My first leadership rotation in Mumbai
Welcome to the second blog of my Leadership Journey series. In the first article, I wrote about the journey I had in Tel Aviv and this one will share my experiences of my first Technology Leadership Program (TLP) rotation in Mumbai.
The first rotation for the 2017–2018 TLP class started with a week long kickoff series on Leadership in the San Jose headquarters. This also gave us the opportunity to meet all our current fellow cohorts and go through leadership trainings.
Unlike Tel Aviv, my daughter was able to join me in Mumbai for this six month rotation. So instead of being alone, I was now going to be a single parent — in a place that I was not familiar with! Even though Mumbai is in India, they speak a different language and the food is a lot different.
I landed a week before my daughter and my first priority was to get the school and daycare logistics set for my daughter when she arrives. PayPal did a great job of providing recommendations for places for everything that is needed to live in a new city, which was so helpful!
As a parent, this was real important to me because we all know there are acts of terrorism and political unrest and uprisings (remembering the Taj Hotel attack)! It was crucial that my daughter’s school and day care was close to work in case something happened.
At the time, the office in Mumbai was small with around 20 people all focused on PayPal Business Development in India. In the beginning, my project in this rotation was not clearly defined, so I spent the first three weeks getting familiar with the business. I began to understand the different functions related to business like Legal, Compliance, Government Relationships, Sales and Marketing. Since my background was engineering/development, all of these functions were entirely new to me!
Because I learned how important every week was in my TLV rotation, I took advantage of these initial weeks to network with the people in the Mumbai office which helped me understand who they are and what they do.
The relationships I formed in the initial weeks helped me at both the business and personal level. This definitely helped make this rotation easier to handle being away from home and my husband. Just being the same country — even though we were still many hours away by air- made it easier to handle than my first experience in TLV.
My host leader allowed me to choose my own project, so I decided to work on Product Marketing Management activities related to the launch of PayPal for domestic payment transactions in India. This was an exciting opportunity to be on the ground floor of introducing our service into this rapidly emerging market. The area of Product Marketing Management was new to me, I knew I would learn a lot of PayPal products and services in this role.
This was also great educational opportunity to learn about primary and secondary research for competitive analysis and GTM strategy! When you read about this in theory it’s really dry and boring, but when you get to ‘learn by doing’, it becomes really interesting! (Really!)
After doing the rotation for about 6 weeks, I decided I also wanted to learn about Sales in order to understand the process from a merchant’s perspective. How does PayPal fit into their business and what products do we already have, or should have, to complete a sales contract and help merchant’s business grow?
I was assigned to be a Program Manager for a new large merchant which provided me a wealth of knowledge around all the complex steps needed to onboard the customer. I also learned that the business world methodology for achieving the target numbers is different from the metrics used to meet the milestones in engineering that I was familiar with.
On the personal side, I noticed that I was procrastinating giving an important presentation, which really bothered me because I knew it was preventing me from achieving my weekly targets. But on the other hand I realized that the fear of failure or being judged by people that may think I don’t know what I am talking about.
Because I gave myself the permission to take the time to understand why I am feeling this conflict, I was able to take steps to get past it. One of things I did was proactively seeking feedback from key individuals that I would be presenting to in order to get their thoughts on my proposal. This helped so much, because their feedback was positive — which proved that my thoughts of inadequacy were all in my head.
I also learned that I am definitely not alone in this feeling of inadequacy, many studies have labelled this the ‘Impostor Syndrome’. Once I realized this, I felt so liberated! I experienced such exponential growth during the rest of the rotation that not only I felt but also others’ took notice of and appreciated the value I brought to the team.
One other struggle I had was ending up with Typhoid Fever and I was bedridden for a week! This was so ironic because I took so many precautions of being sure I could take care of my daughter no matter what happened. But I never thought what would happen if I am the one who got sick!
For the first two days when I was in bed with high fever, I was so proud of my five year old daughter and the independence she showed in not only taking care of herself but also helping me with limited contact. After two days, my husband was able to fly to Mumbai from Bangalore giving me a huge relief by taking care of my daughter and keep her away from getting infected.
Fast forward to my last few week of the rotation, I learned so much as I contributed to the foundation of the India Domestic Launch GTM strategy and setting up the plan for a key partner integration.
Professional learnings:
- In the Sales environment, you really have to understand the value proposition that PayPal has to offer to meet the customer’s unique needs. It is not a cookie cutter approach.
- The complex nature of Business Development is a lot more intricate than just writing and pushing code!
- Gained experience in making the business case for bringing existing PayPal services to emerging markets. I am becoming a global strategic thinker instead of looking at everything through the lens of the US market.
Personal learnings:
- How to overcome the ‘Impostor Syndrome’ and believe that I have a seat at any table.
- My inner strength is stronger than any struggle, illness or self doubt that life throws at me.
- Developing ‘thick skin’ by learning to appreciate the positive feedback I receive and turning potential criticisms I get into an opportunity to improve.
I hope you enjoyed my first rotation experience in Mumbai! You can read my next blog talking about my San Jose rotation.
