Ketan Gangatirkar recently joined Micruity as the Head of Technology. Ketan brings deep expertise and has held senior technology roles at different organizations. In this quarter’s newsletter, Ketan shares insights on his experience, new role at Micruity, and approach to scaling high-growth technology organizations.

Ketan Gangatirkar
Head of Technology

Can you tell us about your experience before joining Micruity?

I’ve spent my career building and scaling at high-growth tech companies, including leading engineering for the world’s leading employment platform. Due to that experience, I know how to navigate rapid growth, architect scalable, highly reliable services, implement robust security protocols, and grow high-performing teams. I’m excited to apply that experience to support Micruity’s mission-critical platform.

What excites you about the opportunity for Micruity and how you leverage technology to build a successful organization?

I’m most excited by the scale and importance of the problem Micruity is solving. My expertise is in building highly scalable, secure, and reliable platforms that can handle complex data and integrations—which is precisely what this industry needs. The vision isn’t just about a single product; it’s about creating the technological backbone for the future of retirement income, and I’m thrilled to be a part of building it.

What is your approach to technology?

It’s critical to retain a balance between technological innovation and practical application. Technologists need to keep abreast of new developments and innovations so they’re always increasing their arsenal of potential solutions. However, they also need to have a laser focus on the customer problem. The customer wants their problem solved well with a minimum of cost and fuss. They’re not interested in the new shiny thing unless it’s the best way to solve their problem. A good technologist doesn’t start with technology—they start with the business problem, and only after they understand that do they bring in technology.

For a rapidly growing technology company, engineering is the backbone of the organization, and it is critically important to have a strong technology team that can execute on the vision. Can you share some of what goes into building high-performance teams?

A leader’s effectiveness is identical to the team’s effectiveness, as the leader does not directly solve customer problems. The general principles for high performance are widely known. The hard part is applying them consistently to a high level.

Everyone understands that they need to solve customer problems, but how deeply are they researching the problem? Are they just mentioning the customer perspective on quarterly reviews, or is the customer represented in conversations about minute details? Everyone understands that reliability is important, but how much effort do you invest proactively into preventing failures? How deeply do you investigate failures, and how rigorously do you extract and apply lessons?

A leader can’t just issue high-minded directives stating abstract principles. They must demonstrate and reinforce those principles constantly and consistently via innumerable small actions and decisions. Two different teams can be following the exact same principles, but they won’t be equally effective in doing so. Suppose one team is just 10% better than the other. When you apply that small advantage to all of the many thousands of individual decisions and actions needed to build sophisticated software, that compounds into a massive increase in performance.

Was it daunting to maintain the bigger picture while also diving into the deep details of an engineering team and writing code?

The customer is always in the picture for good technologists. Every action and every decision must be oriented around solving customer problems efficiently. To do this at scale, you synthesize insights from multiple customers to find recurring problem patterns. Then we can build one solution that solves the problem for multiple customers. The risk here is getting caught up in details of the solution and inadvertently letting the customer fade into the background. We need to constantly check that what we’re building is tightly connected to an important customer need and is the best way to satisfy that need. Technology choices can only be judged by their effectiveness; abstract considerations such as innovation and elegance are at best secondary and at worst counterproductive.

How do you impart this vision to your team and ensure they always keep a line of sight on the end customer objectives?

Software engineers must have a connection with the customer to be great at solving their problems. This connection is also critical for motivation and fulfillment. Years ago, I read a transcript of an interview with a successful startup CEO who said that a startup stops being a startup when there is one person who does not know why they’re doing what they’re doing. Great technologists want to know that their hard work actually matters to someone.