Prabhakaran Paulthiravium
iOS Architect, Jambav
Years with Zoho
Years with Zoho
A leader that inspires you?
Every person I come across.
What did you want to be while growing up?
Nothing in particular; I focused on being a good human.
Your go-to comfort food?
Spicy beef fry.
Describe your current role in the organization.
I take up multiple roles in the team and the organization. Primarily, my work involves iOS app development. I am working on an iOS app and exploring TvOS app development. Apart from that, I also initiated AppGarage within our team, where I try to improve the development efforts in the 15+ mobile apps that are being developed in our team. My contribution involves finding ways to avoid duplicate work, encouraging SDK development, coming up with guidelines for better practices to target quicker release cycles, while not compromising the quality of the product, and in adopting latest platform releases in our products. I also host ZITS, our monthly internal tradeshow, giving teams a platform to showcase their work to our colleagues.
What role does Zoho’s company culture play in your identity and the work that you do?
I go by these thoughts that I hold dear:
- Love what you do
- You can always restart; never hesitate to try
- It's not someone else's problem—it's our product, our responsibility, and our team.
I believe those thoughts also align with Zoho’s values.
We may not always be doing what we like to do, but once we start working on it, we have to love that. It is that love that will drive you to create wonders. I also believe, at work, we need to collaborate as a team. If someone is stuck, everyone is stuck in one way or the other. My chemistry school teacher used to say that the speed of the entire process depends on the slowest of all the processes—I always relate that to work.
What were the highest and lowest points of your journey with Zoho?
Every release is special, but I always cherish the release of the CRM 3.0 mobile app. It was one long journey with an excellent team. I was able to represent Zoho twice at Zoholics and once at WWDC, the developer conference held by Apple. These moments will always have a special place in my heart. I also had my share of painful moments. At one point, we had to freeze development on one of the apps I worked on due to a strategic reset on the product.
Your most embarrassing blunder?
In the early days of my career, in a hurry, I once ran the command “rm -rfv” without changing the path from my home folder. This was the command to delete all the files recursively in the given folder. Running it in the home directory erased all files in my system. Luckily, my work was all backed up in the repository and didn’t have many critical files. It feels funny to think about that now, and it also taught me to be more careful while running critical operations.
What are your hobbies or favorite activities outside of work?
I am passionate about cricket. I spend my time playing, discussing, and watching the game. I also enjoy coding and frequently experiment with Zoho Cliq bots and Zoho Creator apps in my free time. I developed an internal fantasy cricket league at Zoho during each IPL season. It started as a fun predictor game with college friends and has now evolved into a dynamic fantasy game in over 13 years. The game also gave me more friends inside the company.
Words of Wisdom
Don’t expect the world to be fair or things to go as we want them to. Stick around for more surprises.
Every individual has different priorities, and to work as a team, all their priorities need to be respected while ensuring their priorities don’t affect the team’s workflow. People are more energized when their priorities are met, and that would reflect in the work.
Achieving balance is one of the management challenges we need to love solving.