Nidhi Shah

I attribute my success to a very supportive family. Throughout my career, whether when I was starting with my parents and somewhere along the way with my husband and kids, I was able to do what I did because I know that they were there standing by me all the time. I also have deep faith in the universe - I think things actually turn out correctly and fairly, and whatever happens, happens for the right reasons. So I have never dwelled over things or asked 'why did this happen to me?' That 'why me' question never pulled me down.

The most impactful life advice I received is to learn to compartmentalize. There are so many things on the plate, and you have to make the right decisions for all of them. You cannot carry over what you are thinking for one piece of it into the other. If you're moving from operations to the product, be fully present in the product. If you're moving to your team, be fully present for your team. And the same applies when you are out of work - be fully present for your family. That, to me, was like wow, that makes real sense. I think that has really helped me to stay focused and to deliver without getting burnt out.

The advice I would give to my younger self would be that there is a lot of things to learn, and never say no to learning. New doors always open up when you learn something new. Be very, very eager to learn, and yes, things might get harder because you have to spend more time in learning stuff, but that's okay. Once you learn it, I think the life then on the other side of the hill becomes easier. So be really open to learning, and learn as much as you can.

The opportunities are essentially with AI - the opportunity of reducing your workload is tremendously there. What I could do, say for example, in spending 2 days worth of time, I can get it done in 30 minutes. That can truly optimize things. So that opportunity is there for everyone right now. The challenges I see are that because of that, there is also a lot of noise. To filter through that noise, or to remove the fluff from the noise, is hard. It is not easy to get the real signal in the market for the business, as opposed to what it was like some time ago.

The values which define my personal life are the values which define my professional life as well. I don't think that there are two different value systems that I hold for both of them. For me, it is primarily to be honest. That helps in two ways - you build the trust with the team around you, and there is a benefit which comes out of it called the speed of trust. When people around you trust you, you don't have to spend too much time convincing them why something needs to happen. Once you build that trust, there is that speed of trust which helps you execute faster, though it takes time to build that trust. That trust is built by real, honest communication, and sometimes it is communicating the hardest things, but communicating them with complete honesty. One of the values which I hold very dear is honest communication, and communicate often, because honest communication but not often enough is not good enough.