TANUJA BEGARI

I'm a Product Owner at Cognizant, working with Cigna as my end client, where I've been for the past 17 months. In this role, I serve as a bridge between our tech teams, the end users who are nurses using our product, the business stakeholders, and operations. I work day-to-day helping people in healthcare, making their lives better by understanding what they need and translating that into solutions. I lead two engineering teams with both onshore and offshore resources, building reliable solutions and articulating product vision every single day. I've always been interested in leadership roles, and this position has given me a great opportunity to explore and really feel confident in what I'm good at. My biggest achievement so far has been launching the Drug Allergy Module, a unified system that aligns with FDP standards. This was a project they wanted to do for 10 years but it was never prioritized or completed. With the help of my entire team, I made it happen in 17 months, and it's now in production with over 600 users who are still piloting the product. I got a lot of applause for that accomplishment. Currently, I'm working on transitioning a legacy system to a new product, and this system is exactly as old as me, which is always my opening line in introductions. The beginning of my career was exciting and fascinating because I was the youngest in a management role, working with team leads who had 16 years of experience in the industry while I was fresh with only five years of experience in a leadership position. It was a rollercoaster with a learning curve every day, but I'm grateful for all my advisors who trusted in me and gave me the space to fail and learn from my mistakes.