One Knight in Product cover image

One Knight in Product

From Engineer to Product Leader & Getting Away from the "How" (with Rekha Venkatakrishnan, Senior Manager, Group PM @ Walmart)

May 26, 2021
34:51

An interview with Rekha Venkatakrishnan. Rekha is a Senior Manager in Group Product Management for Walmart Global Tech, supporting Walmart offices around the world in building great product experiences. She's also a passionate advocate for advancing women in data, tech & product and a chapter lead for Women in Product in San Francisco.

We speak about a lot, including:

  • What it's like working in product for a giant like Walmart, in a global, distributed product team
  • Whether an organisation like Walmart can be truly agile or whether it's stuck in the past
  • How a move from Walmart to Oracle went wrong and why she ended up back at Walmart
  • How she started as an engineer in India before starting to query the "What" and the "Why" naturally moved her towards product management
  • Some of the challenges of going from an engineering mindset to product mindset, and getting away from trying to specify the "How"
  • How she prioritised practical, hands on experience and hadn't even heard of places like Product School
  • How her passion for communication & education led her to ironically become a trainer for Product School
  • Her work with Women in Product and the initiatives she's working on to help support women in the product community
  • Why it's important to be able to make mistakes as long as you learn from them

And much more!

Contact Rekha

You can contact Rekha on LinkedIn.

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