Strategies for Quality Assurance and Innovation in Digital Products: A Leadership Perspective from MassMutual India
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Kartik Ayalh, Director of Technology Delivery and Operations at MassMutual India
As Head of QA, Automation, and PMO at MassMutual India, what strategies do you employ to ensure the delivery of high-quality digital products and solutions?
Aligning to the organization’s goals and product/program goals is paramount. Also, it is important to ensure the QA strategy and PMO insights compliment each other. We try and come up with solutions that are tech agnostic and are inter-operable across the complex technology landscape. Building the right culture and evangelizing quality gates across teams has led to stronger teams. Collaboration, openness, and transparency help to understand and discuss requirements, user stories, and customer feedback. Those attributes also help us develop solutions that showcase resulting high-quality work.
With your extensive experience in quality assurance and engineering, how do you integrate innovative approaches and technologies to continuously improve processes at MassMutual India?
Empowering the team and cultivating leadership has brought in a sense of ownership towards quality and data transformation, converting it to actionable metrics. Teams feel empowered to make decisions and understand the importance of leading from the front irrespective of their designations. We have seen groundbreaking solutions and improvement come up from the juniors in the team, which is encouraging for all. Yet another approach that has fetched results is fostering a culture of continuous improvement, including automating repetitive tasks to focus on more meaningful work. Last but not the least, the idea is to learn from each other. So, I tell the team to throw a problem statement around, and most times, someone will quickly solve it. Then, the same solution can be reused thus saving research and analysis time.
As someone deeply involved in bridging the gap between academia and industry through the Campus Outreach Committee, what initiatives have you undertaken to prepare college graduates for the tech and insurance sectors?
By virtue of being on the Board of Studies of a few institutions, I provide my feedback on the curriculum. And in some cases, I have helped them curate the curriculum addressing employability demands from the industry. This helps reveal academic challenges and prompted me to take swift action towards a practical and holistic approach on curriculum for future potential employees. As an organization, we ensure that students learn implementation from industry use cases that we provide and model in our AIDEA (Artificial Intelligence, Data Engineering and Automation) labs set up in some educational institutes. These labs act as platforms for easy interaction with mentors and provides faculty a sneak of the industry expectations, and help students solve real world problems. Through our partnership with TSWREIS we have trained more than 500 students from socially disadvantaged areas on behavioral, technical and leadership skills. This also includes many paid internship opportunities as well as full time employment for the students from these institutions. We make efforts to ensure these students get a level playing field and equal opportunities and it gives me an immense sense of gratitude.
How do you see technology and innovation shaping the future of the insurance industry, particularly in addressing global challenges and risks?
Stay true to the business needs and explore various ways technology like AI can be applicable in a meaningful way and provide interesting opportunities. There are use cases for the insurance industry in terms of ensuring faster turnaround time for processing as well as underwriting. AI as an enabler will ensure a larger penetration of the insurance business and ensure more customized and targeted product mixes. AI will democratize the way we work. Problem solving abilities and innovation as well as teamwork will be more important in the future than acquiring technical knowledge. The workforce will need to adapt to the upcoming transformations. Overall, with digital enablement, evolving technologies and the talent pool we have, it’s a unique opportunity to focus more on solutions that are sustainable and tailored to real business challenges.
Lastly, could you discuss your approach to mentoring and coaching within MassMutual India and how you cultivate talent to drive both individual and organisational success?
Identifying high performers and ensuring they have a career road map and mentorship is critical to keep them engaged. It’s also critical to encourage and support idea sharing, provide opportunities for leadership, and offer voluntary activities. Supporting and encouraging to fail and providing continuous feedback so that employees get time to fine tune their skills also helps cultivate talent and achieve success, in addition to internal and external training, coaching and mentoring sessions. Facilitating leadership interactions both internally and externally allows us to nurture future leaders.
