Pavan Kumar T V

CTO | Technology Leader

Building Engineering Teams That Actually Work

I've led technical teams across different environments—from SVP of Engineering at Trilogy overseeing TelcoDR, Ignite, and DevFactory, before that Director at BRIDGEi2i and CTO at my own startup MineWhat. After all these years, I've found that good leadership isn't about fancy frameworks; it's about creating environments where smart people can do their best work without unnecessary friction.

Leadership in PE-Driven Companies

At Trilogy, as the person ultimately on the hook (they called it DRI—Direct Responsible Individual), I had to:

  • Merge acquired companies (AnswerHub, InsideSales) that had completely different structure and maturity levels
  • Move everything to our cloud without breaking things
  • Build tools that made our developers' lives easier
  • Get different groups to stop reinventing the wheel
  • Make remote work actually productive

The first time we tried to make changes, nothing worked, things were blowing up. Two different teams has very diffent visions. One team is trying to keep the lights on. The other was trying to do a Elon musk style DOGE.

That's when I realized technical integration is actually about people, not just code.

What didn't go as planned

  • Not speaking up and saying, stop!!! DOGE untill we know what we are dealing with
  • Lost customers because of unstability.

What Actually Worked

Bringing Multiple Groups Together at Trilogy

What made a difference:

  • Turning legacy products into cloud-native ones
  • Cutting cloud costs across products ( Irony but it helped )
  • Finding ways to share knowledge without endless meetings
  • Creating tools that made remote work less painful (? some devs disagree)

Managing Multiple Products

Things that mattered:

  • Rewriting new systems which modernizes telco systems
  • Creating dev tools that saved hours of frustration daily
  • Cutting infrastructure costs that were bleeding us dry
  • Getting products to share technical approaches

Team Structure That Worked

I worked with:

  • A handful of VPs and architects who could see the big picture
  • Development teams that were actually rockstars
  • Teams spread across different companies in the portfolio group
  • Engineers scattered across time zones
  • People who had just joined through acquisitions and weren't happy about it

Leadership Approaches That Made a Difference

1. How to Handle Acquisitions

What worked when integrating acquired companies:

  • Being brutally honest about the plan (sugarcoating just prolongs the pain)
  • Taking a careful, systematic approach to code changes
  • Moving to cloud-native bit by bit
  • Preserving institutional knowledge wherethere people leave or stay

2. Teams

Approaches that worked across different groups:

  • Making it crystal clear who was responsible for what
  • Building dev environments that just worked
  • Giving people opportunities to grow and learn
  • Allowing movement between products
  • Making remote work not suck

3. Making Processes Better

Lessons from growing teams:

  • Setting up CI/CD that people actually trusted
  • Managing infrastructure through code
  • Creating processes to keep costs under control
  • Building systems to share knowledge

How to Build Effective Leadership Teams

Hiring Technical Leaders

What I've learned from hiring CTOs and technical founders:

  • At Sanabil Studio: Evaluating technical co-founders for startups is completely different than hiring corporate CTOs
  • At Traveazy Group: Successfully hired a CTO who could balance business and technical needs
  • Through my fractional work: Advising companies on who to hire for technical leadership
  • Building frameworks to assess technical leaders that go beyond buzzwords
  • Making sure technical vision aligns with business goals

What Makes a Good Technical Leader

The qualities that actually matter:

  • Technical depth (can they tell real solutions from buzzword bingo?)
  • Business understanding (do they get what moves the needle?)
  • Team building (can they attract and keep good people?)
  • Past experience with similar challenges
  • Values that match the company's

Setting Technical Leaders Up for Success

Things that make a difference:

  • Crystal clear expectations from day one
  • Right resources and team structure
  • Technology roadmap that connects to business goals
  • Framework for working with stakeholders
  • Clear definition of what success looks like

Real Problems

1. After Acquisition Nightmares

How we made it work at Trilogy:

  • Systematic approach to fixing acquired products
  • Modernizing cloud infrastructure without outages
  • Getting dev tools to work across different stacks
  • Finding ways to extract knowledge before people left
  • Working with incredibly small, focused teams

2. Technical Standardization

Things that actually worked:

  • Dev environments that took minutes to set up, not days
  • Central monitoring that caught problems early
  • Tools that helped keep costs under control

3. Making Remote Work Effective

Strategies that helped teams succeed:

  • Building better tools for remote collaboration
  • Shifting from chat to documentation for important decisions

How We Measured Success

Metrics that actually mattered:

  • How quickly teams could ship features
  • How much we spent on infrastructure
  • How products could build on each other's work
  • How often we could ship code

What I Focused On

Current priorities:

  • Getting groups to work together more effectively
  • Using AI tools that actually improve productivity

Looking Ahead

Based on years in the trenches:

  • Better tools for developers that reduce friction
  • Smarter approaches to cloud costs
  • More efficient ways to integrate companies
  • Ways to grow teams without breaking things
  • Better frameworks for developing leaders
  • More practical ways to assess technical executives

The brutal truth is that great technical leadership in PE-backed companies means balancing innovation with pragmatism. You need good systems, solid tools, and relentless focus on removing friction while keeping costs in check. My experience shows that when you focus on developer experience, automate repetitive tasks, and share knowledge effectively, you can build engineering teams that deliver consistently. And finding the right technical leaders—through careful hiring and setting them up for success—is what makes this sustainable long-term.