With more than 25 years of experience driving innovation in software architecture and cloud technologies, Vijay Pahuja has led engineering and product teams through major digital transformations across finance, healthcare, automotive, and education. His approach combines deep technical expertise with a strong focus on team growth, agility, and business impact. In this interview, Vijay shares lessons from managing teams of all sizes and maturity levels, his philosophy on balancing innovation with execution, and how engineering leaders can build cultures that foster creativity, collaboration, and long-term value.
1. What key lessons have you learned from managing software engineering teams of different sizes and maturity levels?
A team’s size and maturity level are important considerations in software engineering. Team size has become even more important as the industry has shifted to agile development. Small teams make it easy in terms of collaboration, communication, agility, and flexibility. I have had first-hand experience with teams large and small, it becomes difficult to track their work.
Due to the size, they usually start working on multiple initiatives, forming groups within the team, and usually, one group won’t put conscious effort into knowing what the other group is doing. They usually start meeting separately to move faster or with the intent to not distract other teams from the unrelated work they are doing.
This causes problems with leaders on the team as they have to split their focus between the groups. If you see, these have become two smaller teams within the team. Smaller teams can collaborate and focus on one initiative. As they are usually focused on the same work item, they mature faster, producing high-quality deliverables. Mature teams usually become self-organizing, requiring little to no help from leadership with their work priorities or deliverables. They tend to be innovative and ready to experiment and take risks.
2. How do you strike the right balance between driving innovation and ensuring the reliable execution on technical projects?
Innovation requires experimentation on ideas, which seems counterintuitive to reliable project execution as we don’t know the outcome of experiments and, hence, any subsequent steps with confidence. The only way to drive innovation while focusing on execution is to be agile, iterative, fail fast, and fail forward. By being agile, we can move from one experiment to another quickly. Being iterative and executing ideas in small increments gives confidence that if we fail, we can adjust. This helps project managers to constantly monitor and update the plan and communicate the same, bringing reliability to execution.
3. What strategies have you found most effective in fostering a culture of creativity and continuous improvement within engineering teams?
Creating an open environment where engineering teams have ownership helps with creativity and continuous improvement. I have seen teams with total ownership try to improve in all aspects of engineering processes and thrive. This investment in employing creative methods to solve problems and continuous improvements may look costly, but it provides huge returns in the long term. An example can be automating upgrades of code libraries so that we don’t run software that is not supported anymore. In addition to ownership, allocating time and recognizing the effort encourages teams to develop initiatives, forming a culture of creativity and continuous improvement.
4. How do you approach upskilling engineers to keep pace with emerging technologies while maintaining focus on current priorities?
The technology field is fast changing, from personal computing to the internet and mobile revolution, cloud computing, microservices, and now AI and Quantum computing. With that in mind, we must understand that upskilling engineers is a need for organizations; my approach is to encourage engineers to utilize new and emerging technologies whenever possible. It is also important to allocate time for R&D and innovation, which is possible with many organizations’ scaled agile frameworks. The framework has provisions to allocate a spring for innovation. Additionally, provide mentorship and arrange knowledge-sharing opportunities for teams. Providing tools to enable learning, hands-on training, and labs are ways I have seen help with upskilling.
5. In your experience, what are the best ways to align technical roadmaps with overarching business goals?
Working with organizations dependent on sound engineering, we all understand that technical roadmaps are key to their survival. However, to gain market leadership, businesses usually ignore pushing the technical soundness of products aside with the promise that they will be addressed. I have seen far too many times that those promises are never fulfilled. For example, creating an engineering roadmap to perform software upgrades, security patches, or migrating workloads to the cloud won’t make sense for business and product teams, and they would resist any investment towards it as it takes away the focus of teams from delivering the features demanded by customers.
I learned from one of my managers to stop defining the engineering roadmap in isolation and get participation from product management teams. It’s preferable not to create an engineering roadmap but rather to align those initiatives with the development of features. For example, closing a security hole that can compromise customer’s sensitive data by upgrading the software. This protects the product, a very important goal for businesses and products. Another example I can think of is refactoring the code or building test automation, as it will improve the team’s long-term velocity, helping deliver new features faster. This helps with the business goal of providing high-quality features demanded by customers faster.
In my opinion, this is the best way to align the technical roadmap with business goals.
6. How can engineering leaders ensure that innovation efforts contribute directly to revenue growth or long-term value creation?
Connecting innovation with business goals ensures that innovation efforts are aligned with long-term value creation. Innovation usually starts in isolation; it is unknown if it solves any business problem. Taking that innovation further requires businesses to evaluate and experiment to determine the feasibility. If promising, the innovation can be turned into a business goal and meticulously executed. This way, we can create long-term value from innovation.
7. What role does cross-functional collaboration play in building high-performing engineering teams?
I believe cross-functional collaboration is one of the most important factors not just for the teams but for the organizations as well. Without the collaborations, the solutions that are built in silos will have inherent problems. When there is cross-functional collaboration, the teams work together towards a common goal, aligning their priorities with that goal. It also helps build trust, creating an environment where ideas and opinions are valued. It builds an environment of transparency and sharing knowledge, equipping teams to find the best possible solutions.
A collaborative environment creates a shared sense of ownership as the teams know they contribute to a larger goal and actively participate. In short, collaboration brings trust, transparency, ownership, and a sense of participation. All of these are critical in building high-performing engineering teams.
8. How do you measure the success of your engineering organization beyond traditional delivery metrics?
Traditional metrics like velocity, code churn, MTTR, and engineering throughput offer valuable insights into the health of an engineering organization, helping assess team efficiency and reliability. However, these metrics alone do not capture an organization’s impact on innovation, business growth, or customer success. As an engineer, I find more excellent value in measuring how the products I develop positively impact customers rather than being evaluated based solely on metrics like lines of code written or defect resolution count. The true measure of success lies in delivering meaningful solutions that enhance user experience and drive tangible business outcomes.
