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Gautam Lunawat

PartnerSão Francisco

Gautam Lunawat

PartnerSão Francisco

Deploys digital innovation to drive top-line growth and coleads the consumer digital work in North America

For Gautam, technology is much, much more than a back-office investment. When done right, digital innovations boost top-line growth, improve customer experience, and drive employee productivity. Working in partnership with executives, Gautam helps consumer-focused organizations thrive in the competitive retail environment. Equally comfortable in the high-tech sector, he helps tech-focused companies find an edge with their customers.

Gautam coleads our consumer digital work in North America, drawing on more than 15 years of hands-on technology experience. In his work with leading retailers, he takes a big-picture view, setting digital strategy and designing end-to-end technology-enabled transformations. He also takes a targeted view, boosting consumer-focused digital product development and putting in place advanced analytics approaches.

Recently, Gautam led an end-to-end technology transformation for a global retailer. To boost the impact, he helped design a future-proof stack and an operating model to enable delivery. In another example, he guided a corporate turnaround for a leading global IT services firm. The effort proceeded on multiple fronts, setting a growth strategy for next generation services, such as cloud computing, big data, and cybersecurity, and pursing a sales-force transformation. Whenever possible, Gautam helps executives build their own capability for continuing the technology innovation journey.

As a technologist, Gautam gained hands-on experience through his pre-McKinsey career as a product leader building cloud-computing and storage platforms, a cofounder at a mobile-health start-up, and a software engineer at a multinational information-technology company.

As one of our leading thinkers on technology-enabled innovation, Gautam recently coled a masterclass for more than 40 CXOs on innovation at scale at a Fortune Brainstorm event in Chicago. He volunteers with The Nature Conservancy on their technology driven conservation initiatives, and also coaches.

Published Work

The big product and platform shift: Five actions to get the transformation right,” McKinsey & Company, June 2023

Products and platforms Is your technology operating model ready,” McKinsey & Company, February 2020

The end of IT in retail?,” McKinsey & Company, February 2020

The cloud as catalyst for retail,” McKinsey & Company, December 2018

Why Legacy Companies Must Reinvent—or Die,” Fortune, September 2018

How analytics and digital will drive next-generation retail merchandising,” McKinsey & Company, August 2018

Toward an integrated technology operating model,” McKinsey & Company, October 2017

Past Experience

Nutanix
Senior product manager

Mobile4Education
Cofounder and chief product officer

IBM
Software engineer

Education

Kellogg School of Management
MBA

R V College of Engineering
BEng

Activities & Interests

Nature and wildlife photography