Anushka Sancheti

If I had to attribute my success to something, I think it would be two things. It would be for me to be pushing myself to be curious about new things and learning new things along the go, because that is really something that is needed in the IT industry. And second one would be the support of my parents throughout, because if anything goes wrong, or if things are not right, I always know I have somebody clapping for me in the worst situations, and the best ones as well.

For somebody that is going really new into product management, something I would really ask them to work on, rather than signing up for courses or taking degrees, is to try to build that PM muscle memory. Because as a product manager, you need to think with different kinds of hats, where you always need to think about what is my goal at the end of it, and spend more time in actually understanding what the problem is, rather than solutioning it. Because sometimes the problem can be really different than what you thought initially it would be. And then also talking to your end customers, or your end people that you're developing the software for, to actually understand what the pain points are, rather than directly leading them to the solutions and asking, okay, is this going to solve your problem? Because they can ask for a flying pony, but maybe they just need a car that goes from point A to point B.

There are multiple things that come when you work in a fintech organization. Things change by the minute, and leadership also cares a lot about revenue because we're working in finance at the end of it. Working on the emotional aspect of these things means being adaptable and looking at how we can approach problems in different ways, rather than just being the one who keeps complaining about things, because that's not getting the team anywhere. Sometimes even a delayed answer, or not giving enough clarity on time, saying a yes or a no, kind of moves your team in one way or the other, so really being mindful of how we get out of this or trying to work with leadership on how we can solution the change that has caused is really helpful. And revenue is something that leadership and companies really care about, so whenever you're setting your priorities, make sure to have a couple of initiatives that tie into revenue so you can keep securing buy-in for future items. But also balance it with customer defects or things that customers really want that might not be the most revenue generating, but they might be something that generates a lot of customer satisfaction.

I think some values that are really important is to be grateful for everything that I have today, being grateful for any kind of small things, big things, or things that even would happen in the future. And also to always have a mindset of, what did I learn from this situation, rather than being like, this is probably not the right place, or maybe I'm not happy. So coming from the perspective of always trying to find positives, that would be the main ones.