Team Hyderabad: Where developers love the learning curve

In Hyderabad, our developers get every opportunity to think about, design, and prototype new ideas. We see this bet paying off in a big way with new features and products delivered to our customers. 

I moved back to India after six years of leading global engineering teams from our ServiceNow headquarters in Santa Clara. An incredible career opportunity brought me back home when I got the chance to lead the company’s fast-growing product operations team in Hyderabad. In India, we create well-rounded, empowered teams, in which designers, product managers, developers, and quality engineers collaborate to design and produce user-centric products that deliver value to customers. The diverse mix of roles creates an environment that instills confidence because we encourage everyone to experiment and innovate.

With the help of my colleagues like Bhuvaneshwari Chandrasekharan (development manager) and Aditya Ramamurthy (platform engineering group director)—who you’ll read more about below—we’re creating products like Virtual Agent solutions and Dynamic Translation (using partner capabilities like language translation) to enhance communication between requestors and agents with different language preferences.

Our development philosophy in Hyderabad is a “go-for-it”: If there's something that brings value to customers, we are empowered to do it.  

The innovation fast-track

We push ourselves not just to come up with ideas but to get them over the finish line. For example, the concept for the Dynamic Translation tool sprung from one developer’s efforts during a team hackathon. The tool helps diverse teams of employees communicate across language differences while working on the same task—connecting colleagues who may not speak the same language so they can push work forward.

We ask ourselves, can something like this deliver value to our customer? If so, we push hard to get it into the next product release. ServiceNow CTO & SVP Pat Casey is a big booster of this process and will often weigh in with ideas. He’ll say, “Give me a plan and tell me how we can get it from here to a real product.” 

The creativity of engineers and their sense of ownership in their ideas help us get products out the door faster. We can take products from idea to PowerPoint to socializing them with the execs to shipping the product all in a single release. Dynamic Translation took us just few months from hackathon to feature release.  

Bhuvaneshwari Chandrasekharan: Embracing the new

The allure of being part of a team whose mission is to live our company purpose—make work, work better for people—is what drew Bhuvana Chandrasekharan to join ServiceNow back in 2017. “In my previous stints, I was working on traditional software that was far removed from customers and I really wanted to explore the cloud world at a company that was laser-focused on customers," she says.

Bhuvana has been busy building a new team and incubating new ideas. “We’re trying to rethink the procurement experience as an enterprise. We want to help employees have a consumer-grade experience much like what they are used to at home. The learning curve on new projects and with new teams can definitely be steep, but I love the challenge and that's the key takeaway for any engineer. When the problem is a big one, and you really get to engage with your team and customers, you can stretch yourself solving them. There’s always room to learn." 

It was an opportunity she welcomed and thrived on. "My leaders and mentors entrust me with a new project and it gives me a deep sense of purpose to deliver something transformational to customers," she says.

Aditya Ramamurthy: Developer as global citizen 

Aditya Ramamurthy, who joined ServiceNow® in 2014 and was part of the group that built the ServiceNow Store, thrives with the creative culture of the Hyderabad team. “I had a fantastic new opportunity to build something from the ground up,” he says. “We had to solve problems like authentication and integrations—it was all completely new, but very satisfying.” 

Aditya enjoys being the driving force behind new products or features. “We are seen as equal partners in the work with other global teams, not just a remote team—we make technical and organizational decisions,” he says. He feels proud to be part of a truly global development team.   

“That’s super-motivating,” Aditya says. “We get access to so many ideas and cultures, and we’re cross-pollinating of ideas.”  He works closely with teams across multiple locations and cultures. “collaborating on innovations that exemplify being part of one global team.”

Culture of fun and giving back

It’s important to me that engineers on my team not only get to own their projects,  but also get to know each other outside of the fast-paced work environment. That’s one reason why my leadership team and I host monthly “lunches with leaders” and special “F5” events (fun, fab, fantastic, frolic, and family) like an office basketball team we recently started, which is competing in local corporate tournaments. 

Recently a group of employees led the initiative to donate much-needed supplies to rural schools in the region. Spending a Saturday with employees who are passionate about social responsibility and seeing the joy of children receiving school bags and supplies was priceless. In the six months I’ve been in Hyderabad, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my immersive experience in India.  

Bhuvana also enjoys having fun on the job. “I brought my kids along on a recent family day celebration and showed them some of the fun stuff we work on, like IoT devices,” she says. “When your family can share the pride in what you do, that means a lot.” 

In Hyderabad, our engineering teams are growing so fast that not only are we already filling up our office space, we’re going to have to create even more team events so that we have enough fun to go around for everyone. Our most recent expansion of office space included an indoor box-cricket pitch and is a big hit with our teams.

Want to join our growing team? Visit our careers page.

© 2020 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.