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Situation:

I was laid off from my first job just four months after joining due to budget constraints. This was a major setback for me as I had just started my career. Around the same time, my father suffered a heart attack, which required me to stay at home and take care of him while he was on bed rest for several months. The combination of losing my job and dealing with a family emergency left me feeling devastated, and I struggled to apply for new roles.

Action:

Despite these challenges, I remained determined to grow in my career. While caring for my father, I focused on upskilling myself:

• I attended mentor sessions on ADPList to gain industry insights.

• I reached out to experienced designers on LinkedIn for portfolio reviews and feedback.

• I enrolled in courses through Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) to expand my knowledge.

• I continuously improved my portfolio and resume, incorporating the feedback I received.

I also actively networked with professionals, which helped me regain confidence and visibility in the industry.

Result:

My persistence paid off. Where I once struggled to pass resume screenings, I started receiving recruiter calls consistently. In fact, this very interview happened because I proactively connected with a senior designer, shared my portfolio, and received a referral for this role. This experience not only strengthened my portfolio and skills but also taught me the power of perseverance, networking, and continuous learning.

When a task is given, I will ensure the expectations are clear from it and provide clear understanding of the details, requirements that helps to track the progress on regular intervals. Recently I have asked my team member to own the customer's obsession initiative considering customer pain points and how our team can help to mitigate some of the known issues and what kind of action items are needed to address the rest. On weekly basis, I am in touch with him to track the progress and provided my feedback on the changes needed to ensure our outcome is aligned and as expected per the requirements.

When buildling the next generation instance, during the planning phase I budget the amount of servers we will launch the product with. Given each server cost was over 2 million dollar I biased to towards frugality and provided a bare minimum number of server we could launch with. But what I completely missed was during the developement some servers will end up in bad state and the engineering team will short of servers to test the software and firmware getting built which made meeting the project timeline riskly and heavily dependent on delivery schedules of servers and them staying healthy. This quickly became a bottleneck that I realized. I quickly put togther a plan to request adittional server and provide a detailed breakdown on where and how these would be used during and after developement. Synced with the hardware and ODM team and executives to get a approval and ordered the parts to get the servers and racks build at ODM. 

I tend to deal with persuasive conversation in a way that tends to benefit all parties involved. And one effective strategy I have found useful is to rather than straight up say no and get into a confrontation, I tend to understand where the party is coming from and what are the goals the party is trying to achieve and what can be done to get into a win-win situation for both parties. Especially in Amazon this comes into play almost every with the amount of dependencies each team has and so much away team work being done.
One example I can think about was my sister team who manager License Manager was working on a S Team level project where they unearthed a dependency on my team pretty late into the cycle and there was very little time the team could do to do an away team effort and came to me for the work to be done. I first understood the business impct of their project and ceded control in this situation by explaining that I have my core projects coming up but one invent and simplify thing we could is to push back the component’s work to later in the dev cycle and provide my support for their project which they can later come back and finish off for my project. In this bargain I was also able to convince my counterpart to provide me their Sr Engineer to do that work as we were taking a risk to my project by pushing that component out. The outcome of this arrangement was that we were able to deliver their project in time as well as get their best engineer to work on my project which led to a timely and high quality deliverable for my project as well.