Her Story
About Heena
I'm a product lead at Artisan AI, a San Francisco-based sales AI startup, where I've been in this role for just under a year after working in the field for about 6 years total. My path to AI began during my MBA at Wharton when I looked around and realized AI was really changing the world. Having previously run a healthcare company back in India, I could clearly see the impact this technology would have on healthcare delivery and so many other industries. I joined Artisan as an intern during my second year at Wharton and worked there throughout that year, deeply motivated by the potential of AI to change workflows across multiple industries. In my current role, I work very cross-functionally with engineering, design, sales, and customer success teams. A typical day involves researching and building new features by speaking with customers and potential customers to understand what they want, crystallizing that into actual specs and requirements that create products people want to use, working closely with design to bring concepts to life, collaborating with engineering to find edge cases and build the workflow, and then supporting sales calls once products are live. The biggest challenge in my field is that AI is a non-deterministic technology - unlike other technologies where one plus one equals two, LLMs are unpredictable in their outputs. Designing features that get the best out of LLMs while serving customers well is extremely challenging because it's such new technology, with new models dropping every couple of weeks, but it's also very rewarding.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Heena
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say that, one, of course, family support. I have an incredibly supportive family. My parents are extremely, extremely supportive, and have always encouraged me to pursue the sciences. But I also think that I've been very lucky in my professional journey to be surrounded by just incredible people who are motivating, supportive, friends, and managers alike. So yeah, I would really say family and the good graces of everyone around me that has been so supportive.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I interned at Samsung over the summer before last, and I had a wonderful manager there who always said to me that as a person who's an operator, there should always be a bias for action, so the output should never be decks. It should never be presentations and ideas and strategies of where to go, but it should be something that's actually actionable, that you have done on ground, and that's something you can hang your hat on. That was just very motivating to hear at that point, and it's really what I think makes a good operator, so I think that's some of the best advice.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would really say, when you start out, the best thing to do is just put yourself in places and opportunities where you're learning new things, even if it makes you deeply uncomfortable or makes you feel out of place, and it gives you imposter syndrome, because I think anyone that wants to build something and learn new things has to deal with those things, has to deal with being not definitely not the smartest person in the room, and be comfortable with that, and then slowly gain your way to becoming one of the smarter people in the room through experience. And I just think that discomfort brings a lot of learning, and I think that's really the best way to advance your skills and your abilities.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge in my field is that AI is a non-deterministic technology, which means that obviously, unlike other technologies, it's not one plus one equals two. LLMs in general are non-deterministic, so you don't know what the outputs are going to look like. So I would say the challenge is, when you have a clear output you want to achieve, and you want the LLM to make the best possible output, it's really about designing a feature that gets the best out of that LLM and the best service to your customers, and that's extremely challenging, because it's such a new technology. We're all learning as we go. There's new models dropping every couple of weeks, so just sifting through all that information, seeing what works best for our customers, for our use case, and just keeping up with what's happening in this space, I would say that's very challenging, but also very rewarding.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think hard work is probably, and professionally, probably one of the most important values that I feel professionally. In my personal life, of course, just love and sincerity and gratitude towards everyone, my parents and my husband, that have helped me come to where I am. So yeah, I would say in professional life, just hard work and intellectual curiosity, and my personal life love and gratitude.
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