About

Technologist, problem solver and people leader. Twenty years building digital solutions, and rather longer being interested in the people who build them.

I help engineers become the leaders their teams deserve.

That is the shortest true version. The longer one is that I have spent twenty years building systems and, increasingly, building the people who build them, and I have become steadily more convinced that the second is the harder problem and the one worth writing about.

The work

I am a technologist, problem solver and people leader with over twenty years of experience building digital solutions. My work centres on systems that scale, teams that thrive, and the kind of complex challenges that need both strategic vision and technical depth.

I have delivered large-scale projects across financial services, media and cloud infrastructure: re-architecting enterprise insurance platforms, running mobile app services for millions of subscribers, leading zero-downtime migrations for major cloud platforms. I have inherited teams that were merged badly and had to rebuild trust before we could ship anything. I have run distributed teams across time zones and learned, slowly, how much of that is a communication problem wearing a technical costume.

The path

My route into technology was not traditional. I am largely self-taught, and I have come to think of that as one of my real advantages rather than a gap to apologise for. Without the scaffolding of a formal framework I had to develop the habit of learning quickly, adapting when the ground moved, and proving capability through results rather than credentials. That habit has outlasted every specific technology I learned it on.

It also shapes how I think about other people’s careers. I am sceptical of the idea that there is one shape a good engineer’s path should take, because mine was not that shape and it worked.

Growing people

Beyond the technology, I care about helping people grow. I have mentored more developers than I can count, led community upliftment initiatives, and volunteered teaching mathematics to children in underserved communities. I am deeply empathetic to what people are carrying, and I believe technology should ultimately serve human needs rather than the other way round.

The part of leadership I find most interesting is the handover: the moment where the job stops being about what you can produce and starts being about what your judgment lets other people produce. It feels like failure for months before it starts feeling like anything else, and almost nobody warns you.

The rest

I read broadly, across leadership, productivity, health and whatever else has my attention. Time management and personal effectiveness genuinely interest me, and I listen to more podcasts on them than is probably reasonable while keeping up a fitness routine. I encourage the people around me to look after their health, on the straightforward basis that we do our best work when we are at our best.

At my core I am a problem solver who believes in continuous improvement, whether that means optimising a system, developing someone’s potential, or finding a better way to be useful.

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is LinkedIn. If you would rather write, hello@indrannaidoo.com reaches me directly.

A note on what I write here

Everything on this site is written in a personal capacity. The views are mine and do not represent my employer or any organisation I work with. I do not write about company-specific matters, and nothing here draws on confidential or financial information.