Her Story
About Pooja
My career journey has been one of continuous evolution and learning across diverse industries. I started as a software engineer at Tata Consultancy Services in India back in 2008, but within three months I realized that coding just wasn't my cup of tea. I had this natural alignment towards organizing, planning, keeping things on track, and building strategy as opposed to just coding. I discussed with my manager that project management would be a better fit for me based on my skill set and interest level, and that's how I got into project management, starting as a project coordinator. As the years went by, I evolved, I learned, and I grew in my space, going up the ladder. After moving to the United States in 2012, I've worked across many different industries - retail with Oakley and Amazon, insurance with Assurance, fintech with Happy Money, media with iHeartMedia, and now cybersecurity with Foresight. Each experience in a different field has really helped me build a very vast skill set and flexibility. I'm most proud of building PMOs from the ground up, which started when I was working at Amazon where I had a small team of project managers that helped me gain necessary insights into how to become a better leader and what a PMO is all about. When I joined Foresight, I built the PMO from the ground up with a very small team of two or three project managers with no project management practices in place. I put together the whole process, and now my team is at six, excluding myself, so we've doubled in size within 10 months of me joining. We now have very much standardized project management processes that we follow across the board, and that has really helped our team and our business grow.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Pooja
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think my success is very much attributed to the learnings that I've had through all the small or big setbacks that I've had, all the coaching that I had received from all my managers and leaders, and the support that I get from my family, whether it be my husband, my mom, dad, and my kids. That keeps me going every day, the tremendous support that I get from my leadership right now and my family. I always take failure as an opportunity, right? It's not a nice feeling, but again, just take it as an opportunity to learn so that you get better. That's the mindset.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say believe in yourself, trust your gut, and always know it is okay to fail, because unless you fail, you will not learn, and you will not grow. So, consider failure as an opportunity and not a setback.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think the biggest challenge is just keeping up with all the technology advancements. I mean, AI, right? That's the buzzword, and it's growing so fast, so it's become very important, and sometimes it's even hard to keep up with that pace, or what are the new tools out in the market that's gonna help our team get better at what we do. Just finding time to do that research and just being on top of it to make sure we are using the latest tools, and we are not stuck with status quo, or using the older tools which are not very efficient anymore. For me personally, I think one of the challenges is also how do we balance between career and home, right? Being a mom is always hard. It's not a complaint, but it's something that I love solving for.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
In terms of values, it would be integrity, honesty, having that willingness to learn new things, and just always thinking about from the other person's perspective. It's not always from your perspective, but you always have to put yourself in other person's shoes to understand both sides of stories. So, I would definitely say integrity, honesty, empathy - those are the key things that I really focus on.
Keep Exploring
More Influential Women · Texas
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.