My story.

As a sensitive, artistic recent grad, I found myself as a fish out of water at my first corporate job at a startup in the heart of Silicon Valley. I had a generic title of Product & Marketing Associate, essentially doing whatever task I was assigned. One of these tasks included coordinating a marketing event for over 300 people in India remotely (way before the normalcy of remote work post pandemic).

While I excelled in this role, demonstrating myself as a resourceful, natural problem solver, I didn’t thrive. This job intimately introduced me to depression and anxiety. Lacking internal empowerment to say no to unreasonable job expectations, I consistently worked late into the night. I often cried in the office’s one stall bathroom.

I didn’t know it at the time, but a few years later I officially launched my product career via an entry level role at Razorfish, a digital experience agency in San Francisco. Working with diverse, distributed teams and clients such as PG&E, Kia and Visa, through hands-on experience, great mentors and a baptism by fire, I grew in my competencies. Skills such as strategic prioritization within team, time and operational constraints, precise business and user problem definition and cross-functional product operations. I cultivated my craft in delivering products.

While I cultivated a reputation as industrious with a high caliber of work, just as it was with my first job, my health suffered due to unrealistic expectations from company leadership and sustained periods of working over 15 hours a day. My career continued on this trajectory of excellence at the expense of my well-being until I made a significant decision to change.