Learning and upskilling are the underlying currents running through Soumya Raju’s 13-year career at Discover Financial Services. With numerous programs and robust support from leadership, employees like Soumya are encouraged to learn new skills in a way that enables them to learn, develop, and follow new passions.
Continual learning paved a path from engineering to business
For Soumya, her career trajectory started as a software engineer, consulting on how to build and optimize software. As an engineer, she benefited from well-built infrastructure design solutions, so it was a natural path to one day becoming the person who creates those same solutions.
This job gave her access to the business side of Discover, which she found to be so compelling that she eventually left engineering to become a product owner at Discover. Her current role is helping teams to adopt a product-centric approach to development.
"I love that I’ve been able to use the problem-solving side of my brain and training to focus on creating compelling business solutions at Discover," says Soumya.
Helping teams move from a project to product model
While Soumya was transitioning into the business side of Discover, the company itself was undergoing a transformation, adopting a single agile way of working. Soumya's team was critical to this effort, offering product model dojos that helped entire teams reframe the way they were working from a project to a product model.
One big win she and her team had was helping with institutionalizing how product development is viewed at Discover. The product owner community of more than 500 product owners have been through product owner dojos, which help create and deliver more value for the customers. This is done through incremental value delivery using smaller sprints, delivering changes regularly, and making smaller, incremental changes.
"By helping the team release early and often, we were able to foster a mindset of continual learning. Each deployment showed the team something they could learn and improve upon for the next deployment. This culture of continual learning has been beneficial as we have adopted an agile, product mindset at Discover."
Discover is a company that awards curiosity and hard work, empowering employees to continually develop new skills and deepen current skills. For employees like Soumya who also embrace this mindset, the opportunities for impact are truly limitless.
