Hello, I’m Yania!
Born and raised in Arunachal Pradesh, India, far away from the big cities that I live in now. I love hiking trails! Hiking is my way of refreshing & recharging away from the hustle and bustle of city life.
My motto in life: “Leave things better than you found it”. It’s my guiding principle.
I speak mainly English, Spanish, and Hindi, but my mother tongue is Apatani.
So… what makes me tick?
My Core Values:
Integrity: Trust is the foundation of every relationship. Keeping it real is my mantra.
Solution Oriented: Solution oriented culture, no blame games. Focus on ‘what is the problem’ instead of ‘who caused the problem’.
Growth Oriented: Space to learn and explore. Opportunities to expand knowledge and skills.
Diverse Inclusion: Environment where everyone feels valued and respected, where diversity is not just a number to achieve.
Ethical: Doing the right thing. It’s not just a choice – it’s a responsibility.
These are my core values that are non-negotiable. They guide me in both my personal and professional life. I thrive on solving problems, learning new things, and connecting with people from all walks of life.
A pivotal chapter of my life occurred in Rajasthan, India, where I volunteered for 3 months with an organization called Pravah back in 2017. It was a big leap-of-faith experience for me - my first time going off on my own into something that I had absolutely no idea about. We had an induction training of 1 week and dropped off in a remote village in Rajasthan. We were the pilot batch so there was not much information on the village with the organization. For the first month, every morning I went with my team door-to-door to do a survey of the village until we covered every single house. We interacted with the local community to understand their challenges. We spent a lot of time on the ground brainstorming plans to mobilize people and engage them in finding collaborative solutions.
The experience demanded courage and resilience to reach every single house in the village. This was my first experience where I recognized the ability to navigate uncertainty in myself. My team members spoke either Hindi or English, I was the only bilingual person, while the villagers spoke their local dialect - closer to Hindi. Acting as an interpreter and mediator between local communities and our team, I learned communication is a skill which goes beyond the words we speak. To get our message across I had to speak at the level of my audience. There is an element of empathy and humility required to create a space where a person who has never interacted with anyone outside their small community feels safe to open up and speak. Most importantly, I learned that if you want to touch people’s minds, you have to speak to their hearts.
It heightened my self-awareness, built my confidence, and instilled a profound sense of civic responsibility in me. This one event was the catalyst that catapulted me into exploring myself more and with it the world around me, eventually leading me to where I am today.
My career in a nutshell…
My professional career began in 2018 in Arunachal, where I had the opportunity to help build and scale a food delivery business from the ground up. I started with basic data entry putting restaurant details into the app. Soon after launch, I found myself at the heart of operations, managing customer relations and delivery operations. This experience was my first foray into the business world, teaching me the importance of having a customer-centric approach for building a business.
Fast forward to August 2019, I moved to Barcelona to pursue a Master’s degree. This academic adventure opened up new horizons and prepared me for the next steps in my career. After my graduation, I joined a small yet ambitious startup in Barcelona. Here I got to experience first-hand what transforming a business looks like and learned how companies sometimes have to change themselves in order to meet their customers where they are.
After more than 2 years in the company, I pivoted to change my role and expand my professional horizons. With this pivot, I received the opportunity to dive into a new industry. I got to work with a global team spanning across 4 continents. Time-zone wise it was crazy, I had teams in Australia working 8 hours ahead of me and teams in America working 8 hours behind me. Collaborating with such a team required crystal clear communication to avoid unnecessary follow up meetings. It also made me a true believer in the culture of documentation. Seriously, half of the meetings I had with the teams were because of knowledge gaps or a lack of clarity on understanding the business processes.
It also taught me the value of standardization. When you work with different regions you see a lot of local rules. It makes the work even more complex. Standardization, although feels like swallowing a toad when you are starting, in the long term it makes life easier.
The other big lesson I learned here was the importance of work culture. No matter how much a company pays, how great of benefits they set up, if the culture is draining, people will leave. Monetary benefits don’t keep people for long.
Anyways, currently, I work in the data and AI space. I ended up in product management. Many people ask me how I entered this space of product management. Honestly, it wasn’t in the plan, it kind of just happened. It is an interesting space to be in, you get a good amount of visibility and exposure in this role because you are in the sweet spot between tech and business.
Overall, my career has been a rich tapestry of diverse experiences. I’ve worn many hats and juggled different skills. Each role has taught me something new, and each challenge has helped me grow. I’ve been fortunate to get inside the heart of a business and see how the different cogs and knobs work together to make it run. It’s worth being called an “adventure”.
My attitude towards learning is summed up beautifully by this quote:
“Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere“