“I spend a big chunk of my time talking with current and future customers and our account teams, working with my team of product managers — an amazing set of folks who are passionate about the products they lead — engineering, and other teams in Cloud, and meeting our execs.”
If that wasn’t enough, she still tries to squeeze in 30-60 mins to catch up on industry and technology-related news, blogs, videos and new launches from other companies.
Outside of work, Joshi started a grassroots initiative called Aurora, to create a network for senior women in Google Cloud that will “provide all of us a community to tap into for support, career advice and growth,” she explains. In addition, Joshi is a member of Google Cloud’s core infrastructure diversity council, which as she puts it “works on driving inclusion and equity, ensuring every person feels welcomed, respected, supported, and valued at work”.
Reflecting on her own career path, Joshi says it has been a “rewarding journey” with the autonomy to solve some real problems and launch great products, and she pays tribute to the sponsors, both male and female, that have “opened many doors for me along the way”.
But it hasn’t all been roses, she also notes a number of challenges such as work-life integration and being stereotyped or underestimated based on her gender. “My strategy has been to focus on what I need to accomplish and have a healthy disregard for any ‘box’ I get slotted into.”
Despite companies like Spark leading the way with a female CEO and chairperson, and a 50% female board, Joshi says recent events in the US against the black community show that “we need to do much more to accomplish true inclusion and equity”. Looking ahead, Joshi says her priority is to bring new enterprise innovations to edge and 5G and, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, ensure Google Cloud customers have what they need to keep business running smoothly.
