Tina Bai

I think it's two things. One is that innate curiosity and that drive to continue to learn and continue to grow, instead of being boxed in by the scope of your title or your role. You can go outside of your formal role and scope to grow yourself - there's extracurriculars you can do, there's all these master classes you can take. The world is your oyster now. The secondary thing in terms of success factor was definitely tenacity. You should never stop learning or never cease to be curious, but there's multiple times you are going to get knocked down through your career progression. It is going to happen, and it could be yourself knocking yourself down in terms of imposter syndrome, it could be external factors. Regardless of where it comes from, the ability to take that as a lesson, bag it, you don't have to reflect on it immediately, but the ability to get up and get going is really one of the biggest factors of my success.

The best career advice I got was pretty early in my career, actually, probably the first year of working. I remember we were trying to meet a client deadline, and it was getting to 11pm. My boss looked at me and he literally said, just remember, very few things can't wait until the next day. Unless you're actively operating in an OR, very few things can't wait till the next day. That's one of the best career advices I've ever got. To translate it into Gen Z parlance, it's really not that deep. Things can wait. It'll be okay. It's better to do it right than do it fast.

I think it's a really tough time to enter any industry. It's definitely tough to enter industries like CPG or anything that's direct-to-consumer, consumer-facing, because the cyclical nature of it is so short. Attention span is shorter than ever. People expect, consumers expect more iterations than ever. But at the same time, that's a very exciting singularity point to be at. The advice I would give to young women who are thinking about entering the CPG field, or honestly any field, is lead with curiosity. There's always something to learn in any situation, and there's always someone to learn from, and that someone can be older than you, it can be younger than you, regardless. Just leave your mind open.

I would say the biggest challenge is the biggest opportunity - the rise of agentic AI. No one buys brand anymore in terms of product, they buy brand in terms of how does this make me feel and do I resonate and connect with the overall positioning of the brand. So figuring out how to organically market in a way that is not intrusive or AI slop, but still delivering value to the end consumer, and embedding ourselves in habits of theirs as more and more people integrate AI into household management - I think that's super exciting. Overall, AI is helping. When people view it as a hindrance, they don't truly understand or trust AI. You have to endow yourself with knowledge, you have to be open and curious and willing to learn about AI and know how to leverage and use it, or else you are going to use it as a hindrance. When the dot-com bubble first started back in the early 90s, people viewed that as a hindrance, and look where we are now.

Similar to my success factors, curiosity and tenacity are important, but what goes hand-in-hand with that is work-life balance. Everyone talks about work-life balance. I think that's intrinsically important. If you work for a large corporation, a startup, whatever, it can fulfill a big sense of purpose in who you are, but it shouldn't be the end-all, be-all of who you are. We are multifaceted. Every human is multifaceted, and that's the beauty and the pain of being human. One of the major factors for me is not losing sight of that, and not thinking my identity is my role and my work, and that's the end-all, be-all.