The people you actually get
We sell judgment, and judgment is not an institutional property — it belongs to specific people. So this page is about them rather than about the company. The senior people below are the ones who show up to the first conversation and the ones still there in year four.
2006founded, and still independent
3–5 yrsthe typical relationship
Mostlyrepeat or referral work
Twenty clients in twenty years is the number we are proudest of
It reads like a small number until you look at the second one. Almost every client has given us several projects over three to five years, and most of our work arrives through someone who worked with us somewhere else. That is only possible if the work keeps being right.
Why the company exists
Shachindra Agarwal founded SWStrategies in 2006, after watching too many projects fail for reasons that were entirely preventable. The talent was rarely the problem. The problem was that nobody senior owned the whole thing: requirements passed through too many hands, context was lost at every handoff, and the people who could have caught it were not in the room.
So the company was built the other way round. Senior technical leadership stays close to the business and owns the decisions; the engineering team around them is one we have worked with for over a decade; and nothing passes between them without someone senior carrying the context. That is the model, and twenty years later it is still the thing clients tell us is different.
We stayed deliberately small. We have no intention of becoming a hundred — partly because the work we are good at does not get better with more hands, and partly because AI has made a small senior team more capable than a large junior one, not less.
Leadership
The senior people who are accountable for the work.
Founder & CTO
Shachindra Agarwal
Founded the firm in 2006 and runs it, and is also its CTO — which is the whole point: the person you are buying judgment from is the one accountable for it. He has launched platforms across eCommerce, retail, finance and enterprise technology, from startups to very large enterprises, and is usually the one who tells a client the estimate they have been given is wrong, and why.
He personally led the Fortune 5 B2B marketplace, the Evati robo-investing platform and EverTest — three of the projects on this site. He is also co-founder and president of EverTest, the AI test-automation platform SWStrategies built.
Senior Architect
Alka Nand
Came up through Raytheon, Motorola and Tellabs — environments where a slipped date is not a conversation anyone wants to have — and spent years running delivery here before moving into architecture.
That combination is rarer than it sounds: someone who designs the system and has also carried the consequences of a date.
A team that has worked together for years
How a small senior team delivers work this size is the obvious question. This is the answer.
Not assembled engagement by engagement
We work with the same dedicated group of senior engineers we have worked with for more than a decade. They know our architecture standards, our delivery model, and how we make technical decisions — so none of that has to be explained again at the start of every project.
Engineers around leadership, not instead of it
Depending on what a project needs, we add engineers around a small senior leadership team rather than replacing that leadership with headcount. You are not buying capacity with a manager attached. You are buying the people who make the calls, backed by engineers who already know how they work.
On our board
Board
Ijaz Parpia
Joined our board when DecisionGPS and SWStrategies combined, bringing deep retail and analytics experience to a practice that was already heavily weighted toward retail.
You would be talking to the people who do the work.
Not a salesperson, and not an account manager who hands you over afterwards. Bring us the problem and you will get an hour with the people who would actually lead it, at no charge.