Kruthika Venkatathri is the Technical Team Lead for our Payer Enrollment product. That means she leads the charge in designing and engineering our solution for credentialing. Not only is Kruthika a part of our amazing team of engineers, she’s also a huge influencer within our company, and a fantastic champion of our team culture.
We sat down with Kruthika for our Open Source employee spotlight series to get to know her a little better, and to talk about what Madaket does, and how we do it.
Tell us about your role at Madaket.
I’m the tech lead for the Payer Enrollment team, working with two remote engineers, and several other Madaket team members, on our newest product that just launched this year for credentialing. Something that’s really exciting about my team right now is that we are taking a more interdepartmental approach to our engineering. As we’re figuring how to build and design the product, we are including the service delivery team and QA teams right from the start and through the life of the engineering process, rather than after we’re done with our next iterations.
This builds on Madaket’s current model of pairing engineers and product managers for a more integrated workflow. With my product manager, Nikki, we all work together to get feedback from QA and service delivery right away, and we’ve all found it to be even more collaborative than it was before.
Tell us more about the pairing system for engineers and product managers. How does it help?
Oh, it’s really great. Nikki is the person interacting with clients and gathering the business requirements. Then she tells me what the client needs, and we figure out how to engineer it. Together, we look at the problems the client and the industry have, and then ask questions like, “What can be done? What should be done? What can be engineered?” We discuss what to do in every iteration, break tasks down, discuss tickets, modifications, and improvements.
It’s different from other company models, and I think it really works. Before Madaket, I wasn’t even aware of product managers, and now I talk to Nikki more than anyone else in the company besides my own team. It’s great, because she understands the client and a lot of technicalities, and I have knowledge of how we can solve the problems. And together, we determine what the product will need a day from now, a month from now, a year from now.
Describe Madaket in three words.
Purposeful, collaborative. fun.
Madaket’s main purpose is to do good in healthcare. We’re really trying to help people and make their lives easier. Part of the reason we are able to do this is that we have a truly collaborative environment. When one of us wants to try something new, we’re able to do it. Everything doesn’t always come from the top down. When our ideas work, we are appreciated for it and other teams pick it up too. We also have good camaraderie. We come together at work around our foosball and ping-pong tables, and outside of work too, to play and really get to know each other. A lot of people are here are not just colleagues, they’re friends too.
What’s your proudest Madaket moment so far?
For me, it was when I was promoted to tech lead. My promotion was mentioned at our weekly All Hands company meeting and what my colleagues said about me in the announcement made me feel good and appreciated. Building on that, I’ve been very proud of the new strategy my team has tried out with including service delivery and QA early. It’s been working, and people have noticed.
People would be surprised if they knew:
I do embroidery! I’ve just started back doing it again. I learned it as a kid, and then I thought: Hey, why did I stop? So, I’ve gotten back into it. Right now, I’m just making small things to get my skills back, but I’ll be working my way up.
Any last thoughts before we wrap up?
In general, Madaket is such a great company with great leadership. I like the mission we have as a company and what we want to achieve is important work. I’ve been here two and half years, and I’ve seen the company grow from 20 to 50-plus people and move into our third office. It’s really cool to see that through it all, we’ve stuck to the same values.
