Why I chose to be in Health Tech.
I’ve talked quite a bit about my career story and my journey into product management over the past couple years. However, I’ve never quite shared the why behind making the constant choice to stay in a challenging, slow but unceasingly inspiring field of health tech. A lot of what I share here are my personal opinions — things I’ve learned over the years from experience, engagements with patients and providers, active and passive.
Living in the heart of “tech” as we all know it in the Silicon Valley, it’s always been an interesting experience talking about what I do. Throwing it back to my first job at a medical devices company (which was also a startup at the time), it was a strange experience explaining what the company does, followed by what I did at the company to my friends and former classmates — most of whom worked at big tech (or “FAANG” as it’s commonly known) or other widely known consumer tech companies. I would be met with responses ranging from “oh that sounds cool” to “hmm (I thought she graduated from an ivy league university — what brought her here?!)”. The latter was mostly from my not-so-well-meaning Desi acquaintances. More importantly, when I transitioned to a product role at the startup (which by then had gone public) working on consumer facing products like mobile apps & portals, it was all the more confusing, internally, to determine if I should continue down this…
