Divya Ganesh
Product Owner, Application Development Team, Management Consulting Company, India
The Great Balancing Act -> PO on the Swinging Trapeze
One of the challenges of moving from the waterfall model of development to the agile mind-set is coming to grips with the role of a leader in self-organizing teams. Many Product Owners go to the extreme of refusing to exert any influence whatsoever on their teams. Others retain too much of their prior command-and-control management styles and hence fail to help unleash the creativity and productivity of a self-organizing team. Thus leading a self-governing team can be a fine balancing act. In this session, we will share our experience of how we learned to exert the appropriate level of influence on our teams without restraining their autonomy.
About Divya Ganesh
Basically an Engineer, Divya has also done her Executive Program in Business Management from Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, India.
Divya has almost 11 years of experience in the Software industry and comes with a rich experience of having worked with diverse clients spanning across different parts of the globe. Having lived and worked in India and the Unites States, she has had a varied cultural experience through her interactions with people from different backgrounds.
She is basically a technologist, and has worked as a Java and J2EE Programmer for over 7 years, but gradually shifted her focus to management, since people and human interactions is her interest area. She worked as a Project Manager in the traditional waterfall model after which she transitioned to the Product Owner role. Currently having executed almost 4 agile projects in the past 1,5 years ranging from long term projects to short ones, she is an advocate of agile methodologies.
She is passionate about the products that she helps build and the people who make it happen. She is especially interested in analysis and prioritization and believes that the best work can be achieved by the best teams and any team can be nurtured to be the best by effective communication.
Divya was organizer and speaker at AIM Conference 2012.