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Suman Thareja

PartnerNew Jersey

Helps established organizations build and scale new businesses through talent-management strategy and capability building to accelerate innovation, and leads digital and agile transformations with a focus on building digital solutions through agile ways of working

Suman is a partner in Leap by McKinsey, helping established organizations build and scale new businesses. She is also a leader of McKinsey’s agile work, driving talent management and cross-industry digital transformations. Suman puts the right people at the heart of new business builds to accelerate change and establish thriving, world-class digital teams. She brings to her work two decades of experience building high-performing teams and shifting organizations to an agile operating model.

Suman has led teams for large enterprises, working with leaders to develop their people strategy, guiding at-scale transformations, and leading end-to-end digitization initiatives. She has deep expertise with holistic digital talent strategy from hire to retire including selection, recruiting, hiring, and retention of digital talent.

Examples of Suman’s recent work include the following:

  • building and deploying talent processes from the ground up for a large human-capital management company, including scaling a program to more than 650 employees, from 30 employees, with world-class digital talent
  • building employee value propositions, socializing them in the market to drive brand recognition for digital talent, and building world-class teams from scratch, for a sports entertainment organization
  • leading implementation of an agile operating model for a large insurance client, improving collaboration between business and IT, overall time to market, and customer satisfaction at record pace
  • implementing a capability program to transform more than 50 business and IT members to become skilled practitioners for standalone enablement, increasing productivity by 120 percent for a leading hotel company

In addition to her client work, Suman is a thought leader on women in digital. She is passionate about growing new talent, and speaks on the subject at events such as Women Who Code in New York City, the Digital Women conference in Bogota, Colombia, and Women in Tech event by McKinsey Digital in New York, speaking to women leaders from across industries.

Published work

The gen AI skills revolution: Rethinking your talent strategy,” McKinsey & Company, August 2024

Rewired to use AI’s superpower,” McKinsey & Company, June 2023

Digital transformations: The five talent factors that matter most,” McKinsey & Company, January 2023

Mining for tech-talent gold: Seven ways to find and keep diverse talent,” McKinsey & Company, September 2022

Five ways that life science companies can build tech talent,” McKinsey & Company, August 2022

Tech talent tectonics: Ten new realities for finding, keeping, and developing talent,” McKinsey & Company, April 2022

Six practical actions for building the cloud talent you need,” McKinsey & Company, January 2022

Revisiting agile teams after an abrupt shift to remote,” McKinsey & Company, April 2020

Busting a digital myth: The naturally gifted product owner,” McKinsey & Company, June 2018 

Education

University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business
BS, information systems