Anubhav Khanna, MBA’16

Like many engineers, Anubhav Khanna is drawn to optimization. When something isn’t working as well as it might, he’ll identify what’s missing and find a way to fill the gaps.

Often, that impulse manifests at work, in the product iterations or process improvements he leads in his job at Amazon. But sometimes, the project is himself.

Before enrolling in the Smith Full-Time MBA program in 2015, Anubhav had spent most of his young career in tech, including a multi-year tenure in software development at BlackBerry. He liked the daily application of his engineering chops and loved the rush of building new things. But he’d hit a professional ceiling: “There was nothing wrong with the work that I was doing, but I just knew I could stretch myself a lot more,” he recalls, pointing to his burgeoning interest in commercializing products and managing teams. “I had no knowledge of things like finance, strategy and leadership. I needed a deeper foundation.” He saw an MBA as a catalyst to achieve just that: “It was a tactical decision,” he explains. “But at the same time, I wanted to take a step back and broaden my perspective. I wanted to invest in myself.”

Anubhav knew the MBA would help him do great things, but he was also keenly aware of his lack of business experience, and as the program start date approached, intimidation and nerves began to creep in. “There was definitely a fear of the unknown,” he says. But the campus experience quickly put him at ease. The immersive nature of the program—meant to mirror a typical nine-to-five schedule—felt familiar and immediately helped him approach the endeavour with the diligence of a day job. The team-based structure created instant accountability, as people of different (sometimes very different) personalities and backgrounds rallied to collaborate as productively as possible. The optimism of his classmates buoyed his enthusiasm—especially when he discovered that virtually every one of his peers was also navigating at least one curriculum area that was outside of their comfort zones. “We were all starting something new,” he explains. “No one was trying to one-up one another, which made things a lot calmer.” And when the workload got particularly intense, the fortifying support of the faculty and staff kept things in perspective: “They were there to show you the light at the end of the tunnel.”

And the program progressed, so too did Anubhav’s thinking: He felt his brain being challenged in new and sometimes unexpected ways. As someone accustomed to more didactic forms of learning, he was surprised to find that in many classes, there were no right or wrong answers: When he’d put forward a response that wasn’t what a professor was expecting, it would spark a discussion, not a correction. “It really was all about learning,” he reflects. “That really built my confidence. It’s what made me realize I was in the right program.”

He also made good use of the Career Advancement Centre, which helped him to better articulate his value proposition and exposed him to potential career paths he’d never considered, including consulting and marketing, which he found illuminating. “I realized that people from all walks of life and all paths of careers can go on to do things that you would never expect them to do,” he says.

Almost immediately after finishing the MBA, Anubhav received an offer for a job at Amazon headquarters in Seattle, where he’s since held progressively senior roles, including his current position leading product management at Amazon Key. His mandate includes technical product development—but also strategic planning, international expansion, talent management and stakeholder engagement, among other responsibilities. He’s still a technical guy at heart, but he can now apply a broader business lens to amplify the impact of the work he loves. “I wanted to learn how to take things further,” he reflects. “The MBA taught me how to do that.”