Founder @ PMDojo | Ex-Atlassian | Product Leadership Coach | Keynote Speaker | Community Builder | Mom 👩‍👦🐶

You’re a high-performing woman doing everything right. You consistently deliver the results, survive the fire drills and have proven your value ten times over. Yet, when the Dir/VP roles open... you hear

"Be more strategic" "Have more executive presence" or "Wait your turn"

while less qualified people move ahead.💔

This isn't about your work ethic or working harder. It’s about power, perception, and strategic influence. As a former C-Suite executive, I know how these decisions are made because I've sat in the talent reviews and promotion discussions.

I started my career right at the bottom in a junior Tech Support role and fought through dysfunctional reorgs and M&As to become a Company President and C-Suite Executive. 

As a working mom and often the youngest executive in the room, I was told every reason why I wasn’t “fit” for the top. I didn’t just shatter the ceiling…I mastered the behavioral psychology required to own the room.

I’ve helped 5,000+ women get promoted at Dir/VP and C-Suite levels and, for many, build founder paths alongside or beyond corporate securing $5.5M in combined raises. and secure $5.5M in combined raises in months, not years.

Stop being the doer that does all the work and start being the leader who leads it. Every cycle you wait is a $40k-$125K mistake.

Send me a DM. Get your seat at the table.✌️

Bosky Mukherjee

Asha Sharma was just named CEO of Xbox. 

I went back to her LinkedIn and just scrolled. 
Because her career doesn't look like what people imagine when they think "future gaming CEO."

She didn't grow up inside Xbox. 
She moved across completely different spaces.

In 2011, she started at Microsoft in marketing. 
Left after two years to join Porch Group as an early employee, became COO, and helped take it public at a billion-dollar valuation.
She joined Meta to lead product and engineering.
She joined Instacart as COO (led a $30B P&L to IPO).
Then she returned to Microsoft in 2024 to run Core AI Product, right at the center of the company’s biggest AI bets.

And now, in 2026, Satya Nadella announced her as CEO of Xbox.
Her appointment surprised many because she isn’t a gaming veteran.
People have already started questioning whether she’s the “obvious” choice.

But instead of shrinking from that, she's openly acknowledged she needs to earn trust in this space. That shows strength and humility as a leader.

Run her career through the old-school "traditional path" filter, and it probably wouldn't make sense.

Maybe that's the point.

Old playbooks don't work the way they used to, especially now, as traditional career ladders are being thrown out the window.

3 things I want women feeling uneasy about career growth to take from her story:

1️⃣ If your path zigzags and looks unfocused, tell the story of your breadth of experience.
2️⃣ If you pivot industries, don't think "starting over." Think compounding skill sets.
3️⃣ If you step into something unfamiliar, remember everything is figureoutable.

Asha's career doesn't look smooth. 
It looks layered. Nonlinear. 
Slightly uncomfortable.

Which is how most real careers look. 
We just don't post about the messy parts.

If your path feels zig-zaggy or “not obvious,” I hope Asha’s story inspires you to pause and see the possibilities in your own future. 💪 

♻️ Share this with someone who needs to hear this story today.

I help women become Dir/VP leaders in AI-native companies | Former C-Suite Exec | Ex-Atlassian | 5K+ women coached | $5.5M+ in raises

The AI race is making a lot of smart people feel stupid.
So many women I talk to are doing exactly what everyone says to do.

Learning AI tools.
Watching YouTube tutorials.
Trying to stay ahead.

And yet I keep hearing the same sentence:
“I’m trying to keep up… but I still feel like I’m falling behind.”

If you already have a full plate at work or you're a busy working mom like me,
you’ve probably wondered:

Where is all of this supposed to fit?

I call this the "AI shame cycle".
You see constant hot takes, tutorials, and “how I built this with AI” posts everywhere…

And it quietly creates the feeling that everyone else is ahead of you.

So you keep learning.
But you still feel like you’re not doing enough.
And the cycle just keeps repeating.

In today’s newsletter, I share three ideas you can start using right away even if you're already stretched thin.

Rooting for you. You can absolutely do this. 💪 
Happy reading.

P.S. How are you learning about AI to help you become the top 10%?

The following is an excerpt from my free weekly email newsletter Rise & Thrive for high-achieving and ambitious women. Subscribe Now and you’ll get th

Open article: “AI shame” doesn’t go away just by learning more by Bosky Mukherjee • 3 min read

“AI shame” doesn’t go away just by learning more

Every year, we get a new "Women in Tech" report, but the numbers barely move.

28% of tech leadership is women, the same as 5 years ago. Maybe the problem isn't women. Maybe it's the rooms that keep pretending they don't see them.

These 6 women stopped waiting to be seen.

1: Marian Croak - She filed 200+ patents on the internet, pioneered VoIP across 30+ years at AT&T, built tech that raised $43M after Haiti's earthquake, and became one of the first two Black women in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Now, she’s the VP of Engineering at Google.

Lesson: Build so deep that history has no choice but to remember you.

2: Avital Arora - From being an engineer at Dell to Salesforce VP, to now VP of Engineering leading AI & Compute Infrastructure at Google, she scaled teams from 0 to 250+ globally.

Lesson: You don't climb the ladder, you build it, rung by rung, person by person.

3: Kamala Subramaniam - Emigrated from India, earned a PhD from NC State, and built a 1,000-engineer cloud hub for Google from scratch in Durham. Now Director of Engineering & Site Lead, she built an entire ecosystem, not just a team.

Lesson: When you build ecosystems, instead of just teams, you become impossible to replace.

4: Divya Ramakrishnan - Joined NVIDIA when it was "just a GPU company." 15+ years later, as Director of Hardware Engineering, she turns silicon into AI, gaming, and data center products. A YWCA honoree who stayed while others job-hopped.

Lesson: Loyalty to the right company, at the right time, is itself a career strategy.

5: Fatima Oguz - 15 years at Qualcomm.  As Director of Engineering, she ships software powering mobile tech globally, while leading Qualcomm Women San Diego as President.

Lesson: Depth in one place beats breadth in many. Master your domain, then use it to lift others.

6: Sarah Knapp - Survived telecom M&A chaos at Lumen for 14 years. Joined DHI Group, Inc. in 2021 and rose to VP of Technology Operations in 4 years.

Lesson: Outlasting chaos is a skill, and it's the one that most people quit before they learn.

Instead of waiting to be seen, these women built things that mattered.

Most women in tech are still rewarded for staying behind the scenes instead of being in the room alongside their male counterparts. With AI reshaping what "valuable" looks like, the window to change that is narrowing fast.

Ready to make the shift? Join me on Feb 24th. (Link in bio)

Tag a woman in tech who deserves visibility. 👇

Nelly from my community just negotiated a $285K role. 
She almost said "YES" when the company initially offered $150K. 🤢 

When she got the initial offer, her first instinct was to say “yes” immediately. 
She told me, "I didn't want to seem difficult."

I have been guilty of this in the past too.
Women who've managed multi-million dollar programs, driven company-wide results... will still hesitate to counter an offer.

Talking about money is never easy.
The number we are given can feel like a verdict about our worth. 

But, it doesn't have to be.

When Nelly and I started working together inside Leadership Edge, we focused on four things:

✅ Understand real comp data inside companies (in current times)
✅ Reframe her narrative around business impact instead of years of experience
✅ Prepare her to walk into that conversation with evidence, not just hope.
✅ Become comfortable talking about money, pushing back and negotiating with confidence. 

She countered and held firm. 
The result was $135K more in total compensation. 💃 
Just from one conversation.

3 things I want every woman reading this to take away:
1: The first offer is almost never the final offer. Treat it as a starting point.
2: Anchor your ask to the value you create, not what you earned before. Your last salary is not your limit.
3: Negotiation is not confrontation. It is a business conversation. The company expects it.

A similar post went viral on X this week, where someone shared how 30 seconds of discomfort earned them $10K more per year. That's $50K over five years.

Now imagine what happens when women start doing this consistently.

If you've ever accepted less than you knew you were worth, I'd love to hear what held you back.

And BTW, Nelly, I'm so proud of you. You can choose the most expensive restaurant, it's my treat. 🙌 🥰 

♻️ Repost this to help women negotiate their worth with confidence.

A C-level executive taught me one framework in 2008. Years later, it saved my career as a working mother. 💪 

During the first 5 years after having my son, I never slept through the night. 
He would wake up crying or needing to go the bathroom and wake me up. 

I was deprived of sleep and still pretending to function like everyone else.
On the professional front, I was building a 300 person team from ground up, and navigating a toxic promotion battle.

Every decision felt impossible because everything felt equally urgent.

So I went back to something I had learned from that executive years ago.

Give yourself just 3 options. I wrote mine down:
Option 1: Start an executive-level job search.
Option 2: Step away from work, be home with my child, because T was just 5 back then, and search when I feel ready.
Option 3: Stay, flip the problem, and learn to work with leadership strategically.

Then I asked myself 2 questions for each: Do I have the energy for this right now, and what happens if I choose it?

The answer came fast.
❌ A job search with no sleep and a toddler would be harder than my current situation.
❌ Staying on one income with a new mortgage was not financially feasible.
✅ So I chose option three. I stayed, flipped the problem, and learned to have adult-to-adult conversations with my CEO. And that got me the promotion on my timeline.

As working moms, we don’t struggle with lack of ambition. 
However, we are often drowing with competing priorities with no decision-making filter.

So next time you find yourself with a fork in road, try giving yourself 3 options and choose 1.

It is so important to learn how as women we can make clear, grounded decisions even when everything feels urgent and the stakes are high.

P.S. What has helped you prioritize as a working mom?

If you've ever heard “You're doing great, but let's talk next year” 
Then this is for you.

I used to be the one leadership trusted with everything messy.

The project no one could untangle? Mine. 
The new hires who needed mentoring? Mine. 
The work my manager didn’t have time for? Also mine.

I was reliable, calm and very capable.
And also completely stuck. 💔 

When a director role opened, I thought my track record would definitely help.
Instead I got: “You’re doing amazing Bosky. Let’s talk next year.”

At the time, I told myself it meant I was really close.
Looking back, I see something very different.

The praise keeps you performing.
The “but” keeps you stuck.

We get so deep in "doing more" that no one has to imagine us operating strategically at the next level.

We make everyone else’s job easier including the people deciding promotions.
Meanwhile, the people getting promoted aren’t necessarily doing more.
They’re being perceived differently.

I stayed in this long cycle until I stopped talking ONLY about what I delivered and started thinking and operating commercially.

That shift changed how I was discussed in rooms I wasn’t in.
And that’s when everything shifted for me and so many women I talk to.

If you keep hearing “you’re doing great, but…”
It might not be about performance at all; it like is your strategic positioning.

So here’s the real question:
When leadership talks about you in talent reviews…
Are they describing you as a dependable doer? Or a strategic leader?

♻️ Share this with someone who would find this helpful.

Most people wait years to get access to executive leaders. 
She got it in 12 days. 🤩

The difference wasn’t confidence. It was where she chose to start.

Luna is a senior leader at a SaaS company I’ve been supporting. 
She had just returned from maternity leave and joined a new company.

As women, we usually focus on proving ourselves. (we all know why)
Learning how things work. Keeping our head down.

Luna decided NOT to wait.

✅ She picked one initiative that was clearly tied to a company priority, something leadership was already paying attention to.

✅  Then she emailed the SVP and asked for 20 minutes to talk about that priority and how her work connected to it.

That was it.

He replied within days, and they spoke that same week. 
Afterward, she told me, “It didn’t feel like a big deal.” But it was.

It meant her name was now attached to an executive conversation…
Not just a team update.

As women, we are told to find a mentor or be more visible. 
At senior levels, access usually follows relevance.

Here’s what actually made the difference for Luna:
1. She reached out to the right executive instead of waiting to be noticed.
2. She tied her work to what this SVP already cared about.
3. She showed him her thinking and impact.

And because she never once brought up her own career advancement...
the pressure disappeared. 

It was just two people discussing the business.

This week, she told me the same SVP wants to talk about her growth in the company. 👏 

That’s how sponsorship often starts. 
Not with a request to get sponsored. 

12 days isn’t luck. 
It’s what happens when you don’t get distracted with junior-level generic advice.

It is so important that as women we know how to pick and choose the right things to do that can propel your career fast. Especially now.

♻️ Share this tip with another woman who might need it today.

Want to learn more? https://lnkd.in/gz6S4C5H

Women in my community get promoted 2 - 3X within 18 - 24 months. 💪 
Not by working 60–70 hour weeks.
Not by taking on more projects.

For years, most of them did what we're all taught to do.
❌ Say yes.
❌Take more work.
❌Be the most reliable person in the room.

And that’s exactly why they got stuck. 
It backfired on them. 
All the strong work ethic helped companies (not them)...

Because more work gives you more work.
Not more strategic power.

This distinction matters more now than ever.
AI is flattening org structures.
Middle layers won’t expand the way they used to.
Companies will promote fewer people but give them bigger scope.

Execution is no longer the differentiator.
Strategic trust is.

Working harder strengthens your execution reputation.
Promotions happen when you build a strategic leadership reputation.
Those are not the same thing.

The women accelerating right now made one shift:
✅ They stopped being known for doing more.
✅ They started being known for influencing the strategic direction.

This is what women in my community are focusing on:
1: They think, operate, and communicate commercially like executives. 
Task-level updates replaced with commercial, strategic language.

2: Insert themselves into problems leadership already cares about. 
This makes them strategically relevant

This is why some careers accelerate and some start to stall. 
It’s not about how hard you work.
It’s about strategic positioning as companies go AI native.

If Director or VP  is on your career path, this shift is no longer optional.
And yes, I believe it’s 100% learnable (5K+ women are doing this). 🙌 

Quick question: Are you currently known for execution…or for strategic judgment? (That answer will tell you everything.)

P.S. I’m breaking this down live on March 24th. Link under my name.

I’m not going to pretend the playing field is equal for women. 🤢 
And anyone who says it is probably isn’t living in the same reality most of us are navigating right now.

I’m not here to debate that.
I’m here for the women who already know this…and are quietly wondering what comes next.

Because I feel it too.
As a working mom.
As an ambitious woman.
As someone thinking about long-term security for my family.

The questions I keep hearing and asking myself sound like this:
1. What does ambition even mean right now?
2. Is career growth still possible when ladders keep shifting?
3. Could my job disappear overnight?
4. Everyone says “learn AI”… but how does that help me not losing my job?
5. What happens to our long-term livelihood?

These are not small questions.
And pretending everything is fine or will become fine isn’t going to secure any of our future.

We need more than optimism.
We need clarity and optionality to succeed, thrive and rise.

And I don’t believe we should be navigating this alone.
So here’s what I’m doing.

I’m building a series of FREE resources for women focused on becoming more marketable and creating real optionality in today's uncertain world.

👇 Tell me in the comments below: What would actually help in the next 6–12 months?

I want to build what women truly need not what sounds good on paper.

♻️ If another woman in your world is thinking about these same questions, share this with her.

Let’s figure this out together. 💪 🙌

As a woman, what feels most unclear about your career and future right now?

The author can see how you vote. Learn more

Co-Founder-Interviewclub | Startup & Product Coach | Microsoft | Harvard, IIT D, IIM L | 200+ mentoring sessions on topmate - Top 1%

A Harvard Business School Alum, ex-Microsoft and Times Internet, seasoned AI Product and Business leader, with an experience of building and launching several 0-to-1 businesses and scaling them to Mn users across India, Dubai and Indonesia region. Building InterviewClub.co with a mission to bridge the last mile gap between interview calls and offer letters. Build a Co-Pilot for interviews. 

#Productleader 
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Bosky Mukherjee

Sumit Kumar Singh

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