This is a profile image of Gautam Lunawat

Gautam Lunawat

PartnerBay Area

Gautam Lunawat

PartnerBay Area

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

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