 Thank you for the introduction. This is Sneha and I'm going to be talking today about leading in a world of constant change. Before I start, I would love to quickly introduce myself. And then we can talk about how exactly are we going to lead in this world of constant change. I grew up and studied in India specifically in Bangalore. I grew up in a family of writers, both my parents being noted Canada writers. They've always used creativity to drive focused results. I moved to the United States to pursue my masters in CMU a decade ago. And I've been leading strategy for company like Sears, Walmart and currently at Sephora. In Sephora, I lead all of the product including digital stores, data and marketing technology. I strongly believe that awareness is the first step towards making a change. I'm an introvert by nature and I'm in the journey of figuring out how being an Indian introverted women, I can navigate in this big technology world and hopefully add a little bit of value in the right way. Having faced this myself and being aware of others experiences. I hope to raise consciousness of the basic biases that women face in this environment, any environment, to ensure that we not only overcome the same together but work towards eradicating it. I strongly believe that the pen is mightier than this word and I intend to keep it that way. So probably if I was not in the technology space right now, I would be a writer or a chef, riding myself away in some secluded mountain space in a cabin. That's a quick intro. Now let's jump in to what we're here to talk about. So human beings are very resilient and if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's the fact that we can adapt to any change. But we really didn't need the pandemic to tell us this. For example, like being an introvert, I totally appreciate working from home and I think my pandemic puppy also does too because he loves the fact that I'm here and I'm spoiling him all the time. But apart from just the pandemic, I think resilience is an innate human capacity that can be learned and developed in anybody. So all people have the ability to develop the skills that will put them on the path to resilience. According to research done, resilience is the human capacity to navigate and negotiate culturally meaningful resources to sustain our well-being. So it has to do a lot with person's ability to make plans, follow through with them to problem solve and to manage impulses and feelings. Resilience is more than a skill. It's an adaptation. So we understand also that it's a process, it's a journey that you just don't wake up one day and you're like, okay, I'm resilient now, right? You go through a lot of experiences right from your childhood that continues throughout your lifespan. Our lives are constantly evolving narratives and so is the pathway to resilience and the equally important parallel process of learning through these changes. While I was thinking about the statement of like, hey, how resilient are humans one thing that I was pausing and reflecting is what are the incidents that in my life that I have I can say that have placed me where I am today. I know there are many, many such incidents, but I picked a few to share with you today. I'm sure each of you have your own journey and it might be an interesting exercise to go through this to identify a few of them to just show the process that you have taken while you were on this path of identifying change and adapting to the changes that you went through. One of the earliest memories I have was probably when I was eight years old and my mom decided to go back to college and do her master's in arts. My mom was a housewife and before that and you know, a lot of things like I would say spoiled my sister and me because she made sure that everything was happening at the right time in the right way. So when she had to go away for a couple of months and we had to rely on dad and sister to kind of tend to ourselves it was an interesting journey. I'm sure it was much more interesting for my mom, but at eight years old I know the whole world revolved around myself. So I remember how we struggled a first few days just to cope up with getting ready, cooking breakfast, making sure we were on time and the realization that a lot of effort went in to make things the way they are and it didn't just magically happen but it was mom actually doing all of that in the background. I loved instant noodles when I was a kid and I always thought I could eat three times a day, seven days a week without any issues but soon when you realize that that's the only thing that's available because dad is not so great at cooking and it's cold you soon realize that instant noodles is probably not the best thing that you could have. I missed a lot of delicious food that my mom was kicking and I think the point that I'm trying to make is in spite of all of this we adapted. We found a rhythm, we made sure that ultimately the house didn't burn down. Of course we were glad when mom came back but that was one of my earliest memories of how a change kind of made us realize that this is what it is and you've got to deal with it in whatever shape or form that suits you best. Moving on I think the next memory that I have is of me coming to CMU to do my Masters which was a change at so many levels. I remember the first few nights when I was thinking what the hell have I done and where have I landed. I didn't know anybody here I didn't have family to help me get settled in but I guess what kept me going was the fact that this was part of a bigger picture and something that I chose to pursue. From learning the lifestyle here to not spending too much because you know you're still in the mindset of converting dollars to Indian rupees bearing the cold cold cold pits for winters to looking for a job because not because you just wanted to work because you needed it to stay in the country. Just the pure number of options in the grocery aisles which was pretty overwhelming and also meeting so many people with such diverse cultures. I was so overwhelmed the first few days and I remember calling my mom you know a few more times than I usually do. I don't talk too much too often so when I called her you know at night and then I called her again in the morning. She has this unique way of grounding me by saying you know we just slept in the night there's really nothing to talk about after eight hours. But she also kind of shows me the mirror all the time and saying that you know you're not the first person going through this. You made this choice because this is what you wanted to do. So get to it and get to you know what you wanted to achieve. I have moments when I question the decisions that I make but I there's always a bit of me that looks at the future and shows me that you know this is just a step towards helping me grow. As I mentioned I think there's been many many instances where you know I can go back and reflect on life changing moments for me that either changed the way I think or defined me the way I am today. Being an Indian woman although we are progressing very quickly there is still a social idea of when you need to get married or settle down. Thankfully my parents version of settling down was a little different and maybe it's because they read a lot and they have a pretty open mind. For them it was being content happy financially stable and just continuous growth. Because of this my version of settling down was buying a house and getting a dog. I did have a dog when I was a kid but I never realized that he was so well behaved and so good because all I had was happy memories of playing with him and you know the nice bits of it because my sister used to spend hours and hours behind the scenes training him. So when I got Leo during the pandemic in the first few months were hard because I had never been through that process. The party training the constant biting destroying of the furniture. I was like oh my God like what did I do. I don't think in general I'm a very patient person but during those times I think the level of my patients changed drastically. But I soon realized now when I look at him that it was all worth you know all the struggles that I went through because now I can't live without him. These are a few personal memories that I'm sharing but there are along with many health concerns and other things as well but you know you just don't learn to live with the changes you adapt and you make it part of your life because you're not just surviving you're thriving to make sure that your journey is the best that it can be because we all know life is short. The one thing that my dad constantly reminds me is how these experiences kind of make you stronger. There is a saying in Canada which is probably one of my dad's best quote and I'll try to do a good job of it explaining it in English. It says that you know when you carve a statue or a sculpture from a rock you gotta hit it multiple times before it turns out to be this eventual you know beautiful sculpture. So as long as these hits doesn't break the stone it's worth the number of hits that it gets because what turns out to be from a rock is a beautiful sculpture. So all these events in your life personal professional are just molding us to be you know the beautiful self that we are and we often emerge from difficult times with the fresh perspective of what bad is and a new appreciation for what is good. I remember exams for me when I was a kid was such a big deal and I thought if I can crack these exams there's nothing more difficult that I can you know not go through and now I'm like man I wish the only problem in my life was dealing with exams but that's how perspective changes as you learn and grow. Moving on to my professional journey. Once I started my professional journey with Dell in as a software developer. Then I moved on to CMU and from graduating from there I went to Sears as part of this technology leadership program, which gave me a platform to try out different things before I chose to pursue what made sense for me. I then spent a couple of years in Walmart, helping with the pickup and delivery experiences and building our own crowdsource platform. Currently I'm with Sephora as I mentioned, leading all of their product. So I just wanted to share again a couple of experiences from my personal professional journey that have kind of again help me define who I am and how I adapt to change. I think the earliest bit of it is my switch from being a developer to a product manager. I was a developer back in Dell and I soon realized that I wasn't just wired the way that you need of how a developer needs to be and it wasn't a match of match for me, but I plowed on you know being me I can't let go I have to do my best. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to do it. In Sears again when I started I worked on Hadoop content moderation, many, many cool things. But again I was like, this isn't what I want to do. So when I got an opportunity to switch to product management, I jumped on the chance, although I truly didn't realize or know what product management was all about. And even today I think it's one space where it really depends on how an organization defines it and having worked with multiple organizations. The underlying principles still remain the same which is the fact that we are the voice of the customers. And our single most important goal is to identify ways of how we can make it simpler and easier for customers to complete their goal, whatever it may be, it could be making a purchase, you know, writing a review or outside of retail just completing a job. You try to learn how the ecosystem is set and find ways either to make progress by adapting to it to what exists or bringing about changes and improvements that is well acknowledged by the people around you. Currently, leading a large org today I don't think I would be able to do a good job if I didn't have the learnings that I had in the past couple of years and getting one thing right which is basically that there is no right or wrong way of problem solving. There's only creative ways to make progress and being aware of progress as a whole is itself a major success. I think the next thing that kind of stood out to me was my experience in the various domains that I had to that I chose to work with during my journey so far. In Dell it's all it was all about fraud detection. There are a lot of smart people out there trying to hack the system in a lot of creative ways and our job was to make sure we stop that. In Sears it had to do a lot with integrated retail which was buy online pickup in store merchandise pickup in vehicle pickup returns and exchanges where you buy online you park and we get your product to you in five minutes. Walmart, a lot of pickup and delivery experience as well but I had the unique opportunity of operating like a startup within a Walmart company like Walmart where we built our in-house crowdsourcing platform. This was kind of unique because you're moving in the same fast-paced environment and with the do or die attitude like a startup but you have the backing of a large company like Walmart so it was kind of like best of both worlds for me and I learned immensely from that experience. In Sephora I started with digital which is basically your customer experiences on the app, websites, partnerships with calls and other things that we're doing along with payments and loyalty and soon I took on data and marketing tech as well. Just going through these various domains has given me a unique sense of problem solving to ambiguous problems and I'm still learning how to get better at it and I'm formulating my own personalized methodology of how I approach problems. I guess in a way of how we look at the world evolving to a hyper personalized experience for customers in a similar way you can think about your journey and how it's going through a personalization journey of its own because you are being more prudent and aware of yourself and your learnings and your kind of catering your philosophy and strategy that works best for you and only you. The other big thing that I think is a skill or is something that stood out to me was people management and it's truly one skill that we need to approach with the mindset that you learn and unlearn every single day. And my approach to this has been learning from others people's mistakes as much as you can. I think people's career and growth is too important for you to make your own mistakes so you never realize all the things that you crib about you know that used to complain about your manager without knowing the full picture is something that you may fall prey to yourself right so just always pausing and thinking that hey did it upset me is this something that if I was in you know that shoes wouldn't make me happy if not then why would somebody else be happy. But at the same time again it's not truly defined by your happiness you still need to understand what would make that individual happy but just always putting yourself in someone's shoes helps. At the same time building a team for individual growth, not just tied to a company right because at the end of the day we all want to grow as people we all want to grow as product managers irrespective of the fact that I'm working with Sephora or Walmart or Sears. I just want to be a good product manager is irrespective of where I am so putting that lens on that. You are building a team for individual growth is definitely something that would help you build a strong product org in general. I think the constant team that you're seeing from the past couple of examples and I can go on and on with many more, although cliche but true is the fact that you know the only thing constant is change. But one thing that we don't do is just be aware of the changes that we've gone through and how far we've come. So the biggest takeaway for me is the fact that I pause and reflect on how I handle changes and seeing if I can do better. In the way that I had done it in the past not regretting and beating myself up because I do that I used to do that a lot now I'm kind of working on that myself. I'm a very emotional person and I know that's my strength because that makes me passionate more empathetic towards people and more aware of the changes that happen. Not just to me but to the environment around me and I make sure that I have a sense of how it impacts others and I leverage my strength and my areas of opportunities to create a better environment for everyone around me including myself. And changes need not be like the big in your face kind of changes I know we all talk about the pandemic. But as you saw through the couple of examples that I spoke we've always been evolving to changes as humans and it could be small or it could be big ones right for example my dog is super sensitive to anything like he sniffs the wrong way and you know he's upset. So I had to go to the ER multiple times I personally haven't been to the ER myself touchboard but I've just gone through that and now I've learned from it and you know just how to manage that whole scenario of taking care of him and making sure he's okay. So, irrespective of the big or the small changes just be cognizant of you know that you're constantly evolving as a person. Now that we spoke about you know what are the changes how do you know that you you've understood what these changes are what are some of the things that has worked for me to make sure that I'm consistently making progress as I navigate through this right the first and the foremost thing is just being customer obsessed. I think this is part of our DNA as as a product manager, how do you make sure you always put that lens because it helps clarifying a lot of the gray areas to like black and white so that you can always think and do the right thing that makes sense for what your customers want. So this is probably something that is applicable in any scenario and just a lens that you constantly need to put on to navigate any change. The next thing is understanding and harnessing the superpowers of your team. I think while we build a team, we all understand a common goal right like we spend time evaluating and assessing what success looks like, making sure we get alignment and that could vary based on who you are. For example, some people need numbers to prove success, some people need a success story. Some people are okay with unknown factors as long as they get leadership alignment so identifying what gets each individual on board and ensuring you provide them what they need to get them vested is the first step. The second thing is spending time to understand each other's nuances right we all have our individual personalities that makes us us. We all start the day hoping to make progress with no intention of you know, making anybody's lives hard so when you're spending time with all of these people you need to understand how they're wired and how they operate to understand to avoid a lot of unnecessary conflicts. This becomes harder as your team grows bigger but at times like this, what has helped me is just observe people for a few days, how do they work, how do they form opinion, how do they adapt to new dynamics and constantly make myself aware of how people operate so that I can create an environment that is beneficial for most if not all. And last but not least like celebrate progress and not just success. I don't think I'm doing a very good job at this but I'm constantly learning because we always look at it's a launch or a product release or an expansion but we forget that there is progress being made every day. And there's a lot of things even realizing that not doing certain things is good is progress so you I'm not saying like figure out the silver lining for every cloud but make sure you're able to identify the small steps to that brings people together. And it's okay for you to take a backseat sometimes if at the end of the day the ship is headed in the right direction and you know you don't have to be leading the ship at all times. This is a little bit of a controversial one but I think what has helped me is you know, I know we always say be positive be optimistic but it's okay to sometimes take off the rose colored glasses and just anticipate the risk and the change so that you're better prepared and you're not caught off guard. Of course there will be scenarios where you will be thrown things that you didn't expect but just going through this experience makes you better prepared and ready for whatever is you know thrown at you. The next thing is evolving your leadership style I particularly say evolve and not define because you consistently learn from your experiences and you change your leadership style as you grow. So when people ask me hey what is your leadership style it's kind of hard for me to answer that because it's not set in stone in that day or that time right it constantly evolves on what I learned what I changed how the environment is changing. But as you go through your personalization journey figure out what works for you and what works best for the others around you and make sure that it's not a stagnant process but a constantly evolving process where you learn to grow a lot more. Last but not the least think big I know if I can have a penny for everything every time I've heard this you know I would have many many many pennies but then in this context what I mean is let go of the smaller hiccups or focus on the smaller goal while you're looking at what does this all mean in the larger sense right in the grander scheme of things what you may have felt is a minor issue or a major issue is probably very trivial. My mentor always used to tell me you know is there some is this something that's going to keep you up at night three days from now three months from now five years from now. And just putting that lens in mind kind of helps me put that into perspective of how much investment and time I need to spend in some of these changes and you know it's okay to like let go of the smaller things in view for the large goal. So if you think small, you know your world will be small but if you think big, your world will be big. Learn from the changes, try not to fall into the same hole twice. But hey, if you do fall to the same hole twice you've got an out of it before so you know how to get off it, get out of it so do it faster and better. And at the same time, just constantly learn and continue to evolve on a day to day basis. That's what I had for you guys today. I loved sharing a few tidbits of how my journey has been. Thank you for having me here. And now we'll move to Q&A. Thank you.