Inside Guidewire: Professional Services Experts Reflect on Their Day-to-Day Work, Career Satisfaction, and Building Customer Trust In today’s ever-evolving tech landscape, no two days are alike and that’s what keeps things exciting for two engineers on the Guidewire Professional Services team. They thrive on the variety and challenges that come with solving complex problems, consulting with customers, and helping drive their success. Their roles touch many areas, including project management, contracts, resource planning, system strategy, and more.
Megha Bhushan and Meenakshi Sundaresan share insights and highlight their opportunities for creative problem-solving. Megha, Delivery Lead in the Global Delivery Center, is based in Dublin. Meenakshi, Lead Architect, works in the QA Practice within the Global Delivery Center in Chennai, India.
Check out their insights reflecting a deep passion for what they do and a strong sense of personal and professional fulfillment.
First, what is the role of Professional Services at Guidewire and how does it support insurers?
Megha: Professional Services plays a crucial role implementing and customizing Guidewire software products to meet our insurance customers’ unique needs. This ensures that our solutions are effectively integrated into their existing systems and provide the tools they need to succeed. By delivering high-quality tailored solutions, Professional Services helps build customer trust and satisfaction, which is essential for their success.
Meenakshi: We ensure customers successfully implement, adopt, and get maximum value from Guidewire products, focusing on smooth implementations, solving challenges, and integrating products with existing systems. The Professional Services team helps with onboarding, customization, integration, and providing essential services to meet specific business needs. The team also provides valuable feedback to improve products. It’s a crucial service, ultimately enhancing customer outcomes and differentiating Guidewire in the marketplace.
What does your day-to-day role look like?
Megha: Every day is different, depending on what phase a project is in. A typical day for me during the development phase might entail helping the team with their blockers, reviewing code the team is committing for best practices and cloud standards, attending Scrum meetings, having working sessions with the development team and customers to solve issues that they are facing. I am also likely designing technical solutions for complex stories and working with other architects.
Meenakshi: I work closely with my team of 35+ quality assurance engineers based in the Guidewire Chennai and Bengaluru, India, locations to ensure our projects meet deadlines and customer requirements. I also work closely with the India management team on specific company strategic initiatives, including hiring and workforce expansion activities. I attend proposal solution meetings, process development workshops, and staff calls with colleagues in Ireland, the US, and Malaysia. It keeps me occupied! We support shift working hours, so my day starts at 11 am local time and goes until 9:30 pm.
Can you describe how you work with other teams, like product managers and developers, to turn business needs into technical plans? What challenges come up and how do you solve them?
Megha: We work with project managers during the inception phase of a project to prepare a backlog of user stories in Jira, based on sessions with customers to understand their business requirements. Then we estimate these ‘stories’ to determine the number of resources needed for the project and the timeline. We prepare high-level design diagrams and scope documents for all integrations. Using the Agile approach, we conduct all Sprint ceremonies. We have daily calls with developers to ensure they have all the resources and inputs they need to work on their stories and aren’t facing blockers. Some stories might need a design change, which we discuss with the customer architects. For stories requiring further clarification on requirements, we engage with customer product owners and business analysts.
Meenakshi: I would add that we work closely with project managers and customer success managers while working on implementations and upgrade projects. Meeting day-to-day delivery challenges and maintaining project timelines are critical. We also work with Guidewire’s training and education team to get required training support to upskill our team on the most recent Guidewire product releases, called ‘ski releases.’ Improving collaboration with our Product Development & Operations team for product support and feature enhancements related to the Guidewire testing framework is also essential for achieving better outcomes. An example of a challenge we are addressing is integrating service estimates into the sales cycle.
In your eyes, what’s the most exciting part of working at Guidewire?
Megha: The most exciting part for me is collaborating with my colleagues to tackle complex problems for our customers and witnessing the trust that builds in them for Guidewire.
Meenakshi: Working on automation and performance proposals for customers, spending innumerable hours discussing the tailored solution, putting together the benefits and value proposition, and finalizing the pricing model with the required set of resources, is exciting to me. Some days are spent discussing the scope of what we can deliver for implementation versus upgrade projects, balancing high customer expectations, and reaching a consensus on the most optimal solution.
What are some of the key technologies you work with?
Megha: We primarily work with the Gosu programming language, which is very similar to Java and shares the same underlying concepts. Guidewire Studio, built on IntelliJ, is used as the Integrated Development Environment. TeamCity is used for build management and continuous integration. We use Git as the version control system and Bitbucket as the source control repository. Additionally, we work with the Guidewire Cloud Platform, which is based on a multi-tenant architecture utilizing Amazon Web Services and Atmos components.
Meenakshi: We work on test automation using the GT-SUITE of tools (i.e., GT:UI and GT:API) and performance test automation using JMeter. We use TeamCity and Jenkins for the DevOps CI/CD pipeline. The primary coding skills of our team include Java and Javascript. With our recent ski release, we started supporting customers in bringing their own testing framework to Guidewire Cloud Platform. Our team also works on AI-based solutions to accelerate test design and test execution activities.
What will the impact of Guidewire’s growth across Bengaluru have on our wider ecosystem?
Megha: It will support Guidewire’s strategy to have a cross-functional India base and scaling of Guidewire’s implementation and engineering solutions with a flexible geographic mix. Having a team in India, especially for EMEA or US-based customer projects, will help ensure coverage 24/7, thereby improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Meenakshi: I would add that it will help us scale our operations globally by leveraging the region’s talent, improving delivery speed, and managing resources. With the shift working model, overlap support can be provided to customers, thus improving the customer experience. With a large partner ecosystem available in India, this expanded team can support partners with training, consulting, and joint implementations, which will strengthen collaboration.
What kind of growth or learning opportunities have you been able to explore to expand your role? Are there unique programs or practices that help you stay on top of new technologies and architectural trends?
Megha: Guidewire offers both technical and non-technical learning pathways, on platforms like LinkedIn Learning, O'Reilly, and Seertech to provide a comprehensive learning experience. There’s also support for employees in their career development through continuous learning and mentorship, supporting internal mobility by creating opportunities for stretch assignments, mentoring, shadowing, and overall career mobility.
Meenakshi: Every new Guidewire product release, the ‘ski releases,’ brings new capabilities and avenues to expand our service offerings in terms of automation, performance, and data-centric testing. We maintain a backlog with a list of expansions in our service offerings to perform proof of concepts and roll out new services. A lot of learning and knowledge gathering happens to prepare the base content to deliver services and train our people.
How do you measure the success of the systems and designs you put in place? What signs show that your work is having a positive impact on both the technology and the business?
Megha: We have regular Sprint reviews with customers to get feedback on the processes followed in the project. We publish weekly status reports to document the team's accomplishments and highlight any issues that arise. Each track is assigned a green, yellow, or red color based on the completion of the estimated stories for the Sprint. Successfully completing a project within its estimated timeline and ensuring a smooth go-live for the customer demonstrates that our work has had a positive impact. A happy customer is the ultimate indicator of a project's success!
Meenakshi: The Testing Center of Excellence within the Global Delivery Center enhances customer implementations by delivering a comprehensive quality assurance strategy, including automation, performance, and data testing solutions. Customers value our team’s presence as it gives them first-hand support on key testing decisions and subject matter expert support from certified Guidewire quality assurance (QA) analysts. We’ve been able to deliver quality assurance advisory, essential on-demand services, and cloud assurance checks, thereby increasing our footprint across the quality assurance ecosystem.
Are you ready to be part of a collaborative and dynamic team? Guidewire’s Professional Services team is hiring around the world! Follow @Guidewire and explore our Careers page to see current opportunities. Want a glimpse into what it’s like to work here? Visit our Culture page and discover life #InsideGuidewire.