“You’re never going to know unless you actually try”

Throughout your career progression, as you kept moving up, were there moments of doubt? Were there moments of uncertainty? And how did you deal with that? Can you give us a specific example?

So a little bit about my career progression. I started out at Juniper as an individual contributor, as a very junior engineer, in fact, the most junior engineer. From there, I rose through various different ranks of engineering responsibilities. At some point in my career, I took the hard pivot from engineering into more of the business side of things, into product management, and there you get an opportunity to define strategy, to find new products, talk to customers, and things like that.
I can assure you that I’ve never felt 100% ready for whatever that next career step was. There was always elements of fear and doubt. And honestly, if anybody says they’ve never experienced fear and doubt, I think they’re either like, not very self-aware or overly confident. And that’s not me. But the important thing is that you don’t let that stop you, you don’t let that stop you from taking that next challenge, from learning new skills, from testing your ability to succeed in new levels of responsibility, in new levels of complexity. And how you deal with it is just don’t let yourself take no for an answer. I’m not saying that it’s easy. Even in the face of the little voices in the back of your head, you have to say to yourself, “Look, you’re never going to know unless you actually try.” And the worst thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to build experience in the process.
In terms of a specific example, I think it’s that pivot that I took in my career, from engineering into product management, that in many ways was a step forward in terms of new things to learn, but a big step back in terms of the scope of my responsibility. So it was a bit of a career risk that I took in order to branch out and to broaden my skill set. And like I said, I had lots of doubts, am I going to be good at it? Am I going to enjoy it? But ultimately, I convinced myself that it was the right thing to do to take that risk and fortunately, it really paid off.