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Drive Innovation Agenda & Building future engines in large enterprises

Clients

Deutsche Telekom

Services

Drive Innovation

Date

February 21, 2024

Before scaling SMB growth engines like BidAssist and Nexizo, I learnt the ropes of incubation inside two of the world’s largest companies: Deutsche Telekom in Europe and Airtel in India. The challenge was simple to state but hard to solve: how do you build future growth teams inside massive organisations designed for innovation, and speed but on top of the legacy stack.

What worked was combining my McKinsey problem-solving training with a startup style of execution. Big visions only moved forward when broken into milestones, phases, and finally sprints that leaders and teams could align on.

From Europe’s Streaming Play to India’s Music Platform

At Deutsche Telekom, I worked on a pan-European OTT platform designed to compete with global streaming players. The hard part was alignment across nine countries, content partners, and vendors, all pulling in different directions.

At Airtel, I led the build of Wynk Music as an in-house platform. The goal was clear: build capabilities internally instead of outsourcing so Airtel could scale faster and own the customer experience directly.

The Power of Alignment and Process

In both settings, I learnt that building the product was only half the battle. The other half was alignment.

  • Breaking down the vision → translating strategy into phases and weekly sprints made execution real.
  • Stakeholder alignment → keeping executives, market teams, and partners moving in sync required as much effort as the product itself.
  • Working with Apple → At Airtel, when I worked with the Apple team, learnt the power of repeatable processes for structured launches
  • Owning capability → building in-house talent and platforms created control and long-term sustainability.

Impact

  • At Airtel, the entertainment stack paved way for a new world driving up retention levers in a competitive market.
  • At Deutsche Telekom, the OTT platform supported both retention and acquisition, proving telcos could compete in consumer services beyond connectivity.

Lessons from the Build

Three big takeaways stand out:

  • Structure creates speed — breaking big ideas into milestones and sprints gets things moving.
  • Alignment is critical — without it, even the best product vision stalls.
  • Process and ownership scale — process discipline and in-house builds give enterprises long-term advantage.

These journeys taught me that large enterprises can drive innovation like startups if they commit to alignment, structure, and building lasting capabilities.