What’s your current role at Tesco?

I am currently a Product Manager at Tesco, managing multiple products and internal applications that aim to reduce food waste and improve sustainability across all Tesco stores.

Can you tell us a bit about your education and career background?

I have a bachelor’s degree in business administration. In order to make a smoother and easier transition into the tech sector, I completed the Product Management course at BrainStation in 2016.

Since then, I have worked in a number of companies and startups at different stages, developing different skill sets required for a Product Manager, before I landed a role in Tesco Technology, 2 years ago.

What made you want to become a Product Manager?

A few years back, I found myself working at a Startup. There was so much happening in my day-to-day that by the time I made it to bed my brain could not process any more thinking. During that time, I learned about product management. Soon enough I started to obsess about it. I took product management courses. I would attend monthly PM meetups. I found myself consumed by and surrounded with anything product related and held onto one dream — becoming a Product Manager!

With learning how to become a Product Manager I learned how to be the Product Manager of my own life - not as easy as it may sound! I began to plan my life as a roadmap. With this new outlook, suddenly everything became an opportunity for me to work on improving the quality of my own well-being.

I became the dot-collector and the dot-connector: I would spend a good amount of my time not only collecting information from different sides of the product (Business, Marketing, User and Engineering) but also connecting these data dots. There are not too many roles that will allow you to be in such a central position, where you have access to everything and work with everyone. This allowed me to have a more holistic and lateral outlook of my own life and learn how to make the best out of what was given to me so that I can get the results I was aiming to achieve.

What’s keeping you in Tesco Technology?

Good question, and the truth is, as I try to wrap my head around writing my very first blog for Tesco Technology, I wonder if it should reflect my personal or professional life.

But, I crossed the lines between personal and professional a long time ago. I realised that they are interconnected.

In a perfect world, our brains would have a “microservices” architecture where we could store different parts of our lives in a separate box, independent from one another, to serve our ultimate goals. Unfortunately this is not the case …well at least not with my brain!  This is what is really great about working in Tesco Technology, it’s different here.  I can have conversations with my line manager about my career and my plans to hopefully start a family one day in the future.  It’s really refreshing to know that my career will not be hindered if I start a family – these conversations are completely welcome and women are whole – heartedly supported here, as they should be.

I will always advocate for Tesco, because being an outsider I might never had considered Tesco as a place to grow in my tech career. The tech innovation is cutting-edge, the business values resonate with me and I am supported as a tech professional and as a woman.