Talking Retail SaaS, Engineering Excellence and 2025 Priorities with Aptos’ Tushar Sachdev

Editor’s Note: In May 2024, Tushar Sachdev was appointed CTO across Aptos, LS Retail, and Revionics and head of engineering for the Aptos business unit. We asked Tushar to share some of his takeaways from his first few months at Aptos as well as a look ahead at major initiatives for 2025.

Q: Tushar, your career has spanned decades, with a heavy focus on technology leadership at SaaS companies. Following your first few months at Aptos, what is something that has really stood out about Aptos and our software?

We are all consumers – engaging with and buying from retailers. And that feels natural and easy. But when you look at it from a software development perspective, retail is incredibly complex. And the complexity skyrockets when you factor in omnichannel and the demands of the store.

Think of a POS system, for example. Your customer information comes from a CRM. Your order information comes from an OMS. Your product information comes from a merchandising system.

You are running on top of another vendor’s hardware, such as an iOS or an Android device. You are integrating with an expanding number of payment providers, plus maybe other third-party solutions for tax, e-receipts, promo, loyalty, etc.

If you are a software engineer at heart, like I am, you realize that’s a very messy environment to build software for. In addition to this messy technology setup, there is a tremendous amount of functional depth that needs to be encoded within the software.

I quickly realized the work we are doing at Aptos is hard and important. And that our colleagues’ deep expertise in retail – and within specific retail verticals – allows us to drive real business value for our customers. It’s a great realization to have.

Q: While you’ve been impressed with Aptos’ current development capabilities, you also have new initiatives you are excited about. On a high level, can you share some of your key focus areas?

Aptos brings real depth in the retail domain and our ongoing focus is on “Excellence” – Operational Excellence and Engineering Excellence. Operational Excellence is really all about releasing features more frequently, tightening processes and driving what I call Field Performance. Aptos’ software operates by integrating with various technologies, which vary widely by customer. To continuously shorten our deployment cycles, we need to keep refining how our technology operates in the “Field.”

On the Engineering Excellence side, we are focused on improving the Developer Experience. Essentially, we want to enable developers to quickly and effectively create new functionality without worrying about the underlying plumbing. Yet obviously, that plumbing is extremely important, so we have a dedicated platform engineering team, led by a new VP of Platform Engineering, Jordan Hughes. Our platform engineers provide the foundational tools, services and process automation that will enable our developers to more quickly, securely and cost-effectively advance their applications.

This is just one of our initiatives aimed at faster and more frequent product releases. Another area that we’re working on is release flags. Sometimes our customers need more time to do their testing prior to adopting new functionality. This is not uncommon in a retail environment when you think about new features being rolled out to hundreds or thousands of stores and with many competing IT priorities. To help with this, we are considering deploying updates with release flags, so for SaaS customers that aren’t ready for new functionality within a release, we could “hide” that functionality behind the release flag. We would then make that new functionality available to the customer when they’re ready for it.

Ultimately, in every decision we make, we are balancing what drives maximum business benefit for our customers and how to continuously improve release velocity, quality and Field Performance. Advocating for Operational Excellence and Engineering Excellence is what I’m most passionate about. It’s a never-ending journey, but I’m confident in the plan our team has in place.

Q: In addition to leading Aptos’ engineering function, you serve as CTO across Aptos, LS Retail and Revionics. Can you share your experiences working across all three business units so far?

LS Retail and Revionics are fortunate to have strong technology leaders in Dadi Karason, CTO at LS Retail, and Josh Oettle, VP, Product Management and Engineering at Revionics.

So far, a lot of my conversations with Dadi, Josh and their teams have been about gaining a deeper understanding of their businesses and engineering processes, finding common themes across each of the businesses, and then facilitating best practice and knowledge sharing across our teams.

For example, Aptos has created an Aptos Well Architected Framework (WAF), inspired by the AWS WAF, to give our developers an updated set of guiding principles as it relates to designing and deploying workloads in the cloud. This is something we’ll make available to LS Retail and Revionics, again as a means of knowledge sharing.

While our business units each work with different cloud platforms, there’s still a lot of cross-pollination that can occur. No, we cannot reuse libraries and assets, but ultimately, we’re all focused on developing applications with high availability, and there are a lot of advantages in pooling knowledge across three companies that are leaders in their respective markets.

From an engineering perspective and overall, I’m excited and optimistic about what’s to come for Aptos, LS Retail and Revionics. I’m glad to be here – and grateful to all the colleagues, customers and partners who have leaned in these first few months.

Want to continue the conversation with Tushar? Connect with him on LinkedIn.