Charu Sankarganesh

The best career advice I've ever received is to be a sponge. This was told to me during my second or third internship - the goal you should be getting from the end of the summer is that you should have absorbed as much information or learning as you could have. At first, I thought it was just a great phrase for interns or people early on in their career, but even as I'm maturing and have growth in my career, the one thing that always sticks in my head is be a sponge. Even when you're ramping up to new products or anything like that, you should be in a learning-first mindset and always be open to hear what everyone else says. It's about lifelong learning, always absorbing.

I think the most important thing is to be confident and don't doubt yourself. It's very easy to do that, especially being a minority, being first generation for me, being a woman, and like, my parents didn't do typical jobs, so entering corporate was very hard for me. It was always like, oh, I feel like I don't really know what's going on all the time, I don't know as much as these people here who may have gone to crazy Ivy League colleges. But I always think about it and I'm like, I'm at the same place that all of these other people are, I'm doing the same job as them, so why should I doubt myself? Another phrase that always sticks with me is you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take, so you should always just be open to try and fail, because that's better than not doing anything and failing. You might as well try, and you might as well be confident doing it, because a lot of grace comes with that too. If you're confident, a lot of people respect you, and a lot of my role models that I've had growing up and as I get into the work space have been people who are just very confident and able to talk well about what they're doing.

There are a lot of big opportunities in my field right now. Working with a lot of people, it's always very easy to network within the company, and within the team, it's really great to be a leader and be able to influence people on different decisions that we're taking for the product itself. Community-wise, this space always feels really great for me, and I'm really glad that I picked it. As for challenges, some of the things that are harder are obviously always getting alignment. A lot of things that they say about product management is you should be the shield for the team, so if something's going wrong, people always look towards the PM in cases, so you should always be able to explain yourself and not blame it on other people or anything like that, be able to take ownership. Those are obviously some of the challenges that come with it, but those are fun challenges in a sense.

One of the values that's really important to me, especially in work and in the product management track, is empathy. Customer empathy is a big one for us - you should be able to actually stand in your customer's shoes, solve the problems for them, and be able to actually build a good product out. You're not just building it to push metrics or get a deliverable or something like that. You're actually trying to create a good experience, so empathy is something that's very valuable there. For life, I think one of the biggest values I have is just kindness, approaching everything in a kind way. It literally cannot kill you to be nice rather than have any type of hatred. Especially when dealing with a lot of conflicts, instead of being rude or being very stubborn in a way, kindness is something that I always take with me.