Navigating Career Curves and Breaks with Chaitra Rao

From Software People Stories by PM Power Consulting

May 15, 2026 · 54 min

About this episode

Chaitra Partha Rao discusses her career journey from medicine to IT, emphasizing user empathy and the impact of automation.

My guest today is Chaitra Partha Rao, Vice President at Daimler Truck Innovation Center India – Manufacturing , Sales & Aftersales. Chaitra shares how her childhood aspirations to become a neurosurgeon shifted to commerce due to cost constraints, eventually leading her into IT through an internship at a medical diagnostics firm automating stores processes. She describes observing early requirement-gathering and MVP-style delivery, learning the importance of user empathy, and contrasts it with a later failure where a $15M trading interface was rejected because designers didn’t listen to analysts. Her career spans core banking, Fidelity-style investing, equity trading transformation (including crypto/digital assets focus in 2015–2017), and automotive/trucking, emphasizing designing for human touchpoints even amid AI trends. She discusses patience versus outcome-chasing, staying focused via “recalculating” and timeboxing, scaling systems using “day in the life” simulations, cross-cultural user commonalities, cautious optimism about synthetic data, guidance for women returning from career breaks, and grounding routines like yoga, reflection, cooking, and music. The timestamps are…

People in this episode

Guest: Chaitra Partha Rao

Topics covered

career development
user empathy
technology in business
women in tech
automation
AI trends
cross-cultural insights

Keywords

career curves
user empathy
automation
AI
women returning to work
cross-cultural user commonalities
patience
outcome-chasing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Daimler Truck Innovation Center India, Fidelity, Daimler, IT, AI, crypto, digital assets, banking, automotive