Building a successful tech career requires more than just technical skills; it demands the right environment, one where innovation, collaboration, and growth are encouraged and nurtured. Leaders play an invaluable role in creating such an environment. They provide guidance, set the vision and empower teams to reach their full potential.
In this edition of “Tech Titans,” we sit down with Praveen Kumar Kalwagadda, Vice President of Engineering at Cashfree Payments, to explore his take on leading teams. With over two decades of experience, Praveen has shaped his career by fostering a customer-centric approach and driving innovation. Through our conversation, we explore Praveen’s journey, his leadership style, and how he helps mould a strong engineering culture at Cashfree Payments.
Can you tell us briefly about your engineering journey and how it led you to Cashfree Payments?
My engineering journey spans over 20 years and, for the most part, has been in startups. Startups excited me because of the learning opportunities, the chance to create an impact, and the flexibility in decision-making. I felt very close to the customer in these environments. Initially, I also worked in enterprise companies and then moved to e-commerce. Eventually this journey led me to Cashfree Payments, where I got the opportunity to build and lead impactful engineering teams.
Taking the idea of customer-centricity forward – How important is it for engineers to have a pulse of the customer, especially when building products and making tech decisions?
I think it’s extremely important. At Cashfree Payments, engineering is at the forefront, and we hire the best talent not just to execute but to make informed decisions. This means engineers need to understand our merchants, users, and business goals to prioritise initiatives effectively through data and user research. Knowing the customer helps make better decisions and deliver a superior merchant and customer experience.
While making informed decisions, what technological trends do your teams leverage to stay ahead of the curve?
My team handles payment collections at Cashfree Payments, building platforms for various payment modes like UPI, credit cards, and no-cost EMI banking to name a few. In this area, we focus on automation and use machine learning to optimise transaction routing, detect fraud, and improve customer experience. We’ve also implemented chatbots to automate customer queries, significantly reducing response times. This helps us stay ahead in the competitive payments landscape.
Startups can be high-pressure but high-impact environments. How do you ensure your teams stay high-performing?
In my experience, high performance is achieved when the team knows the goal we are marching towards and when they have enough autonomy to make decisions. So, while startups can be high-pressure, they also allow professionals to influence decision-making and create high impact.
While nurturing high performance, it’s also crucial to celebrate both successes and lessons learned from failures. In startups, failures occur because we have to set audacious goals and punch above our weight. When something doesn’t go right, we do blameless root-cause analyses to help everyone learn.
This also creates trust and openness in the team. When the team trusts each other and works towards a common goal, they can bring out their best. So while we help every member challenge their comfort zone, we ensure they are not overwhelmed.
How do you approach mentorship to boost innovation and help engineers grow within your teams?
Sometimes in fast-paced startup environments, teams can get caught up with execution. But to ensure we don’t lose sight of the bigger picture, we place a big emphasis on growth at Cashfree Payments.
Especially with first-time managers, who are just taking on mentoring roles, I make sure they don’t lose sight of the fact that their team’s success is their success – and your teams can succeed only when they are growing, ideating and learning. We also encourage continuous feedback with clear expectations.
In essence, we create an environment where we provide the right challenges so that engineers test themselves, execute, and succeed or fail.
In this process, they learn, calibrate, and learn again. That helps give everyone a perspective on “what’s next for me, what should I do next?”
In addition, innovation is essential for our success in an evolving space like fintech—it’s the one thing that can help you leapfrog your competition. Without innovation, the pace at which we introduce new changes and industry-first products will also be much slower.
At Cashfree Payments, the emphasis on innovation comes from Akash Sinha, our CEO, and Ramkumar Venkatesam, our CTO. We celebrate innovative ideas that make it to production and hold hack days to foster creativity. This trickles down further when our teams have regular conversations about innovation and customer conversations. This helps increase ownership and innovative thinking.
Under Praveen’s leadership, our engineering teams are empowered to make impactful decisions, continuously learn, and collaborate effectively. If you’re passionate about building cutting-edge technology and want to be part of a dynamic team that values customer-centricity and innovation, Cashfree Payments is the place for you.
Ready to take your career to the next level? Explore our open roles here
