SHUBHAM MANIKLAL DIVATE

1. What is the one domain where you can create genuine clarity for someone? Career, MBA and early-career decision-making. I can help students and young professionals who are confused about what to do next — whether that means preparing for CAT and pursuing an MBA, choosing between career options, understanding what kind of role they should target, or figuring out how to grow after entering the corporate world. My own journey has involved many of these decisions — preparing for CAT, evaluating multiple IIM and IIT options, choosing IIT Kharagpur for my MBA, moving into consulting, working with large clients, and gradually moving toward product and project management. I understand that the difficult part is often not finding information; it is making sense of the information and deciding what actually makes sense for you. 2. Describe a real situation where someone came to you confused and left clearer. What exactly did you do? I've often had people come to me when they have too many options — MBA vs. job, which career path to choose, whether to switch roles, or how to approach a particular opportunity. My approach is not to immediately tell them what to do. I first understand what they actually want, their constraints, strengths, priorities and what they are optimizing for. Then I break the problem down, separate facts from assumptions, and lay out the realistic options with their trade-offs. Once the options are structured, the decision usually becomes much less overwhelming. The value I bring is turning a vague problem into a structured decision and a practical next step. 3. What kind of person or problem are you NOT the right mentor for? I'm probably not the right mentor for someone looking for a person to simply tell them exactly what decision to make. I can help someone structure a decision, challenge their assumptions, share my experience and build an action plan, but they ultimately need to own the decision. I'm also not the right mentor for highly specialised areas where I don't have first-hand experience, or for serious mental-health concerns where professional psychological or clinical support is more appropriate. My strength is career, MBA, professional growth and decision-making — especially when someone has multiple options but doesn't know how to evaluate them. 4. What is one big decision you made in the last 3 years that you'd make differently today? One thing I would approach differently is how deliberately I built my career identity after entering the corporate world. I spent a lot of time focusing on being good at whatever problem was in front of me — requirements, analytics, dashboards, stakeholder management, project delivery and client work. That helped me build a broad skill set and strong client relationships, but in hindsight I would have started defining my longer-term direction much earlier. Today, I would be more intentional about building toward a specific identity combining business understanding, technology, product thinking and execution, rather than allowing my role to be defined primarily by the projects that came my way. The lesson for me is that being adaptable is valuable, but adaptability without a direction can make your career look broader than it needs to be. 5. What is one thing you used to believe about success that you now question or reject? I used to believe that success was largely about getting into the right institution, getting the right job and continuously moving to the next title or compensation milestone. I don't completely reject ambition or career growth, but I question the idea that they automatically mean you're moving in the right direction. My experience has made me realise that the quality of the problems you solve, the skills you build, the people you learn from, the ownership you take and the options you create for yourself matter just as much as the next designation. Today, I think of success less as simply climbing a ladder and more as building a career where my skills, interests, impact and long-term goals increasingly point in the same direction.