I am an electronics engineer who spent the early part of my career as a scientist at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), working on a Government of India project to identify quality parameters in tea production. This precise, methodical work trained me to trust data, ask the right questions, and never accept a result without understanding what was behind it.
From there, I moved into global operations at Keysight Technologies — managing teams across geographies, driving cross-functional decisions, and navigating cultures I hadn’t grown up in. The technical rigor came with me. But the skills that actually shaped my leadership? Those I had to find on my own.
Technical skills got me in the room. Business skills determined whether I stayed and whether I led.
The Gap Nobody Warned Me About
As a SWE global ambassador, I mentor women engineers across India and beyond. And I keep hearing the same story — she is technically excellent, her work is solid, everyone knows it; and yet opportunities kept going to people who seem, on paper, less qualified. She couldn’t figure out why.
Most of the time, the gap is not technical. It is that nobody told her the job has two halves.
Engineering education is exceptional at teaching us to solve defined problems. It is far less effective at teaching us to make a business case, own a budget, influence without authority, or translate technical complexity into language that moves a room. For women, who are often already working harder just to be taken seriously, this gap compounds fast and quietly.
What Combining Both Looks Like
When I moved from a scientific role into operations leadership, I had to learn a second language — not a spoken one, but a commercial one. “How does this project affect the P&L? What does this engineering decision mean for the customer? How do I make the case for resources to someone who doesn’t think in specifications?”
I discovered that my engineering brain was not a liability in those conversations. It was an advantage. The same qualities that make a good engineer, such as structured thinking, evidence-based decisions, and comfort with complexity, make a sharper business thinker, too.
I’ve seen this play out with the women I mentor. The ones who grow fastest are not necessarily the most technically gifted; they are the ones who learned early to connect their technical work to business outcomes, to speak up in rooms that felt unfamiliar, and to trust that their engineering instincts were valuable beyond the engineering function.
Raise Your Hand Before You’re Ready
A mentor in Minneapolis once told me, “Don’t wait until you’re ready. Just raise your hand.” For women engineers, this is harder than it sounds. We are trained to qualify ourselves fully before stepping forward, and in technical work, that instinct is an asset. But in business settings, it holds us back while others, less prepared but more visible, move ahead.
Business skills are not a separate qualification to acquire before entering the room. They are built by being in the room. Own a small budget, volunteer to present upward, or read the business case behind the project you are building. Ask the commercial team what your work means to the customer. Start before you feel ready.
Where It Took Me
That combination of technical grounding and business thinking eventually gave me the confidence to co-found a science-backed food venture. My engineering discipline shaped how we validated the science, and my business skills shaped how we built something around it.
I share this because the path from engineer to founder was not a pivot. The skills we build as engineers, such as curiosity, rigor, and the instinct to find the root cause, are extraordinary foundations. Business acumen is what extends their reach.
The women I work with are some of the sharpest people I know. The only thing standing between them and the table is the belief that it wasn’t built for them. It was. They just need to walk up to it.
