We interviewed Divya Unni, Product Owner at S&P Global on her experience and thoughts on women in tech.
I have been working as a Business Analyst/Product Owner for over 8 years now. As part of my role, I am involved in gathering business requirements from different stakeholders and to convert these requirements to Product Backlog by slicing and dicing the gathered requirements into Epics, New Feature and User stories in Jira platform. I am also involved in writing detailed Acceptance Criteria that are required to be met for the user stories to be marked as complete, prioritizing the user stories, and having regular backlog grooming session with the technical team. I also create a roadmap to make the business users and technical team aware of the future releases. My major task is to act as a bridge between business and technical team as I understand both business and technical language.
I have always loved working with technology from a very young age. I am a self-learner and an explorer which has helped me build my career in technology.
Yes, I have done my bachelor’s in engineering in Information technology
Yes, I have volunteered in number of IT related jobs before choosing my career in IT
Not anymore, there used to be a time initially however I feel the gap is reducing drastically now
Having more technology related subjects during school and university can help to learn tech skills. Also taking technical mini projects online can be of help.
Learning tech skills is an important think to look when trying to get into tech industry. This is not gender specific. With the right attitude any individual, be it a woman or man can get into tech industry
This can be done by encouraging girls from an early age by providing exposure to tech skills. Also, we need to ensure companies have diversity policies and programmes – not just for women, but all aspects of diversity.
An important career advice to young women would be to come out of their comfort zone and not to fear failures. Embrace failure, follow your effort which will in turn lead to success. Live your life, and not someone else’s!