Deepika Murthy is Manager of Pricing and Platform at GoJek. Throughout her career she has been fortunate enough to be supported and encouraged by her bosses, and attributes a key part of her success to preparing for both the current job and future role.
Deepika discovered her talent for maths at school which biased her choice of engineering versus medicine at university. Remarkably she knew that the natural fit for her career choice would be engineering, thus defining her career. She joined a start-up called Ittiam, a company formed by ex-leads of Texas Instruments, and then another start-up Cinemacraft, when she moved to Singapore.
Her next move was somewhat quicker, when Cinemacraft moved to Tokyo she had to find another job quickly in order to keep her visa. She sent a blind email to the CTO and recruiter at Viki stating her skills would benefit them enormously and within an hour she had received a response. During the interview Deepika was questioned whether she could solve their specific challenges “Yes. But you have to hire me first” was her response.
While at Viki she developed both her leadership and people management skills which led to working closely with the HR team to ensure a more equal approach to the workforce, particularly around maternity leave and return to work.
At the same time Deepika also became the Chapter Lead for Women in Product, a global organisation designed to help women navigate their careers and prepare for starting new roles. Its collegiate set-up means women share experiences and help each other, whether that’s practising an interview, dealing with specific work issues, or considering scenarios. Deepika finds helping younger women consider what they want out of their career to be hugely rewarding and has been featured twice within the Women in Product Top 20 awards by Product Management Festival.
At her next role with Gojek Deepika became actively involved in the mentoring programme, and found this to be a very valuable initiative, particularly when facing challenges during the pandemic of managing a new team and understanding new processes remotely.
Deepika has some sound advice: “Based on what I see at work and within the Women in Product Chapter, I find that before women will consider their next career move, they try to fully prepare and develop all the necessary skill sets and experience, whereas men will go for the job and then learn in the role. It would be good to see more women having the confidence to apply for roles or ask for help in developing their careers. Remember my journey before joining Viki and believe in yourself. There really is nothing stopping you – so my advice: go for that dream role and ask for responsibility!”
Read Deepika’s full interview here
