Ms. Archana Shukla
Achiever's Success Story
Hard work, perseverance, learning from failures, and being passionate in whatever she does pushed her to achieve new successes
It has been 20 years in the IT industry since Ms. Archana Shukla graduated with a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science in the year 2004, and got placed in a start-up company. Like any other young professional, she had many dreams and enthusiasm to explore the corporate world. An excellent working environment and guidance of the best mentors- were her first growth anchors.
She works as Senior Director in Product Management for business process management and automation cloud services in SAP. In her global role, she is responsible for business architecture for the cloud services, leads strategic customer engagements, drives alignment with product management teams, deeply engages with product strategies, and heads multiple strategic projects at SAP to increase awareness and adoption of our cloud services and solutions across regions. Product management has always attracted her, and it is an absolute pleasure to interact with our customers, share product strategies, features, and roadmap, resolve their queries, and listen to their feedback and suggestions. Before landing the product manager role, she worked as a developer for a very long time in her career, then moved to product owner, program manager, global partner manager, regional head of APJ, and other diverse roles. It is important to keep challenging yourself and shifting gears in your career to keep growing.
She always wanted to give back to society with her experience and learnings, so she started to mentor young engineers, technical leaders, and aspirants from different colleges and companies. It is truly satisfying to interact with people, listen to their stories, and provide guidance that can help them advance in their careers. She always ensures to take out time to connect and collaborate with developers around the world through the SAP developer community, write blogs and articles to share product features, and conduct podcasts to exchange regular product information and customer/partner success stories. Besides, she is also a regular speaker at different user groups, coffee corner sessions, fireside chats, code-jams, hackathons, and many international conferences.
As part NASSCOM Mentorship and Leadership Program, Women in Big Data Asia Region, SAP Women in Technology member, and other such communities, she aims to help women from all job roles to educate them on new technologies. She strongly believes that empowering women can change the way the IT sector works, and more women in leadership roles inspire others to take that extra mile to achieve more and reach their dreams.
As Mahatma Gandhi says – “If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it in the beginning” Hard work, perseverance, learning from failures, and being passionate in whatever she does has helped her achieve new successes. Not only this, traveling across the world, reading all kinds of books, and networking with different people have also taught her many important lessons, both professionally and personally.