Her Story
About Harini
Harini Suresh is a Senior Product Manager at Amazon, where she has served for the past year and a half. With five years in the tech industry, she manages pre-hire hiring assessments, constructing product roadmaps tailored to Amazon's diverse needs while ensuring cost savings and seamless operations for hundreds of thousands of candidates. Her career path began in engineering, followed by a Teach for India fellowship, a Master's in public policy from Germany, work as a political consultant engaging over 61 million young voters across 175 constituencies in India, and a Master's in business administration in the United States before joining Amazon. Outside her corporate role, Harini founded the nonprofit Save Our Future in India, which earned the Commitment Award, a 1,500 euro grant, and develops lesson plans to help teachers address child sexual abuse awareness in urban communities. She is also learning Japanese through anime and beginning to study Chinese.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Harini
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I feel like a lot of us tend to hesitate to go for roles, just because you think you're not qualified for it. I feel like you need to have the confidence of someone who believes that everything revolves around them, and just go for it. And trust. If you fail, like, what's the worst possible thing that could happen, right? They just send you, like, a rejection email that you're not qualified for it. Like, when I was an engineer, when I had to go for a master's in public policy, it was a social scientist field, I knew next to nothing about it. I still tried, right? Like, you try, and you apply, and you never know what transferable skills you have that'll help you succeed. So I feel like if you want to learn something, don't let you be the person who stops you. So, just go and try.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Everybody is still standing away from AI. I feel like, as a product manager, you are your domain's trying to extremely diversify. Right now, there are people who just still ship projects products with, like, a traditional BRD in mind, just doing traditional customer interviews and going forward, you would have to, like, really fastly acolytimize yourself to how AI is reshaping the industry to stay relevant. and upskill yourself, so you do not end up being a blocker, but more like you're using AI as something that supplements you, so nobody can replace you with devices in the long run.
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