In the business world, digital transformation is what everyone is implementing. Either tech giants are trying to scale up new technologies further into their practices or small and medium-sized organizations are preparing strategies to adopt modern technologies to their business processes. Businesses who have embraced disruptive technologies are seeing increased ROI and that's motivating other companies to lead the rest of the pack.

This increased demand is calling out several digital transformation solution companies to ensure their products are adaptable to varied business categories. One such company that is building customer-centric, data-driven solutions to ensure the transformation is hassle-free is Numerals LLC, founded by Amresh Mathur as the CEO. As an ex-digital transformation leader for Samsung Electronics America, Amresh's rich experience comes with valuable insights into the industry. Here's an exclusive interview talking about his journey to entrepreneurship, the challenges he faced, and his view on disruptive technologies.

Charging Data-driven Teams across Countries

Amresh Mathur is a digital transformation leader with a passion for bringing customer-focused experiences to market. He has more than 22 years of experience in the technology sector enabling business transformation and leading complex turnarounds. As a leader, his primary focus is to launch new products, build high-performing teams, develop talent and manage growth.

In his current role at Numerals LLC, Amresh is focused on ideating and delivering solutions built around consumer centricity, agility, and technology-powered platforms across multiple countries.

Recently, his leadership roles made him responsible for driving the transformation of the world's largest consumer electronics company by launching an end-to-end user-centric eCommerce experience across B2C, B2B, and services from the ground up. The diverse digital-led product management and data-driven experiences he has, across buyer and owner aligned user journeys, setting up capabilities for content management, product information management, search, personalization, and campaign management, equipped Amresh to lead these teams.

Prior to this stint, Amresh was a trusted advisor to many of the world's most influential businesses. He helped organizations build, lead and transform user-centric capabilities, shaping and delivering game-changing digital strategies, driving global P&L, and managing innovation at scale while modernizing the core.

To add more feathers to the cap, he is also an industry-recognized speaker and influencer, playing a leadership role in technology consortia and academia partnerships, and has been the recipient of several industry awards.

Leveraging Personal Experience to Drive Industry-level Change

Growing up in India, Amresh graduated in Engineering and worked in a leading manufacturing company. Progressing in his career, Amresh then joined a small Indian software company which, fifteen years later, has become a US$11 billion organization. During those years, Amresh had managed teams across Asia, Europe, and the USA, while partnering with clients to transform their organizations, embed technology into everything they do, and build digital capabilities.

In 2015, Amresh was drawn to Samsung's unique culture and values. The visionary leadership team of the firm signaled its serious commitment to setting up data-driven direct to the consumer market. He was involved in leading and building world-class product management, digital marketing operations, supply chain, and engineering organization to power digital and eCommerce functions from the ground up.

Subsequently, Amresh launched his firm Numerals LLC, which aims at delivering transformation and laying the foundation for building data-driven, consumer-focused experiences, driving new paradigms in marketing, deeper levels of engagement, and a stronger focus on customer engagement and commerce for internet, healthcare, and other industries.

The Journey to Entrepreneurship

We asked Amresh about the most challenging part of his journey so far to which he explained that achieving digital-led transformation was the most demanding task. It involves championing the structural processes, technological changes and rallying the entire organization towards a common goal. Amresh was able to overcome some of the challenges by reorienting around the extreme consumer–centricity.

He further added that working with the teams to understand the voice of the consumer helped him empathize with the consumer's needs. This helped Amresh frame every problem very differently. Iterating and launching shorter solutions in response to consumer needs also helped tearing down the structural silos in large enterprises. By shifting the focus to gathering a complete and unified view of the consumer, he was able to bring about agility and faster unlocking of unstated user needs. This led to a change in process and brought agility within teams while reducing the cost of failure.

To navigate that phase, Amresh's hypothesis was to truly connect brands with consumers, technology and data solutions focused on consumer centricity help generate valuable insights leading to happy and engaged consumers.

Disruptive Technologies and Leadership Go Hand in Hand

Amresh is passionate about technology and everything it has to offer. He acknowledges that the volume of information flowing through the physical world and the global economy has increased tremendously. New sources of data, fed into systems powered by machine learning and AI, are at the heart of this digital-led transformation. Technologies such as AI and Big Data make extensive and precise insights available easily and enable leaders to make more informed decisions.

Giving his two cents on how modern technology is affecting the industry, Amresh states that AI and Big Data-driven insights have helped evolve the role of the leader by bringing agility and transparency into decision-making. Some of these insights are being used by leaders during the pandemic to quickly offer personalized online capabilities and remote support across commerce and healthcare sectors.

Leaders of both technology and non-technology boutique firms have started harnessing the power of AI to get into the race as these new platforms and analytics tools are leveling the playing field and enabling innovation. He also adds that creating teams of subject matter experts to partner with data science teams allows leaders to go deeper into the local business armed with the knowledge logic of different cultures.

"Accepting the fact that these technologies enable the ability to connect individual-level data, analyze it, and then use it in a way that doesn't give away any individual-level information requires a lot of innovation", says Amresh.

Emphasis on innovating products or solutions to appeal to your target audience

Amresh believes that the secret to being successful in today's ultra-competitive market is product innovation. If your product or solution is innovative, you've got a much higher chance to survive and thrive.

Product innovation represents a new way of solving a problem a high number of consumers have. When we emphasize innovation, we don't refer only to products, but also to services, processes, and business models. It takes a village to develop and launch an innovative product in today's market—from the engineers to the manufacturing experts, from the marketing consultants and designers to the legal experts, we need everyone's involvement to make sure we are able to consider if the product is relevant, better or unique.

Measuring the success of the product can be through use cases and ROI. However, if the product is new, market research can provide a clear understanding of the consumers and competition.

A Leader's Take on Effective Leadership

Being a leader himself, Amresh's take on successful tech leadership is direct. He considers being decisive a vital leadership attribute. According to him, a good tech leader should make decisions quickly for the success of the organization and empower teams to innovate and solve critical business opportunities. He also stresses the importance of being collaborative in action and solving critical business problems with technological solutions. As a team player, Amresh values recognition of team efforts, which keeps the employees engaged. He strongly believes that a tech leader is successful if the team members are engaged and successful.

Advice to Budding Entrepreneurs

Amresh is of the belief that the pandemic experience has shown how work can be done in ways that make it more efficient, effective, and human. "Emerging leaders have an opportunity to lead in ingenious ways. They should recognize the barriers to change and inspire teams to reimagine the potential at this inflection point and become more efficient", he added. He breaks down how by understanding the learnings on what worked during the pandemic, they can recalibrate company operating models to be more effective. Lastly, he concludes by saying leaders should help people maintain morale to create stronger and cohesive teams.

Management: Amresh Mathur, CEO, Numerals LLC