Sonal Pardeshi

I would say that being curious is definitely something that is really important. You have to be treating every day, this is something I learned at Amazon, as your day one, right? Whether it's your day zero or your day 1,000 at the job, at the project, with a team, being curious, being open-minded, treating it with the same level of interest and dedication is what I believe in and has led to my success. I think it's a very valuable concept that keeps you engaged and constantly learning, no matter how long you've been in a role or working on a project.

The best guidance or advice that I've received in my career was when I was thinking about doing something and coloring outside of the lines, moving away from the normal, incremental career path. One of my mentors, she was a VP at Microsoft at the time and also a female leader, basically told me that when you make these unexpected changes in your career, pick something that is going to put you in a challenging position. Pick something that will make you uncomfortable, because that will help your learning trajectory grow manyfold. Don't be afraid, take that leap of faith, because that is really what is going to help drive your career acceleration. In many cases that can help accelerate careers, but if nothing else, the outcome at least is that you feel like you have achieved that zero to one, and it builds your own confidence in how you can take an ambiguous problem in a new space and be able to solve it and lead it.

I think for a lot of women, it's really believing in yourself, even when nobody else does, right? If there's something that you really want, that you would like, you have to be that change driver for yourself. Believe that you can get there, and then work towards it. That's really the first step. You need to have that confidence in yourself and your abilities, and be willing to advocate for yourself and your goals, even when you don't have external validation or support.

The values that are very important to me at work include transparency and clarity. As leaders, we have the onus to really bring clarity to ambiguous things for the team so that we can move fast, not have blockers, and be complete. That streamlines a lot of churn for the team. Another principle I really believe in is customer first. Always have your eye on the customer, especially today with the way GenAI has really spoiled us for choice, because you have any idea and you can prototype it within minutes thanks to Gen AI. There are so many different ideas that are available and accessible, but how do you pick the one that's actually going to be valuable and drive impact for your customers? Keeping that customer top of mind mindset is really a principle that I work and live by, and I also propagate it to my team. The other one is this idea of iterating, being comfortable with failing fast, and learning and creating. If you think about the way AI is changing the world, some plan that you might have made 3 months ago is no longer valid. You have to be in this mindset of continuing to evolve, but then you also need the safety net of your team and your management so that you can experiment and then fail, and then learn from that, and move quickly, and pivot. So that is an operating principle I would say that I live by.