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SGH Careers Month: Meet Deepu Venugopal, Sr. Product Owner – Offer to Price!

amanda.k
Community Manager
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3 min 38 sec read

Deepu.jpegDeepu Venugopal has worked at Autodesk for almost 2 years as a Sr. Product Owner – Offer to Price. Outside of making a positive difference to users that choose Autodesk software, he is also a coach and mentor for Oregon Youth Cricket. Deepu is very passionate about seeing the kids making progress in their game and their ability to work together as a group.

 

 

 

Question: What degree did you graduate with, and how has it affected your career? Or, what education / training do you have that has helped with your role?

Deepu: I have graduated with an Engineering degree in Computer Science and Engineering. I am also a Certified SCRUM Product Owner (CSPO) through Scrum Alliance. My educational background, along with my experience and training, has helped me immensely in understanding the business needs and requirements to create the software product. A thorough understanding of the software development cycle and translating the requirements into use-cases and user-stories that can be consumed by the team to get to stable working software is central to what I do at Autodesk. I work closely with various stakeholders including Architects, Business, Engineering team, Project Managers, Product Management, and Leadership to ensure that the most important features identified are worked on to meet the release timelines. Prioritization and generating value to the users of product are the main goals for me and this could mean improving user-experience, saving time, or reducing effort and/or cost.

 

 

Question: How would you describe your role at Autodesk? What does a typical workday look like? Which skills and qualities are important to be successful in your role?

Deepu: This is a highly visible role, and we play a central part in defining the course and path forward for our products. Understanding the problems and needs of the product, and then having the analytical ability to break that down into scenarios, use-cases, and from there to user-stories is a essential to this job. Communication and decision-making are critical for this role and that includes listening, showing empathy, and understanding the customer/ stakeholder pain points. This role has many stakeholders, and a typical day involves attending several meetings including daily stand ups, providing clarifications to engineering teams, being part of design discussions for the approach, and doing demos and presentations to show the progress made. Having a clearly laid out plan along with effective prioritization of the list of items to be worked on is key to being successful in this role. Having a technical background definitely helps, as it gives an understanding of how the solution is designed and built.

 

 

Question: What do you find interesting about your role? What are the challenges? What do you find satisfying about your work? 

Deepu: Having the ability to own the end-to-end roadmap and shaping the product from initiation to requirements and working with the team to design build, test, and finally to take it to the users is the most interesting part of the job. Working with multiple stakeholders for setting and managing expectations is a challenge and much of the success in this role is defined by how effectively this can be done. The most satisfying part of this role for me is that it provides ample opportunities to contribute and improve the experience working with people, product, platform, and process.

 

 

Question: What advice would you give to a student who is interested in pursuing a role like yours? Is there anything that you would have done differently before you graduated to prepare for your role? Is there a piece of advice you would give yourself back on day one in your role?

Deepu: I would recommend anyone who is interested in being a product owner to be curious, ask questions, understand the product functionality, goals, and vision, and be able to define and generate value, build strong relationships and credibility through actions, commitments, and being actively involved all throughout the process. Looking back, I should have reached out for mentorship early on in my career as it would have helped me to be more prepared to handle situations. I had to learn and do things the hard way early on and this could have worked better by working with an experienced person.

 

 

Make sure to let Deepu know if you have any questions (or advice about cricket) below!

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