Many of the industries building the world around us experience common challenges across their process. From architecture and engineering, to manufacturing and transportation, even media, and entertainment, the ability to intelligently shape data and foster collaboration is mission critical. The need to unlock both in real-time has pushed each of these industries towards cloud and platform transformations, enabling their workforces to thrive. One company sits at the center of many of these well-laid plans – Autodesk – a critical partner to any organization looking to increase their productivity through digital design.
In this episode of The Restless Ones, we had the opportunity to sit with Raji Arasu, Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk. Raji sits at the helm of the company’s own platform transformation, unifying the products and services it offers its clients. She and her team prioritize three key areas for success: Creating the building blocks that all of their technology can grow from, strengthening the ecosystem of partners that can scale their offerings, and looking towards the future through the company’s research labs. Their work, along with the strength of high speed 5G networks, allows terms like generative design, industrialized construction and adaptive manufacturing to be fully realized by their clients, and all of the world to enjoy their outputs.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
How do people build for sustainability? How does design your build, process,
you operate process, all of that change. This is another
wave that's happening that people should sort of wake up
and get ready because it's not cheap. How do you
talk to your clients around that balance of sustainability with cost.
(00:24):
Infrastructure will need to get overhauled to meet the net
zero outcomes. That's where I would say leaders need to
also focus as they're probably grappling with things like labor
short agents, supply challenges and getting to the cloud. I mean,
this is here, real and the next wave that's going
to happen. Welcome to the restless ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
(00:47):
As you may know, I've spent the last fifteen years
covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying everything from
massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything in between.
Yet it's the conversations with some of the most forward
thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology and business
(01:07):
that fascinated me the most. Raj A. Rossu has worked
at companies like Oracle, eBay and into It as an
engineer and technology leader before bringing her expertise to Autodesk.
In our conversation. I learned about her approach to leadership
(01:27):
and her passion for leveraging the right technological solution to
solve challenging problems, from computer generative design to mixed reality.
We talked about how cutting edge technology allows for new
approaches to old problems. I also learned valuable lessons about
the way to approach leadership by building, supporting, and listening
(01:49):
to teams. This was a fun talk and I really
could have chatted with Raji for hours about science, technology,
and communication. But before we die even to all of that,
I first wanted to learn more about Raji's own history. Raji,
first of all, let me welcome you to The Restless Ones.
(02:12):
It is a pleasure to have you on the show. Jonathan.
Thank you for having me here and giving me an
opportunity to connect to this audience to your podcast. Oh absolutely,
We're going to be covering a lot of topics that
I'm really excited about. But before we get into any
of that, I would love to hear how you decided
to pursue an education and then subsequent career in technology.
(02:35):
As you can tell from maybe my accent and pronunciation,
I grew up in India. I always loved watching signs
helping us do some unimaginable things. As a total geek
watching people landing on the moon. I remember my favorite
moment being in Night three, even Gian blue Ford became
the first black astronaut to travel to space. Was pretty
(02:57):
awesome to watch that. I used to geek out on
things like hoping our surgery episodes. I don't know if
you remember this, but the first time they telecasted through
Channel eight an Arizona Heart Institute, that was better than
any action movie for me. My love for science and
things out there led me to accidental discovery and selection
(03:19):
of computer engineering, and I remember like, not really knowing
what it was all about. It just sounded pretty cool.
So this is so new. Those days when I came
home for summer, my family would wonder why I could
not rewire the antenna or electric lines. You know, after
many courses in engineering, they would ask me like, aren't
(03:39):
you an engineer. I started my first job actually after college,
digitizing maps for phone lines for the state through AutoCAD,
and now many many decades later, come full circle to
working at Autodesk. I want to learn more about your experience.
I mean, you've obviously You've worked for several big name
(04:00):
tech companies. I'm curious, did you notice any sort of
commonalities between the different companies that you worked with or
were they each sort of unique in their own mission
and needs. That's a great question, John, Then I think,
you know, my background is definitely leading tech and business
transformations for e commerce, payment, fintech. You know, you see
(04:23):
entertainment a bunch of different industries, and you know it's
interesting when you start to look at that and where
I'm at Autodisk, I think where the similarity comes in
is all of the platform transformation, the cloud journey, the
common capabilities, and how we think about creating or attracting
(04:43):
talent within the companies that are on distributed systems and
systems thinking all of that stuff is pretty much the
same across the board. I think it's this business model
transformations or even the domains that we work and which
are different, and sometimes the pace of adopting technology solutions
in these businesses are different. I mean, we see this.
(05:06):
You know, we at added As we support three major industries.
Architecture engineering construction is one of our key ones, manufacturing
and media and entertainment. We have multiple infrastructure categories like transportation,
land development, and water. Coming into the company, I was like, wow,
I mean that's a lot of different things and finding
(05:27):
how where there are lots of things that are common
across these industries, but all of these industries are different
levels and maturity in terms of adopting technology, and you
have to as a technologist walking and you have to
understand that nuance. And that's the initial time that you
spend is understanding your customers, your business, your domain, and
(05:48):
understanding what's going to work and what's futuristic. I think
that's key. We've already kind of touched on Autodesk, but
I'm curious what actually brought you over to Autodesk. I
had to refer left on this. In our lives, even
though we say that relationships and people are everything, in reality,
we associate a lot of value to the physical asses
(06:10):
and experiences that we collect over time. Are living spaces,
the cars, the gadgets, the content we consume for entertainment.
I mean, we take pride in them and we feel
a sense of achievement. So as consumers, we continue to
demand more and more out of these things, and we
want to live in these connected smart cities, use the
(06:31):
latest tech. We want to have less maintenance, sustainable, cost
effective assets, and then this voracious appetite for new and
differentiated content, and that's where autodesks came in for me.
It was forty years in this business of making customers
who design and make these digital and physical assets. So
(06:52):
exactly these kind of consumers around the world and our customers, architects,
the general contracts, the structural engineers, manufacturers, and production studios,
they are creating these assets for our everyday life experience.
And that was what was the realization. I was really
(07:13):
intrigued by what autodis was doing and how it was
actually shaping everything around us and actually going to enhance
our life experience, my own personal experience. I remember in
high school, I had a friend who was in drafting class,
and that's where I first learned about the term computer
assisted design. And the more I learned about it, the
(07:34):
more excited I got, especially when my friend presented me
with an enormous poster that was a vector line drawing
of a Klingon Bird of Praise starship from the Star
Trek series that he had meticulously designed an auto cad
out of curiosity, How do you explain what your job is,
(07:56):
to say a casual acquaintance, someone who's not in the
indus story at Auditors, we are going through a platform
transformation as a company and as a chief technology officer,
my job is to steward this transformation through our technical teams.
If that's all the takeaway, that's pretty much pretty much
(08:17):
just summary. What is this journey? What is this platform
transformation and journey about? It is really to accelerate a
customers digital transformation across industries. I mean that's the destination.
And like every CTO, there are hundreds of things to
get done every day. But at the end of the day,
I find myself focusing on three areas. When I would say,
(08:40):
is building the foundational blocks? The tech leaders were listening
to this, No, this this is really hard, right. Building
foundation for the long run is always hard when you
have short term outcomes, but it pays back leaps and
bounds over time. I have three industries and multiple infrastructure
products in our portfolio. You talk about shared tech, there's
(09:04):
a lot of opportunity and with that shared technology we
can actually accelerate our industry and sometimes even cross industry solution.
A good example for that would be the connected data
digital thread that runs through our project life cycle. You know,
based on anything you're building, it's a building, it's an
infrastructure piece, movie any of that requires a project life cycle.
(09:29):
How cool is it if you have data that really
connects these disciplines, cuts down time and labor and so
those are things that are common and I'm constantly looking
for them, and you know, we're constantly as a company,
you know, finding ways to invest in there. The second
one I think it's really the key for me, is
(09:49):
how do I extend my ecosystem? And when I say ecosystem,
these are our partners, are system integrators. These are valuable assets.
They our a p I, S and S D case
and make it work for the customers last my niche needs.
Sometimes it's extending the workflows, automating their processes, or connecting
(10:11):
to the back end. I mean that third party ecosystem
is something my teams try to nurture and grow because
that's really really part of our overall offering and solution.
The last one I think is we have an amazing
effort that we have in our research labs in multiple
locations around the world, and we do some amazing work
(10:35):
with large companies, industry, thought leaders, and academia on ideas
that are about seven to ten years or either it's
designing for net zero industrialized construction or adaptive manufacturing. You know,
concepts like these that are getting flashed out and we
get to work with these amazing thought leaders across the world,
(10:56):
and that's exciting. So in somebody, I would say building
found a more blocks, extending my ecosystem and maybe shaping
the future through our research work. These are these are
key focus areas for me. That's that's an extensive explanation
that I really appreciate. One thing I really wanted to
ask you about. I saw in a previous interview you
(11:18):
had done that when you first arrived at Autodesk. You
chose to go on what you called a listening tour,
which I think is a phenomenal idea. Could you talk
a little bit more about the listening tour and what
you learned through that experience. How much time you got, Johnathan,
when you join a company, this is the precious time
that you have to get into a listening tour, right
(11:42):
and you start with a clean slate and you can
draw the picture the way you heard it, not the
way people have told you, but you know you're hearing
it from folks across the company. I might have started
with like a t employees, various functions, some even ex employees, customers,
and partners. It happened over the course of six weeks.
(12:02):
I was really really insightful. You know, you're kind of
not emotionally attached to anything at that point, and you
know you don't have baggage of having built something and
it's not working yet and all of that stuff. This
really creates active listening and it was amazing. I learned
a lot about things that we're doing right, are amazing
(12:24):
products or customers, are design and build talent, or work
around three D graphics, geometry modeling. All of this were
like pretty cutting edge. But going through this, I also
found out that the platform journey was a paradigm shift
as a company that we were going through. It required
more specificity. It required people to understand what a platform was,
(12:48):
what its capabilities would look like, who and how should
we build this. These are really key, you know, sort
of insights I gathered and helped to shape our platform
strategy and areas we needed to prioritize for three to
five years. I know there are many books and articles
that talk about going on and listening tour, highly recommend
(13:10):
for anybody joining, you know, a new company and being
exposed to new domains industries. It's a really game changing experience. Yes,
I imagine not only does it educate you about the
company and its processes and its products and its impact
on its clients and its partners, but it also helps
(13:30):
start to build that connection with all those different divisions
and both internal and external, where you're showing that you
have that desire to learn and to understand. So I
think that that goes a long way to establishing a
good foundation to build upon. I'd love to talk more
(13:53):
about some of the emerging technologies that the company is
really diving into and working with. Can you talk a
little bit about some of the what my friends would
call the cool stuff? That there's so much cool stuff.
I'm going to prioritize a few areas one day. I
think we are very excited about and you've heard this
(14:16):
probably this term being used in our industry called generative design.
Think about this as computer generated design. We have so
much data, product data, and now with all of the
computational power that we could use, you know, using AI
and artificial intelligence and machine learning. We can apply that
(14:36):
to design processes, making a computer be the design partner,
offering options for designers instead of just sort of documenting
their design, and that's going to fundamentally transform how design
will be done and how operating data from things like
Digital Twin and others could be used to create design
(15:00):
in styles and score them for different various performance indicators
like sustainability, cost, maintainability, constructibility. There are so many different
things that can be taken into consideration in this sort
of multidimensional outcomes that we can drive. That's really gonna
(15:21):
change the world of an architect. I think there's gonna
be a lot of association where they're going to be
expected to deliver these performance outcomes in the physical assets
of their building, and that has to be taken into
account earlier on in the design. And how do we
simplify this. I look at that as a whole paradigm
(15:41):
ship going from CAD to really a computer generated design world,
and the elevated role that will let our architects play
in that world. That's one concept we had ordered as
activity research. The other one I think is worth mentioning
is is our our converge of industries that's happening. We're
(16:01):
seeing this where we see many manufacturing methods being applied
to building industry, and we are excited about that because
there's stuff that we're looking at which really really solves
for modular construction and in some cases even being able
to do that fabrication and really accelerate the time that
(16:23):
takes to build and construct. In the future, maybe even
things like autonomous construction of buildings and things that will
happen because it's modular. And how does that really change
the world. This is the world that we're manufacturing, design,
and construction all come together in a very unique way,
driven by the need to go faster and driven by
(16:45):
the need to reduce. And then the last one, I
think it's really this whole concept of how the shop
floor or what we call the factory floor is going
to change. And I think similar to data centers and others,
I think you're going to see this next way where
our factory floors are going to be configurable and easy
(17:09):
to change, products that are built autonomous, remotely operated, a
lot of things happening, compute happening on the edge, and
safety maintainability. All of this Britain. You know this is
a factory of the future, and a lot of that
is mentioned in Industry Plato, But how do we really
(17:31):
make that happen? I think that's another really important emerging
technology that we look into. Conventional thinking says you have
to pay more to get more. I want the work.
But Team Mobile for Business uses unconventional thinking to deliver
premium benefits for better r o I from customized five
(17:53):
D solutions to three sixty support, we help you reach
your business goals right now. I want it now, innovating
to improve business today and tomorrow. That's unconventional thinking. From
T Mobile for Business. Capable device required covers on available
in some areas, some require certain clatter features C mobile
dot com. We're now entering a world where we're capable
(18:19):
of having this incredible wireless connectivity that gives us fiber
level work. But you're no longer tethered by cables. How
does connectivity play a part in this future? That is
so true. Five G is going to play a huge
role in industrial, so we support and connectivity through that
(18:39):
find you promise to remote dependence upon like workstations and
installed infrastructure. It's going to really transform the virtual reality
and XR experiences for example, and I don't mean from
an entertainment perspective. We're talking about you know, streaming directly
to we our sets and on demand video the way
(19:00):
it stream to TVs today. This is going to change
how people interact with each other. Is going to enable
our workers at remote sites with limited connectivity if now
fully experiences these immersive virtual models. And we see this
today like in our argumented reality, we see people wanting
to project their detailed design in areas of where the
(19:24):
construction is happening, and they want that easy access and
be able to actually visualize it. And these are the
kind of real scenarios that's going to demand that immersive experience.
Specifically need media and entertainment production. We see that FIG
is going to provide support for some really rich data
(19:45):
workflows on film shoots and sets right, and it's going
to support the move for production in the cloud, and
it's going to really create like these bigger worlds with
you know stories. And people also want to simulated exp
before they buy things, right, I look at myself, I
wanted to see the layout of my new home or office.
(20:07):
We want to be able to simulate furniture, appliances, and
and you know, really experience it before we buy these things.
And I know this is there's a lot of promise
for meta words right now, but I'm talking about northern
hypothetical world. This is a real world needs for consumption
that's going to really be dependent on fight G and connectivity. Yeah.
(20:30):
I see augmented reality being as disruptive and transformational as
three D printing was a decade ago, where three D
printing enabled that rapid prototyping where you no longer had
to wait for a sculptor to create whatever physical model
you needed. You could make fast adjustments on the fly
(20:53):
wait you know, half an hour an hour for a
small model to be printed. Now we're talking about having
that capability but in an augmented sort of virtual projection
over our real world surroundings. For businesses like architecture, I
imagine that being absolutely transformational. Like the ability to show
(21:14):
a client, well, we've worked up five different designs and
you can see what they will look like on the
site by just putting on these glasses and we will
cycle through them and show you all the different assets.
You can even show in different layers, like here's the wiring.
Here's the air duct system. We recently acquired the Wild
to offer customers more immersive and these collaborative workspaces. One
(21:38):
our customers want that are more teams working together doing
this conceptual design, and we do that in architecture and construction.
But I think where you are going is what happens
next is then the customers actually engaged with their client
and they want to show them these visual experiences that
are super immersive. In some cases, they want to be
(21:59):
able to edit those immersive experiences, be able to edit
it and bring it back to three D and two D.
In some cases, this design form is having a conversation
with the general contractor and showing the different layers that
you talked about. I mean, these conversations become so much
more easier when you have that sort of granular information
and then you're able to use x are to really
(22:22):
take it to the next level. I know that the
history of augmented reality has its roots in laying out
wiring on airplanes like that was one of the earliest
applications of augmented beyond the HUD systems that you saw
and say the jets for the Air Force. In my mind,
that's still one of the most phenomenal applications for it,
(22:45):
something where it effectively gives you the ability to both
see the future and X ray vision at the same time.
So I'm curious also what went into getting Autodesk to
get behind and a unifying vision like the Forge platform.
First of all, can you talk a little bit about
what the Forge platform is and the process of getting
(23:08):
the company buy in two pursue that Forged platform is
actually two different things. Internally for us, it's an amazing
way of taking these shared capabilities that we're building across
industries and sort of use that to accelerate our industry solutions. Externally,
(23:29):
it is the same capability, same e PI, same as
the k is that we provide to our customers and
our partners, and many of our partners, this is the
ecosystem that I talk about. They're extending these to create
new work clothes for our customers, in some cases connecting
their back end systems and sometimes it's about automating their processes.
(23:50):
That's what they're doing, and I think it's really really
a new way of consuming our capabilities. Traditionally, folks have
come in and they've used products and they'll continue to
use products and experiences that come out of the box
throughout the desk offerings. But I think the new way
is also to be able to get these API s
and capabilities and a lot of what we see as
(24:12):
people want to pull out the product data, transform it
and then maybe even customize it and send it back.
I mean, there's a lot that's happening in real time,
and our largest customers love these mechanisms to integrate. So
that's what for us, the Forge platform means. It means
(24:34):
the same APIs internally accelerating our industry solutions, and it
also means the same that we provide our customers and
partners so they can extend their work clothes, they can
build new solutions and you know, go through this digital
transformation faster. That's a powerful message to give to clients, right, like,
(24:55):
this is the tool we use to do what we do,
and we're extending that capabilit city to our clients and
our customers. That to me is the most powerful sales point,
right we use it. The proof is there, Yeah, exactly.
It's eat your own awful for sure, and they love that.
It really takes away the conversation around Hey, is this reliable?
(25:18):
Is this is this something you've committed to because che
we use it. I'm curious, with the onset of the
pandemic and so many companies needing to adapt and pivot
and to find new ways to approach the way they
do business, did you see a much more aggressive trend
toward digitization? Absolutely, Jonathan. I think we were on the
(25:43):
front lines of both needing to adopt adapt as well
as witnessing the extreme challenges among our customers in every
industry we support. We knew we had to help our
customers adapt as quickly as possible to pandemic, and the
most common and thread for all was the need for digitization.
(26:04):
In many cases it was you know, it actually accelerated
the move to cloud, and we saw that, we saw
a lot of folks actually sort of going and doing
that with a lot more urgency. And the second one
was the support for remote workforces. I think it's like,
how do tool and technologies enable that. I think our
customers were just used to being all present at the
(26:25):
site and being able to put together even design firms
worked on the site, and now they suddenly faced with
the reality of remote workforces. The last, but not the least,
I think is a ton of labor shortage and supply
you know, which you have been hearing is real and
you know, how does this supply chain disruption and this
(26:46):
global interdependency play out for our customers and how do
we help them through that stuff? I think these are
real issues that we see and it definitely helped, you know,
make the case for going faster using technology, using cloud
and some of these too sort of accelerate helping them
(27:08):
with remote workforces and helping them with digitization. The other one,
I think that came up a little bit. You know,
it was always there, but actually kind of accelerated with
the COP twenty six and all of that conversation is
how do people build for sustainability? How does design your
build process, you operate process, all of that change for sustainability.
(27:31):
And this is another wave that's happening that people should
sort of wake up and get ready for because it's
not cheap to build sustainable you know, a process and
and so how does it work? How do you talk
to your clients around that balance of sustainability with cost
and as you have you know, I know in this
(27:52):
podcast you've covered many times about smart cities and smart
infrastructure with a lot of emphasize on infrastructure, sure will
need to get overhauled to meet the net zero outcomes.
That's why you're seeing all these bills globally being passed.
And this is where I think auditis we do a
lot around things like spacemaker, which actually helps you sort
(28:13):
of design smart cities and then in a wise and
tandem that lets you work with smart infrastructure. These are
the kind of things that we need to really double
down on and adopt because that's the future and it's
going to be starting with understanding how to build for sustainability,
but it's going to soon get to having conversations around
(28:35):
net zero. So how do you start thinking about design
to actually operating these physical assets in a way that
actually tackles that. That's where I would say leaders need
to also focus as they're probably grappling with things like
labor shortage and supply challenges and getting to the cloud.
I mean, this is here real and the next wave
(28:56):
that's going to happen. Yeah, I could not agree more.
Your auto, you've said, is to make new mistakes and
learn fast every day. Could you share with us a
mistake you may have made and how you learned and
grew from it. It's a model that helps me, but not,
you know, apologize for trying something new. Right. I believe
(29:19):
that the faster you fail, the faster you learn. And
very recently, I'll tell you an example, we implemented an
API that provides access to granular data for a manufacturing industry.
The team debated for days whether this API should be perfected.
We might run into scale problems, we might not have
(29:41):
all of the features that are large customers need. And
then we took a chance and we put it out
there for a couple of our large customers. We kind
of gave them all of the sorry part of our dust.
And what was interesting about this particular exercises, we were
super surprised on our findings. We anticipated all of these
(30:03):
other problems, and they told us something very basic. They said,
your A P I S G. You know, I'm a
manufacturing customer and I only know about part numbers and
part description and assembly and all of that stuff. But
your APIs are very generic terms. We don't know how
to make sense out of it. Because we were really
(30:23):
building something that would work across industries, and we forgot
that our customers actually need that level of detail that
they are used to, so you know, fast forward, it
was an easy one to go fix. We went to
a different implementation using graph Q and all of that,
and now it's more contextualized in the way that they
(30:45):
want to consume this information, and you've got adopted like
wildfire with the subsequent releases. But you know, if we
hadn't put it out there and we had debated it,
I think we would have missed the opportunity. I think
this is why I mean you you don't want to
make the same mistakes, But as long as they don't
put the business address for trying our new things and
sort of experimentation, that culture of experimentation is something we
(31:09):
have to role model and we have to let our
teams do that. Raji, I love that answer. It also
goes back to the whole concept of listening. I could
have talked to Raji for ages, and in fact we
had to edit our conversation down because I got a
little carried away. But I still couldn't let her go
(31:30):
without asking her one more thing, what do you consider
to be your proudest achievement? I would say, you know,
it's always about people. You as a leader can have
visions and strategy, but it's always about the people. So
my proudest moment would be and I have a team
(31:52):
that can operate without me. They move faster than I'm
able to push them. You visit a customer site and
they can't stop praising the work that your team put
out there. You know, all the companies I work for,
it's it's a lot of hard work to get to
that moment. But when you get to that moment, you
sit back and you soak it in and you know
(32:13):
you enjoy that and that that that moment makes me proud.
I think that's a great testament to the type of
leader you are. Raji, thank you so much for joining
us on the Restless Ones. I've very much enjoyed our conversation.
Thank you, Jonathan. This is real pressure. Thanks again to
(32:36):
Raja Rassu for sharing her time and perspective with us.
The task of digitization can be a really daunting one. Companies,
particularly those with long histories, can find it challenging to
adopt new technologies and processes while maintaining the expectations of customers, partners,
and other stakeholders. It's no small task to make that
(32:59):
kind of move without disrupting business. But, as Raji pointed out,
it's never been more clear that digitization isn't the future,
it's the present. Underneath that digitization empowering it is five
G technology. To have the benefits of fiber connectivity, including
the low latency needed to minimize decision making time, all
(33:22):
without the need to be tethered by a cable. Is
transforming businesses at a phenomenal pace. It's now possible for
companies across all industries to make massive rapid shifts to
meet new needs, whether that is enabling remote work or
implementing a comprehensive digital strategy crucial for organizational success. Make
(33:49):
sure to download future episodes of The Restless Ones, where
all have more conversations with leaders who are defining how
technology will shape the business of tomorrow. I'll see you then.
T Mobile for Business knows companies want more than a
one size fits all approach to support. I want the world,
(34:10):
so we provide three sixty support customized to your business,
from discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account
team and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already
right now, I want it now. Three six support that's
customized for your success. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile
(34:32):
for Business
How do people build for sustainability? How does design your build, process,
you operate process, all of that change. This is another
wave that's happening that people should sort of wake up
and get ready because it's not cheap. How do you
talk to your clients around that balance of sustainability with cost.
(00:24):
Infrastructure will need to get overhauled to meet the net
zero outcomes. That's where I would say leaders need to
also focus as they're probably grappling with things like labor
short agents, supply challenges and getting to the cloud. I mean,
this is here, real and the next wave that's going
to happen. Welcome to the restless ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
(00:47):
As you may know, I've spent the last fifteen years
covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying everything from
massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything in between.
Yet it's the conversations with some of the most forward
thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology and business
(01:07):
that fascinated me the most. Raj A. Rossu has worked
at companies like Oracle, eBay and into It as an
engineer and technology leader before bringing her expertise to Autodesk.
In our conversation. I learned about her approach to leadership
(01:27):
and her passion for leveraging the right technological solution to
solve challenging problems, from computer generative design to mixed reality.
We talked about how cutting edge technology allows for new
approaches to old problems. I also learned valuable lessons about
the way to approach leadership by building, supporting, and listening
(01:49):
to teams. This was a fun talk and I really
could have chatted with Raji for hours about science, technology,
and communication. But before we die even to all of that,
I first wanted to learn more about Raji's own history. Raji,
first of all, let me welcome you to The Restless Ones.
(02:12):
It is a pleasure to have you on the show. Jonathan.
Thank you for having me here and giving me an
opportunity to connect to this audience to your podcast. Oh absolutely,
We're going to be covering a lot of topics that
I'm really excited about. But before we get into any
of that, I would love to hear how you decided
to pursue an education and then subsequent career in technology.
(02:35):
As you can tell from maybe my accent and pronunciation,
I grew up in India. I always loved watching signs
helping us do some unimaginable things. As a total geek
watching people landing on the moon. I remember my favorite
moment being in Night three, even Gian blue Ford became
the first black astronaut to travel to space. Was pretty
(02:57):
awesome to watch that. I used to geek out on
things like hoping our surgery episodes. I don't know if
you remember this, but the first time they telecasted through
Channel eight an Arizona Heart Institute, that was better than
any action movie for me. My love for science and
things out there led me to accidental discovery and selection
(03:19):
of computer engineering, and I remember like, not really knowing
what it was all about. It just sounded pretty cool.
So this is so new. Those days when I came
home for summer, my family would wonder why I could
not rewire the antenna or electric lines. You know, after
many courses in engineering, they would ask me like, aren't
(03:39):
you an engineer. I started my first job actually after college,
digitizing maps for phone lines for the state through AutoCAD,
and now many many decades later, come full circle to
working at Autodesk. I want to learn more about your experience.
I mean, you've obviously You've worked for several big name
(04:00):
tech companies. I'm curious, did you notice any sort of
commonalities between the different companies that you worked with or
were they each sort of unique in their own mission
and needs. That's a great question, John, Then I think,
you know, my background is definitely leading tech and business
transformations for e commerce, payment, fintech. You know, you see
(04:23):
entertainment a bunch of different industries, and you know it's
interesting when you start to look at that and where
I'm at Autodisk, I think where the similarity comes in
is all of the platform transformation, the cloud journey, the
common capabilities, and how we think about creating or attracting
(04:43):
talent within the companies that are on distributed systems and
systems thinking all of that stuff is pretty much the
same across the board. I think it's this business model
transformations or even the domains that we work and which
are different, and sometimes the pace of adopting technology solutions
in these businesses are different. I mean, we see this.
(05:06):
You know, we at added As we support three major industries.
Architecture engineering construction is one of our key ones, manufacturing
and media and entertainment. We have multiple infrastructure categories like transportation,
land development, and water. Coming into the company, I was like, wow,
I mean that's a lot of different things and finding
(05:27):
how where there are lots of things that are common
across these industries, but all of these industries are different
levels and maturity in terms of adopting technology, and you
have to as a technologist walking and you have to
understand that nuance. And that's the initial time that you
spend is understanding your customers, your business, your domain, and
(05:48):
understanding what's going to work and what's futuristic. I think
that's key. We've already kind of touched on Autodesk, but
I'm curious what actually brought you over to Autodesk. I
had to refer left on this. In our lives, even
though we say that relationships and people are everything, in reality,
we associate a lot of value to the physical asses
(06:10):
and experiences that we collect over time. Are living spaces,
the cars, the gadgets, the content we consume for entertainment.
I mean, we take pride in them and we feel
a sense of achievement. So as consumers, we continue to
demand more and more out of these things, and we
want to live in these connected smart cities, use the
(06:31):
latest tech. We want to have less maintenance, sustainable, cost
effective assets, and then this voracious appetite for new and
differentiated content, and that's where autodesks came in for me.
It was forty years in this business of making customers
who design and make these digital and physical assets. So
(06:52):
exactly these kind of consumers around the world and our customers, architects,
the general contracts, the structural engineers, manufacturers, and production studios,
they are creating these assets for our everyday life experience.
And that was what was the realization. I was really
(07:13):
intrigued by what autodis was doing and how it was
actually shaping everything around us and actually going to enhance
our life experience, my own personal experience. I remember in
high school, I had a friend who was in drafting class,
and that's where I first learned about the term computer
assisted design. And the more I learned about it, the
(07:34):
more excited I got, especially when my friend presented me
with an enormous poster that was a vector line drawing
of a Klingon Bird of Praise starship from the Star
Trek series that he had meticulously designed an auto cad
out of curiosity, How do you explain what your job is,
(07:56):
to say a casual acquaintance, someone who's not in the
indus story at Auditors, we are going through a platform
transformation as a company and as a chief technology officer,
my job is to steward this transformation through our technical teams.
If that's all the takeaway, that's pretty much pretty much
(08:17):
just summary. What is this journey? What is this platform
transformation and journey about? It is really to accelerate a
customers digital transformation across industries. I mean that's the destination.
And like every CTO, there are hundreds of things to
get done every day. But at the end of the day,
I find myself focusing on three areas. When I would say,
(08:40):
is building the foundational blocks? The tech leaders were listening
to this, No, this this is really hard, right. Building
foundation for the long run is always hard when you
have short term outcomes, but it pays back leaps and
bounds over time. I have three industries and multiple infrastructure
products in our portfolio. You talk about shared tech, there's
(09:04):
a lot of opportunity and with that shared technology we
can actually accelerate our industry and sometimes even cross industry solution.
A good example for that would be the connected data
digital thread that runs through our project life cycle. You know,
based on anything you're building, it's a building, it's an
infrastructure piece, movie any of that requires a project life cycle.
(09:29):
How cool is it if you have data that really
connects these disciplines, cuts down time and labor and so
those are things that are common and I'm constantly looking
for them, and you know, we're constantly as a company,
you know, finding ways to invest in there. The second
one I think it's really the key for me, is
(09:49):
how do I extend my ecosystem? And when I say ecosystem,
these are our partners, are system integrators. These are valuable assets.
They our a p I, S and S D case
and make it work for the customers last my niche needs.
Sometimes it's extending the workflows, automating their processes, or connecting
(10:11):
to the back end. I mean that third party ecosystem
is something my teams try to nurture and grow because
that's really really part of our overall offering and solution.
The last one I think is we have an amazing
effort that we have in our research labs in multiple
locations around the world, and we do some amazing work
(10:35):
with large companies, industry, thought leaders, and academia on ideas
that are about seven to ten years or either it's
designing for net zero industrialized construction or adaptive manufacturing. You know,
concepts like these that are getting flashed out and we
get to work with these amazing thought leaders across the world,
(10:56):
and that's exciting. So in somebody, I would say building
found a more blocks, extending my ecosystem and maybe shaping
the future through our research work. These are these are
key focus areas for me. That's that's an extensive explanation
that I really appreciate. One thing I really wanted to
ask you about. I saw in a previous interview you
(11:18):
had done that when you first arrived at Autodesk. You
chose to go on what you called a listening tour,
which I think is a phenomenal idea. Could you talk
a little bit more about the listening tour and what
you learned through that experience. How much time you got, Johnathan,
when you join a company, this is the precious time
that you have to get into a listening tour, right
(11:42):
and you start with a clean slate and you can
draw the picture the way you heard it, not the
way people have told you, but you know you're hearing
it from folks across the company. I might have started
with like a t employees, various functions, some even ex employees, customers,
and partners. It happened over the course of six weeks.
(12:02):
I was really really insightful. You know, you're kind of
not emotionally attached to anything at that point, and you
know you don't have baggage of having built something and
it's not working yet and all of that stuff. This
really creates active listening and it was amazing. I learned
a lot about things that we're doing right, are amazing
(12:24):
products or customers, are design and build talent, or work
around three D graphics, geometry modeling. All of this were
like pretty cutting edge. But going through this, I also
found out that the platform journey was a paradigm shift
as a company that we were going through. It required
more specificity. It required people to understand what a platform was,
(12:48):
what its capabilities would look like, who and how should
we build this. These are really key, you know, sort
of insights I gathered and helped to shape our platform
strategy and areas we needed to prioritize for three to
five years. I know there are many books and articles
that talk about going on and listening tour, highly recommend
(13:10):
for anybody joining, you know, a new company and being
exposed to new domains industries. It's a really game changing experience. Yes,
I imagine not only does it educate you about the
company and its processes and its products and its impact
on its clients and its partners, but it also helps
(13:30):
start to build that connection with all those different divisions
and both internal and external, where you're showing that you
have that desire to learn and to understand. So I
think that that goes a long way to establishing a
good foundation to build upon. I'd love to talk more
(13:53):
about some of the emerging technologies that the company is
really diving into and working with. Can you talk a
little bit about some of the what my friends would
call the cool stuff? That there's so much cool stuff.
I'm going to prioritize a few areas one day. I
think we are very excited about and you've heard this
(14:16):
probably this term being used in our industry called generative design.
Think about this as computer generated design. We have so
much data, product data, and now with all of the
computational power that we could use, you know, using AI
and artificial intelligence and machine learning. We can apply that
(14:36):
to design processes, making a computer be the design partner,
offering options for designers instead of just sort of documenting
their design, and that's going to fundamentally transform how design
will be done and how operating data from things like
Digital Twin and others could be used to create design
(15:00):
in styles and score them for different various performance indicators
like sustainability, cost, maintainability, constructibility. There are so many different
things that can be taken into consideration in this sort
of multidimensional outcomes that we can drive. That's really gonna
(15:21):
change the world of an architect. I think there's gonna
be a lot of association where they're going to be
expected to deliver these performance outcomes in the physical assets
of their building, and that has to be taken into
account earlier on in the design. And how do we
simplify this. I look at that as a whole paradigm
(15:41):
ship going from CAD to really a computer generated design world,
and the elevated role that will let our architects play
in that world. That's one concept we had ordered as
activity research. The other one I think is worth mentioning
is is our our converge of industries that's happening. We're
(16:01):
seeing this where we see many manufacturing methods being applied
to building industry, and we are excited about that because
there's stuff that we're looking at which really really solves
for modular construction and in some cases even being able
to do that fabrication and really accelerate the time that
(16:23):
takes to build and construct. In the future, maybe even
things like autonomous construction of buildings and things that will
happen because it's modular. And how does that really change
the world. This is the world that we're manufacturing, design,
and construction all come together in a very unique way,
driven by the need to go faster and driven by
(16:45):
the need to reduce. And then the last one, I
think it's really this whole concept of how the shop
floor or what we call the factory floor is going
to change. And I think similar to data centers and others,
I think you're going to see this next way where
our factory floors are going to be configurable and easy
(17:09):
to change, products that are built autonomous, remotely operated, a
lot of things happening, compute happening on the edge, and
safety maintainability. All of this Britain. You know this is
a factory of the future, and a lot of that
is mentioned in Industry Plato, But how do we really
(17:31):
make that happen? I think that's another really important emerging
technology that we look into. Conventional thinking says you have
to pay more to get more. I want the work.
But Team Mobile for Business uses unconventional thinking to deliver
premium benefits for better r o I from customized five
(17:53):
D solutions to three sixty support, we help you reach
your business goals right now. I want it now, innovating
to improve business today and tomorrow. That's unconventional thinking. From
T Mobile for Business. Capable device required covers on available
in some areas, some require certain clatter features C mobile
dot com. We're now entering a world where we're capable
(18:19):
of having this incredible wireless connectivity that gives us fiber
level work. But you're no longer tethered by cables. How
does connectivity play a part in this future? That is
so true. Five G is going to play a huge
role in industrial, so we support and connectivity through that
(18:39):
find you promise to remote dependence upon like workstations and
installed infrastructure. It's going to really transform the virtual reality
and XR experiences for example, and I don't mean from
an entertainment perspective. We're talking about you know, streaming directly
to we our sets and on demand video the way
(19:00):
it stream to TVs today. This is going to change
how people interact with each other. Is going to enable
our workers at remote sites with limited connectivity if now
fully experiences these immersive virtual models. And we see this
today like in our argumented reality, we see people wanting
to project their detailed design in areas of where the
(19:24):
construction is happening, and they want that easy access and
be able to actually visualize it. And these are the
kind of real scenarios that's going to demand that immersive experience.
Specifically need media and entertainment production. We see that FIG
is going to provide support for some really rich data
(19:45):
workflows on film shoots and sets right, and it's going
to support the move for production in the cloud, and
it's going to really create like these bigger worlds with
you know stories. And people also want to simulated exp
before they buy things, right, I look at myself, I
wanted to see the layout of my new home or office.
(20:07):
We want to be able to simulate furniture, appliances, and
and you know, really experience it before we buy these things.
And I know this is there's a lot of promise
for meta words right now, but I'm talking about northern
hypothetical world. This is a real world needs for consumption
that's going to really be dependent on fight G and connectivity. Yeah.
(20:30):
I see augmented reality being as disruptive and transformational as
three D printing was a decade ago, where three D
printing enabled that rapid prototyping where you no longer had
to wait for a sculptor to create whatever physical model
you needed. You could make fast adjustments on the fly
(20:53):
wait you know, half an hour an hour for a
small model to be printed. Now we're talking about having
that capability but in an augmented sort of virtual projection
over our real world surroundings. For businesses like architecture, I
imagine that being absolutely transformational. Like the ability to show
(21:14):
a client, well, we've worked up five different designs and
you can see what they will look like on the
site by just putting on these glasses and we will
cycle through them and show you all the different assets.
You can even show in different layers, like here's the wiring.
Here's the air duct system. We recently acquired the Wild
to offer customers more immersive and these collaborative workspaces. One
(21:38):
our customers want that are more teams working together doing
this conceptual design, and we do that in architecture and construction.
But I think where you are going is what happens
next is then the customers actually engaged with their client
and they want to show them these visual experiences that
are super immersive. In some cases, they want to be
(21:59):
able to edit those immersive experiences, be able to edit
it and bring it back to three D and two D.
In some cases, this design form is having a conversation
with the general contractor and showing the different layers that
you talked about. I mean, these conversations become so much
more easier when you have that sort of granular information
and then you're able to use x are to really
(22:22):
take it to the next level. I know that the
history of augmented reality has its roots in laying out
wiring on airplanes like that was one of the earliest
applications of augmented beyond the HUD systems that you saw
and say the jets for the Air Force. In my mind,
that's still one of the most phenomenal applications for it,
(22:45):
something where it effectively gives you the ability to both
see the future and X ray vision at the same time.
So I'm curious also what went into getting Autodesk to
get behind and a unifying vision like the Forge platform.
First of all, can you talk a little bit about
what the Forge platform is and the process of getting
(23:08):
the company buy in two pursue that Forged platform is
actually two different things. Internally for us, it's an amazing
way of taking these shared capabilities that we're building across
industries and sort of use that to accelerate our industry solutions. Externally,
(23:29):
it is the same capability, same e PI, same as
the k is that we provide to our customers and
our partners, and many of our partners, this is the
ecosystem that I talk about. They're extending these to create
new work clothes for our customers, in some cases connecting
their back end systems and sometimes it's about automating their processes.
(23:50):
That's what they're doing, and I think it's really really
a new way of consuming our capabilities. Traditionally, folks have
come in and they've used products and they'll continue to
use products and experiences that come out of the box
throughout the desk offerings. But I think the new way
is also to be able to get these API s
and capabilities and a lot of what we see as
(24:12):
people want to pull out the product data, transform it
and then maybe even customize it and send it back.
I mean, there's a lot that's happening in real time,
and our largest customers love these mechanisms to integrate. So
that's what for us, the Forge platform means. It means
(24:34):
the same APIs internally accelerating our industry solutions, and it
also means the same that we provide our customers and
partners so they can extend their work clothes, they can
build new solutions and you know, go through this digital
transformation faster. That's a powerful message to give to clients, right, like,
(24:55):
this is the tool we use to do what we do,
and we're extending that capabilit city to our clients and
our customers. That to me is the most powerful sales point,
right we use it. The proof is there, Yeah, exactly.
It's eat your own awful for sure, and they love that.
It really takes away the conversation around Hey, is this reliable?
(25:18):
Is this is this something you've committed to because che
we use it. I'm curious, with the onset of the
pandemic and so many companies needing to adapt and pivot
and to find new ways to approach the way they
do business, did you see a much more aggressive trend
toward digitization? Absolutely, Jonathan. I think we were on the
(25:43):
front lines of both needing to adopt adapt as well
as witnessing the extreme challenges among our customers in every
industry we support. We knew we had to help our
customers adapt as quickly as possible to pandemic, and the
most common and thread for all was the need for digitization.
(26:04):
In many cases it was you know, it actually accelerated
the move to cloud, and we saw that, we saw
a lot of folks actually sort of going and doing
that with a lot more urgency. And the second one
was the support for remote workforces. I think it's like,
how do tool and technologies enable that. I think our
customers were just used to being all present at the
(26:25):
site and being able to put together even design firms
worked on the site, and now they suddenly faced with
the reality of remote workforces. The last, but not the least,
I think is a ton of labor shortage and supply
you know, which you have been hearing is real and
you know, how does this supply chain disruption and this
(26:46):
global interdependency play out for our customers and how do
we help them through that stuff? I think these are
real issues that we see and it definitely helped, you know,
make the case for going faster using technology, using cloud
and some of these too sort of accelerate helping them
(27:08):
with remote workforces and helping them with digitization. The other one,
I think that came up a little bit. You know,
it was always there, but actually kind of accelerated with
the COP twenty six and all of that conversation is
how do people build for sustainability? How does design your
build process, you operate process, all of that change for sustainability.
(27:31):
And this is another wave that's happening that people should
sort of wake up and get ready for because it's
not cheap to build sustainable you know, a process and
and so how does it work? How do you talk
to your clients around that balance of sustainability with cost
and as you have you know, I know in this
(27:52):
podcast you've covered many times about smart cities and smart
infrastructure with a lot of emphasize on infrastructure, sure will
need to get overhauled to meet the net zero outcomes.
That's why you're seeing all these bills globally being passed.
And this is where I think auditis we do a
lot around things like spacemaker, which actually helps you sort
(28:13):
of design smart cities and then in a wise and
tandem that lets you work with smart infrastructure. These are
the kind of things that we need to really double
down on and adopt because that's the future and it's
going to be starting with understanding how to build for sustainability,
but it's going to soon get to having conversations around
(28:35):
net zero. So how do you start thinking about design
to actually operating these physical assets in a way that
actually tackles that. That's where I would say leaders need
to also focus as they're probably grappling with things like
labor shortage and supply challenges and getting to the cloud.
I mean, this is here real and the next wave
(28:56):
that's going to happen. Yeah, I could not agree more.
Your auto, you've said, is to make new mistakes and
learn fast every day. Could you share with us a
mistake you may have made and how you learned and
grew from it. It's a model that helps me, but not,
you know, apologize for trying something new. Right. I believe
(29:19):
that the faster you fail, the faster you learn. And
very recently, I'll tell you an example, we implemented an
API that provides access to granular data for a manufacturing industry.
The team debated for days whether this API should be perfected.
We might run into scale problems, we might not have
(29:41):
all of the features that are large customers need. And
then we took a chance and we put it out
there for a couple of our large customers. We kind
of gave them all of the sorry part of our dust.
And what was interesting about this particular exercises, we were
super surprised on our findings. We anticipated all of these
(30:03):
other problems, and they told us something very basic. They said,
your A P I S G. You know, I'm a
manufacturing customer and I only know about part numbers and
part description and assembly and all of that stuff. But
your APIs are very generic terms. We don't know how
to make sense out of it. Because we were really
(30:23):
building something that would work across industries, and we forgot
that our customers actually need that level of detail that
they are used to, so you know, fast forward, it
was an easy one to go fix. We went to
a different implementation using graph Q and all of that,
and now it's more contextualized in the way that they
(30:45):
want to consume this information, and you've got adopted like
wildfire with the subsequent releases. But you know, if we
hadn't put it out there and we had debated it,
I think we would have missed the opportunity. I think
this is why I mean you you don't want to
make the same mistakes, But as long as they don't
put the business address for trying our new things and
sort of experimentation, that culture of experimentation is something we
(31:09):
have to role model and we have to let our
teams do that. Raji, I love that answer. It also
goes back to the whole concept of listening. I could
have talked to Raji for ages, and in fact we
had to edit our conversation down because I got a
little carried away. But I still couldn't let her go
(31:30):
without asking her one more thing, what do you consider
to be your proudest achievement? I would say, you know,
it's always about people. You as a leader can have
visions and strategy, but it's always about the people. So
my proudest moment would be and I have a team
(31:52):
that can operate without me. They move faster than I'm
able to push them. You visit a customer site and
they can't stop praising the work that your team put
out there. You know, all the companies I work for,
it's it's a lot of hard work to get to
that moment. But when you get to that moment, you
sit back and you soak it in and you know
(32:13):
you enjoy that and that that that moment makes me proud.
I think that's a great testament to the type of
leader you are. Raji, thank you so much for joining
us on the Restless Ones. I've very much enjoyed our conversation.
Thank you, Jonathan. This is real pressure. Thanks again to
(32:36):
Raja Rassu for sharing her time and perspective with us.
The task of digitization can be a really daunting one. Companies,
particularly those with long histories, can find it challenging to
adopt new technologies and processes while maintaining the expectations of customers, partners,
and other stakeholders. It's no small task to make that
(32:59):
kind of move without disrupting business. But, as Raji pointed out,
it's never been more clear that digitization isn't the future,
it's the present. Underneath that digitization empowering it is five
G technology. To have the benefits of fiber connectivity, including
the low latency needed to minimize decision making time, all
(33:22):
without the need to be tethered by a cable. Is
transforming businesses at a phenomenal pace. It's now possible for
companies across all industries to make massive rapid shifts to
meet new needs, whether that is enabling remote work or
implementing a comprehensive digital strategy crucial for organizational success. Make
(33:49):
sure to download future episodes of The Restless Ones, where
all have more conversations with leaders who are defining how
technology will shape the business of tomorrow. I'll see you then.
T Mobile for Business knows companies want more than a
one size fits all approach to support. I want the world,
(34:10):
so we provide three sixty support customized to your business,
from discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account
team and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already
right now, I want it now. Three six support that's
customized for your success. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile
(34:32):
for Business
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