FAST COMPANY: Have you made a mistake that helped shape you?
TARUN NIMMAGADDA: A mistake that helped shape me and ultimately helped shake Mutual Mobile is outsourcing design. And this mistake was immediately apparent when we started to experience the friction between the handoff of design to engineering. And the way we started to approach this problem is to aggressively move to a cross-functional approach, where we not only co-located designers and engineers in the same space where they sat side-by-side, but we also made sure that they overlapped in terms of the work that they did and educated each other about the constraints in engineering and design.
Have you made a mistake that ultimately helped shape you?
Tarun Nimmagadda has helped clients such as Google, Cisco, and Xerox take full advantage of the evolving mobile platform. A natural entrepreneur, Tarun has worked tirelessly to elevate Mutual Mobile to where it stands today.
Before founding Mutual Mobile, Tarun founded and served as Chief Information Officer of AccessAble Systems, LLC, for which he won the Dell Social Innovation Competition. His work on robotics took him to the finals of the DARPA Grand Challenge and was published in the Journal of Physical Agents. With partner Mickey Ristroph, now CTO at Mutual Mobile, Tarun designed the successful mobile application Sparkphone. Tarun has also worked with GM on V2I and V2V communication and is a founder of the SmartPhone Entrepreneurs Group.
Tarun now heads the fulfillment and operation side of Mutual Mobile. Under his supervision, the company has managed to combine award-winning designers and world-class engineers under one roof. Despite the ongoing talent war, Tarun’s vision has continued to attract the smartest, best minds in mobile. As a testament to this process, Mutual Mobile is now the single largest hirer of iOS developers in the country.
Tarun is a natural leader and motivator. New Mutual Mobile developers and designers quickly learn that there is no static, hidebound development process within the company. Rather, under Tarun’s collaborative supervision, teams are encouraged to create ways to heighten innovation and maximize efficiency.
