Pooja Gulati

First Name : Pooja

Last name: Gulati

Not to blow my own trumpet but just to humbly mention that intentionally / unintentionally, today I’ve got curved into a professional who has had experience of multiple domains : Marketing, Sales and Training through my work experience of 12 years till date. I’ve worked with many industries like Pharma, Finance, Real Estate and IT so have an overall idea about the dynamism that typically any industry would have. My performance in various companies is self explanatory by the kind of promotions I kept getting at various levels and in different industries and companies. Starting from a typical one man army of being a sales representative to handling a team of 9 trainers are various roles Ive played during my journey as a professional. Ive closely worked with middle level and the top level management so know very well how any manager / team member would decide / feel at any point of time during any decision making / routine moments; what would be the reasons behind any action / decision taken and what would be driving forces / factors of any team / management. Ive closely realized / analysed the keys to many a challenges that I would not have got the idea about Had I not got such a vast exposure of agile and a typical waterfall environment too. My experience during the early years of my career was a typical waterfall environment where the team was not a part of the decision making process, there was not much collaboration with the client too. My wow moments of those years are “I was still successful as a professional”: very much apparent from the kind of recommendations I got from my ex colleagues and respect worthy seniors (the CXOs).

To share a bit in detail about my work experience in Agile environment, I joined Xebia with a brief background of Agile philosophy. In my previous company, I already had a exposure to Agile (courtesy Madhur) who had shared with me about the agile way of working. We were already working in small small teams with myself being the scrum master and had a development team and a product owner who was ultimately our management. We were a part of the training function of the company where in we also created content and delivered it. With myself and a team of four we created lot of content and delivered trainings as per the management's expectations following the Agile philosophy. In Xebia, under the guidance of my 1st manager “Madhur Kathuria”, I played as a team member, enjoying the agile way of working and sometime facing many challenges too. After a sufficient exposure of few months, I played the role of a product owner in one of the projects that I worked at. The project was to revamp the Xebia India website and give it a new fresh look. With a team of 5 people (including a scrum master), We were very closely associated with the client who was the Group CEO and finally the product (new website) got live in three months time. All the ceremonies were performed as a routine, there was an active involvement of the client although he was in a different geography all together. Meanwhile I also did my CSM so I was much more clear about the do’s and don’t’s, rights and wrongs, facts and myths of the agile way of working. But throughout Madhur’s guidance was there to check me and the team when ever we went wrong anywhere.