This "startup" within PWC moved rapidly to create a new generation of software for field service and retail sales organizations. The goal was to replace behemoths like Great Plains and home grown systems with modern applications that use big data, machine learning, and conversational interfaces.
Initially, I was to identify and enforce commonalities across the efforts of a large and fractious group of vendors.
I on-boarded teams, reviewed code bases, and evangelizing for a common set of practices around the development of micro-services, continuous integration/deployment, containerization, search, ETL, and the use of BPM engines for the orchestration and business logic.
It soon became apparent that I was only adding to the cacophony in that role.
I withdrew into one of the product teams working under the rubric of "fit-bit for work". As the main applications gathered an ever increasing amount of data, we would provide individuals and management tools for changing behavior to measurably improve performance. Working with my friends at
Philosophie, I got a taste of their flavor of product development, as we designed, built, validated, and piloted several iterations of the app.