Hackathon Pune 2016 was a rather exciting week for us at e-Zest. There has been such a huge response and so many cross pollination of ideas during our recent Hackathon, and this followed by a wonderful episode on e-Zest journey in AgileNEXT which is a weekly talk show produced by hosts Daniel Gullo and Stephen Forte wherein industry thought leaders are interviewed about their thoughts on emerging trends in Agile and corporate innovation.
The founding team of e-Zest comprising of the founders Devendra Deshmukh who is a CEO, Jaywant Deshpande (COO), Amol Pande (Director), Ashish Gupta (CTO) and Sunil Dane (Director) spoke in the podcast. This episode of podcast was recorded live on June 2016 at e-Zest Technology Innovation Center in Pune, India during a 24 Hackathon that was going on.
The talk was about how e-Zest was built as a startup and how all five of them who are co-founders share a common passion for software product engineering. Devendra Deshmukh in this podcast spoke about the future of Agile, leadership, corporate culture and innovation.
Amol Pande warmed the audience with the founding story of e-Zest and Devendra added to him about how a group of five friends who shared a common passion for software product engineering turned them into technology entrepreneurs which drove them to start e-Zest.
Jaywant Deshpande who is passionate about innovation spoke on how they embraced Agile, how they implemented Agile in an offshore environment, and lastly how they scaled Agile. While sharing his insights on how and why e-Zest was an early adaptor of Agility he said "Agility, the way we say it in Product Engineering service that is the core focus of the company. We have followed some practices which is of our own and some added and some modified for example, review developers code is one such practice we started”.
Amol also threw some light on Agile processes and said "many of our projects follow Agile practices not just in development but also in our processes and infrastructure". We have used Scrum and Sprints not just for project delivery but also in other business functions like sales and marketing campaigns".
Ashish spoke to the audience and said "in outsourced product development and new product development we always select the right kind of technology and solutions that’s where quick Sprints have helped us immensely to rationalize as well as to take the well informed decisions on technology side".
All spoke about how they practiced Agile unknowingly even when they did not know the terms when building enterprise solutions and in product engineering way back when Agile was not all that popular. Adding to this, Devendra and Sunil said in unison "this has been the key differentiator for us even now. As we started our Agile journey, we started educating and brainstorming with our customers on how Agile and Scrum processes work. We are proud that we are one of the first outsourcing companies in Pune to introduce Agile to the bigger community that gives us a lot of visibility in the market to be as thought leaders”.
Listen to the podcast here http://agilenext.tv/2016/09/22/episode-15-founders-of-e-zest/