Reinventing yourself: An approach to reimagining your career, learning, and relationships

Before we jump in, I’d like you to take a moment to think about the following questions:

• If you weren’t doing what you do today, what would you like to be doing?
• Which personal values do you aim to reflect in your daily work?
• What gives you energy as you think about your career advancement?

That’s right – I'm not here to talk to you about demand optimization, product storytelling, or customer insights. I'm here to talk about us – you and me – and that tiny little thing that defines so much of our lives: our careers.

I’ve always found it fascinating that we spend so much time defining our marketing plans, quarterly business reviews, and weekly dashboard review reviews. But when it comes to our own careers, we have this "we'll see how it goes" sort of approach. There’s a clear opportunity for us to think about our professional lives in a more structured, thoughtful, and ongoing manner.

By way of introduction, I'm Karan Nigam and I’m currently leading product marketing for one of the business units at Palo Alto Networks. I've had my share of move-arounds – some of them successful, some absolute failures – and I have some learnings to share from my journey.

The power of reinvention

A few years back, a mentor of mine, who happened to be a chief scientist at Microsoft, shared with me the importance of reinvention. As an early-career product marketer, I was always focused on the latest and greatest technology, but my mentor taught me that sometimes, focusing on improving and reinventing existing models can be even more effective than constantly chasing net-new inventions.

Inventions can often be accidental – chocolate chip cookies, Post-it notes, X-ray machines. So many things we rely on were accidental inventions. Reinvention, on the other hand, is almost always something you have to pay attention to and be conscious about. 

I started to think about this idea from a career perspective as well. Most of us don't spend enough time thinking about how we can reinvent ourselves to create careers that align with our values and bring us fulfillment. 

The Great Introspection

Over the last few years, humanity has lived through a massively dramatic experience where everything has been upended – economies, personal lives, and perspectives on what we buy and spend time on. 

Our relationship with work has completely changed. There's this constant tension between prioritizing personal well-being, flexibility, money, or the job itself. As professionals and individuals, we're unsure of how to think about careers that used to be linear.

This makes it all the more important to pause and think about what the market needs, what we have to offer, and how we fit into this new model of work.

Let’s take a look at some stats that have emerged from employers recently: 

• Only 22% feel they’ll have the right sales and marketing talent in place in the next five years to sell what they have. 
• Only 30% feel they have the right technical skills in the next five years to do the innovation they need to succeed. 
• Over 60% of employers are open to hiring people from a variety of backgrounds. They want people with different skills and ideas because most companies are now in complex businesses. You don't just create a product that sells the same for 10 years - businesses get upended constantly. So companies want agile and adaptable talent.
• Over 4 million people have changed jobs every month this past year - 4.3 million people across the US economy quit in February alone. The entire workplace is going through an incredible churn of talent.

What this tells us is that there’s a huge opportunity for those of us who want to be in the tech world to reinvent ourselves, to take on new challenges.

Over the last couple of years, there's been a lot written about “The Great Resignation” or “The Great Reshuffle,” but, for me, what's really interesting is the space that the last two years have created for a great introspection.

For the first time, we, as the talent, have the power to demand and think about a career – versus just a job –  in a more constructive way. This is what I call “The Great Introspection” and it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.

Along with the great Introspection, I have three more key ideas I’d like to share:

1. Linear careers are overrated
2. Career as a service 
3. Continuous and conscious reinvention

Let’s dig a little deeper into each of these concepts.

Linear careers are overrated

In today's world, no one cares about the linearity of your career path. It used to be that people could demand higher salaries and titles when they stayed somewhere for 25 years, but that doesn't work anymore. 

It doesn't matter if you work for a 100,000-person company and then go to a 40-person startup either. The market isn't assessing your talent based on company size anymore. 

The market is thinking about talent based on experiences and what people bring to the table. We have to retune ourselves to this new mentality, since most of us went to school when linear careers were still the expectation.

To show you what I mean, let me share my story. 

I grew up in India with a loving family, but my mom had a strict idea of what I should become: a doctor, just like my dad. The plan was that I’d become a doctor, rise through the ranks until I ran my own hospital, and eventually win a Nobel prize for some incredible medical breakthrough – nice and linear. 

Spoiler alert: that’s not what happened. 

Looking back at my career, I realize that my original plans didn’t work out, but that was for the best. Let me talk through some of the transitions and failures I’ve experienced and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. 

Lesson one: Failing ≠ failure

My first lesson came from my time at Nokia. I joined because when I was growing up in India, Nokia was what Apple is today – one of the biggest consumer brands in modern business history. 

To give you a sense of their dominance, Nokia had 72% market share in Asia Pacific and 45% in North America in 2010. If you watch the Matrix movies, Keanu Reeves is even using a Nokia phone!

I joined Nokia during a transformative period. They were exploring how to create advanced smartphones featuring touch interfaces and robust app ecosystems. This was a time when Apple had just introduced the iPhone, shaking up a smartphone market that was primarily led by Blackberry.

I wanted to be part of their attempted transition. However, that didn’t exactly go to plan. 56,000 employees got laid off in the four and a half years I was there. It took me a long time to understand what this failure meant for me because I thought Nokia was my one and only job for life.

However, I was blown away by the number of offers I got from companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google after Nokia failed. They were all trying to figure out the smartphone business, and basically said, “We don't have enough people who understand this market.”

When I was approached for my Windows job, I asked why they wanted me. The hiring manager said, “We don't have enough people who know what failure looks and feels like. We don't know how to think about listening to customers. You guys completely screwed it up at Nokia, so we hope you can bring some of those learnings here.”

I was stunned that people were open to that perspective, because to me failing meant total failure. But that was the exactly wrong way to think about it. 

Every time you fail, it’s a great learning opportunity. And, trust me – there's a wonderful story that can come out of it if you pitch it right.

Lesson two: How to operate at scale

When I was considering joining Microsoft, I thought it was this boring, monolithic company and I had some misgivings as to whether I should take the job. But then I met with the Windows head and he completely changed my perception. 

He said, “Think about all the vending machines, airports, airplanes, IoT devices, laptops, and even the machines that create Apple phones – the global economy is running on Windows. Yes, it may be boring, but if you want to learn how to operate a business at scale, you should join us.” 

That pivoted how I thought about the kinds of products I wanted to work on. At that point in my career, I decided to focus on learning how to operate at scale - how to do marketing, channel management, and branding across different countries and cultures – another experience I gained that I hadn't anticipated.

Lesson three: The power of purposeful innovation

When I was at Microsoft Teams, what really stood out was that during the pandemic, every single person working on Teams became a frontline worker overnight.

We were on calls with customers globally because, in that first month, there was almost no server capacity left – software companies were struggling to keep services running because demand exploded exponentially. People couldn't communicate. 

Microsoft decided to buy out servers globally to optimize capacity so hospitals, schools, and businesses could stay on Teams. Of course, it was a business decision, but those years at Teams let me understand both how to do B2B SaaS (software as a service) and how to think about jobs in a meaningful, purpose-driven way while enabling economies to run – another experience I didn't expect but gained a lot from.

Lesson four: Tech meets culture meets politics

Most recently, I joined Palo Alto Networks because I had started thinking more about cybersecurity and blockchain. Now, you may not be a fan of blockchain, but the reality now is that nation-state attacks are a real thing. Not only that, but roughly 80% of people have had their credentials compromised in some way, whether they know it or not. 

I wanted to join a space where big cultural conversations were happening alongside innovation. For me, cybersecurity became that space.

It's been interesting even in one year to see the mix of technology, cultural conversation, and politics coming together. I'll report back in a few years on how it goes! 

A few key learnings from a squiggly path

Here are a few key more learnings I've had from this winding career path:

• When life gives you lemons, make lemonade: Everything I feared from my Nokia failure became the foundation for the rest of my career. To this day, including at Palo Alto Networks, I get jobs because people find it fascinating that a company that big can go under so spectacularly. They want to understand the lessons from that experience. Failing isn't inherently bad.
• Interesting is inherently imperfect: Most jobs are either safe or interesting – if you take a safe job, great. But if you choose an interesting job, expect pain for a few years because imperfection is what makes it interesting.
• Planning is more important than a plan: Having a meticulous 10-year plan can backfire; it’s better to have a planning mentality where you continuously evaluate, readjust, and optimize based on your interests.
• Complex problems need people with nonlinear careers: I was approached by a recruiter from an electric vehicles (EVs) company, which makes no sense based on my background. But the hiring manager said EVs are about software/hardware integration, building businesses at scale, and convincing people about new categories – all things I've done, just not directly in the EVs space.
• Knowing what you don't want to be is as important as knowing what you do want to be: Negative experiences with bad bosses can be tough to deal with, but these experiences can help us figure out the kind of person we don't want to be and the kind of leader we don't want to become, ultimately guiding us towards a better future.
• A career is like a jungle gym, not a ladder: We have to accept that all the random, stupid stuff we go through makes us who we'll be in five or ten years.

Career as a service

The next big idea I want to share is about career as a service – how we can apply the SaaS mindset to our professional lives. 

If you’re in tech, you’ll know that the biggest shift over the last 10 years was software as a service – everyone was selling CDs and packaged software, but then Salesforce came along and said there's a better way: SaaS. 

Even if we work in software as a service, our career mindsets are still linear and stepwise. We need to start thinking about careers with the same mentality as SaaS – as something that continuously updates.

Traditionally, we've defined successful careers like there's some formula you can follow for a steady upward trajectory. That's not the reality anymore.

In SaaS, we rapidly prototype ideas, try things out, get user feedback to understand what resonates or doesn't, and then iterate – this virtuous cycle of constant evolution. Why not think about careers with that same mentality? 

Try out jobs that interest you, attract like-minded people, learn quickly, and fail fast. There's merit in thinking about careers as iterative cycles, just like we do with our SaaS products.

We have this weird fascination with the idea of a perfect career progression, even though we know products get better through imperfect iterations. We need to reconcile that somehow. This isn't the age of mainframes with 20-year product cycles. Technology is constantly shifting and evolving; careers have to keep up.

Continuous and conscious reinvention

When I talk about continuous reinvention, I’m not suggesting that we all change our careers today – it’s still important to weigh your options. Here are a few questions I've found helpful to ask myself when considering a job change:

1. Are you running away from something or running towards something? People often change jobs out of desperation, with the result that they end up accepting less-than-satisfactory positions. Asking if you're running towards something positive allows a more thoughtful approach, so on tough days you can anchor back to your purpose. 
2. Why do you really want a change? We often have nice narratives about wanting to change jobs to make an impact, when the reality is we just want more compensation or a better title or to manage a bigger team. It's important to have an honest conversation with yourself and admit those practical motivations.
3. How many constants are you changing? There are three main constants in jobs: location, expertise, and organizational culture. Trying to change more than two of those at once often sets you up to fail because it's so overwhelming. So, see how many big constraints you're changing and whether now's the right time for that much change. 
4. What matters to you? I've borrowed the framework below from the CEO of LinkedIn. To evaluate career moves, it looks at the two values that matter most to you at this point in your life and optimizes for both.
   When I was considering my latest career move, the two most important values for me were compensation and learning. I realized I could stay at Microsoft and continue learning, but there was a limit to how much I could increase my compensation. So I went back on the job market to find an opportunity for both increased compensation and an entirely new skill set to learn.

Let’s wrap up

The people who shape the world rarely start with a preset plan or know how their path will unfold. Obama wasn't born thinking he'd be President. Malala didn’t know she’d become a global advocate for girls’ rights. Jon Stewart didn’t know he’d become the biggest comedian this country would see for two decades. 

They were open to opportunities, they made lemonade, and hence they have interesting lives.

I fell in love with this quote years ago: 

"It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique." 

We all have some perceived idea of what we should become, whether we create it ourselves or others create it for us. But it's often our failure to achieve those expectations that leads to an interesting life story.

So, I hope you fail at achieving whatever perceived ideal someone else set out for you – and instead stumble into opportunities that lead to an interesting life story.

This article is based on a presentation given by Karan Nigam at the Product Marketing Summit in Seattle. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.