Ritika Singh

I attribute my success to my superpowers - stakeholder management, leadership, collaboration, and the ability to see both the bigger picture and finer details. But beyond that, it's really my curiosity mindset that has helped me pivot between different industries and challenge the status quo. When I moved from consumer to business side 18 months ago, I was hired specifically because I didn't have traditional business side experience. They wanted me to bring my consumer experience and challenge how things were done. That curiosity has helped us reshape processes, reduce development cycles by 25%, and bring more collaboration and transparency to the team. Having that questioning mindset, combined with my core superpowers, has been the key to my success in navigating different spaces and making meaningful impact wherever I go.

First and foremost, don't give up. Look at what's hindering you - there can be biases you have for yourself, or biases put on you by your family, friends, or society. You have to always keep questioning them. The first step is always to recognize those biases, and that's very powerful because once you know something is going on, you can actually change it. This is a very network-oriented industry, so reach out to people and ask for help. I was a person who'd never ask for help because I wanted to do it all, but asking for help, delegating stuff, and saying no when you cannot do something is really important. Reach out to people, network, talk to people, be vulnerable, and tell them what your needs are, because unless you don't tell them what you actually need, people will not be able to help you. One quote that always sticks out to me is: you are the best advocate for your own career. You have to pick up in terms of whether you need help and where you want to go. Recognize what is stopping you and work on it. You also need to have a lot of patience as you go through it. It's not something you can do at once. You will feel disheartened, but you have to pick yourself up, have small goals, and work on it every day, little by little, to get to where you want.

I think both the challenge and opportunity right now is AI. It's very challenging to find how AI can fit into product management, and I don't think there is a playbook on it yet. Everybody's experimenting - at Verizon, we have multiple teams trying to do multiple AI initiatives, and we're just trying to find which one sticks. There's this lack of a concerted strategy around it, so that's a challenge. But it's also an opportunity because AI has helped me become a more efficient PM. Some of the mundane things that I used to do, I can just offload to AI. We use Gemini a lot at work, so I can offload a lot of things, and even in personal life. However, using AI a lot, sometimes you have to find a balance - sometimes you don't know if you're spending too much time on AI tools and not getting work done. So it's about trying to find that niche in AI where it's going to actually boost productivity. That's both a challenge and an opportunity in my field at this time.

The values most important to me in both my work and personal life are integrity, accountability, clear division of responsibilities and having clear ownership, clear communication, and the ability to build trust. I think all of these apply equally in both personal and professional life.