Rani Ghandi

I started my career in technology in 2005, and I've been passionate about solving complex problems ever since. I just recently joined FINRA about a month ago as a Director of Product Management, where I lead the Workday HCM and generative AI space. My days are packed with meetings starting at 6 a.m. on East Coast time and running until about 2 p.m., where I work to prioritize pain points from our stakeholders and find solutions from an automated or process perspective. We're heavily focused on reinforcing Workday and AI for people-related processes, especially HR processes where there are massive pain points. I work to understand what those pain points are, scale down the requirements, understand the technology needs, and coordinate with our engineering side on level of effort and timelines to make sure we deliver something of real business value. One of my most notable achievements was at Salesforce, where I served as a senior manager of product management. When COVID hit and we had to evacuate all our buildings, our CEO leveraged my team to build out Work.com and Safety Cloud to help bring back employees safely. We pulled in all the country, state, and local regulations into Salesforce and built out processes using social distancing protocols. We launched this application within 3 months of getting the ask. It was a very rigorous timeline, but my team was all in, and we implemented it successfully. The best thing about this was the connection to building a tool that brings back our employees safely. Realizing that we have an impact when it comes to our employee safety is just a huge win for me. I'm extremely proud that I finally took that stepping stone of getting into a director role, but that's not the end for me. I definitely want to rise higher and make sure I'm networking with the right people too.