What are you looking for in your next role?

In the long term, my goal is to be a product leader who helps bring emerging tech — whether AI, automation, or IoT — into real-world applications that drive economic productivity. I’d love to grow within a team that shares that ambition and operates with high standards of execution. In addition to that, a few non negotiable principles for me which should infacet be a part of the company's DNA as well -

 

• Customer obsession: Extremely clear with user needs and pain points, Frequent user research

• Metrics driven: Ability to fram the right problem statement with clearly defined success metrics

• Bias for action: Able to act fast with limited data, reiterate and keep improving

• Ownership: High degree of ownership while working on any problem statement

• Disagree and commit: It’s healthy to disagree within a team, but once decided need to 100% stick to that direction

• Growth mindset and coaching culture: People should seek feedback, happy to mentor others and stay curious

With 10+ years in corporate world especially in Fintech so far, I've been lucky enough to be exposed to different financial service platforms/technologies and sharpen my skillset working with some of the greatest talents in the industry. Not only was I able to learn a lot and contribute meaningfully, I was also able to grow as a person and sharpen my soft skills, which I believe are an important asset for the success of any company/product.

For my next role:

1.  I would want to be at a place where I can deepen my understanding of the emerging technologies and innovations. We are living in the world of AI/ML and I see it evolving tremendously in the near future to enhance AR/VR as well as real-life experiences. I would want to learn and work with the greatest players in this space.

2. I want to simultaneously convert my acquired knowledge and expertise on product(s) designed for the betterment of the community (either designing from scratch or improvising an existing one) that align's with the company's goals and missions.

2. Throughout this process, I want to continue learning and growing since self-development is a life-long journey. Eventually I want to build products that consider the usage by or betterment of the less-previleged/differently-abled sections of the society, so I would want my next role as one of the stepping stones towards that goal by honing my PM expertise

Hello, I am a coach on the platform, and I love this behavioral question because I often hear from people in 1:1 coaching sessions that these kinds of questions cause the most panic and worry. Ultimately I tell people to think of these questions as "filter out" questions rather than "filter in" questions -- meaning that you should avoid stepping on landmines (listed below), but the content otherwise is usually personal and thus generally acceptable. When I ask questions like this, it's usually as a warm up or cool down question, and I mostly just look out for red flags and then move on to the next question. 

TLDR: An open, vulnerable, thoughtful answer is fine, a deeply thoughtful and stragetic answer can inspire your interviewer and is still fine, and most answers are acceptable as long as you don't bring emotional baggage or step on a landmine.

Landmines (topics / tones to avoid in your response)

• I want a better boss. My current one sucks. (potential red flag: relationships)
• I want a better company. My current one sucks. (potential red flag: outlook)
• I want a better job. My current one sucks. (potential red flag: identity/role fit)

• (self improvement) I want to grow / build new skills 
• (self-improvement / accountability) I want a bigger challenge / more responsibilities
• (strategic) I want exposure to a new domain / to see a new angle to this industry

I'll share how I would have answered this question at each phase of my career (ideally).  These questions are more personal, so there's room for a lot of variability, and others may chime in with something different. 

Early Career

I'm in a learning phase of my career, so in my next role I'm looking for strong leadership and mentorship to guide my learning and accelerate my growth. I'm excited for the opportunity to be on a high performing team so that I can contribute at the top of my capacity, earn feedback and coaching, and learn from others. I'm also personally very interested in the opportunity to improve engineering processes and tools, so having time for work automation and helping on team-level process improvements would be very appealing to me.

Mid Career

I've had exposure to a handful of different technologies, companies, and business models in my career to date. Most of these companies were at the later stage of growth, with me joining long after the business was stable and growing in the range of 5 to 20% YoY growth. What interests me at this time is to be in a role where I can be part of a company that is in the hypergrowth phase, where I can experience and participate in rapidly scaling technologies, systems, and people while the business is growing much faster than I have experienced before. I believe that this will unlock learnings for me that will accelerate my career and equip me, as an engineer, to better understand the business that I'm building within.

Late Career

I've been working in the technology industry for almost 15 years, and I've worked on everything from biotech to software platforms to IOT, and in organizations of all sizes using many different business models. I am looking for the opportunity to bring all of this knowledge and experience to bear in a role where I can leverage these experiences and learnings. I find that I'm particularly motivated when working in a high trust / high performance leadership team where everyone is working at the top of their game and pushing themselves every day. In my next role, I would like to continue to hone my approach to building a product and engineering team that has an outsized impact on the business, and I look forward to minting the next generation of product and engineering leaders along the way.