Our latest ‘Tech Connects’ guest is Sastry Durvasula, who’s the CIO and Client Services Officer of TIAA, the huge provider of financial services for those in academia, government, medicine, and other fields. It has more than a trillion dollars under management. As you can imagine, the tech infrastructure supporting all of that is quite vast, and Durvasula has an enormous job. In addition, he’s also guiding the organization through a digital transformation that includes generative A.I. and other cutting-edge technologies. Let’s listen in as he describes what it takes to grow into and thrive in a senior technology role, and the big changes he’s helping shepherd at TIAA.    

If you’re a tech professional who’s interested in climbing the ladder into a senior management position, I hope you learned something from Durvasula’s story. Here are some quick takeaways from our discussion.

First, if you want to move into a managerial role, much less take the CIO or CTO seat, you have to focus on people. When you’re running an organization’s tech, you’re going to be building and decommissioning platforms, and instituting and unwinding processes. There’s going to be constant re-engineering. If you want to get through all of that smoothly, you need to invest in people and help them grow, so that they’ll help you and your organization grow in turn.

Second, the higher up you climb in terms of your roles, the more you need to embed yourself in the core business. You need to understand a business’s domain, its culture, and its problems. Being a technology leader also means often being a business leader. That’s a pretty hard shift for some tech professionals, but if you want to make a real difference, you have to take charge and become another voice at the table.

Third, if you’re helping shape your company’s A.I. policy, it always pays to think “safety first.” Start by thinking about the guardrails that need to be put in place, and the ways you need to lock down your company’s data. Once you’ve thought all that through, you can put A.I. into production in a safe way.

We covered a whole lot of other topics during the episode, of course, so give it a re-listen if there was something you missed. We’ll see you next time—and remember, Dice is your best resource to find the tech talent you need to fill your open roles, and for technologists, the best place to grow your tech career.

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