The Practice of Willingness: How Anjali Grew From QA Lead to Practice Lead at Cyntexa

What if the best move of your career is a role you have never held? Most of us wait until we feel ready, and ready has a way of never arriving. Meet Anjali, the Practice Lead at Cyntexa, who has spent her career doing the opposite. She started as a QA Lead, stepped into consulting, took charge of projects, and now represents Cyntexa in the United Kingdom. This is her story of how willingness, one unfamiliar role at a time, grew into leadership.

Anjali grew up with her sisters in a loving and supportive business family. She was the studious one, the front-bencher teachers could count on. But she was never only that. She took part in every activity going on, which says something early on about her: she did not like watching from the sidelines.

What stands out about her family is how much space it left for her to choose. With a business already running at home, the easy assumption would have been that the children would step into it. Instead, when Anjali had decided on engineering, and then on IT as their own profession, her parents stood behind her.

That kind of support does something quiet to a young person. It teaches you that choosing differently is allowed, and that someone will be there whether the choice works out or not. Her goal was clear from the start. Take PCM in high school, then engineering, then a career in IT. The first real fork came when she had to decide how to begin it. Placement season at her engineering college brought her an offer from a company in Jaipur: home city, family close by, job in hand, a clear path. Most people would have stayed. Anjali went to Bangalore, searched for a job on her own, and found one. Her family had given her the confidence to choose, and now she had to use it. She has no regrets about that decision, and it shows how she approaches decisions. She makes them, and then she commits.

At the Bangalore company, she worked as a software engineer on a technical product for image scanning and barcode reading, built for a bank in Australia and New Zealand. Working for a bank on the other side of the world meant a high standard and a small margin for error. After two years, she moved to another prominent IT company and spent around five years handling L2 and L3 production support in COBOL and SQL. Production support is a hard teacher. When a banking system misbehaves, the problem lands on your desk and stays there until it is solved.

Seven years of serious technical work, and not one day of it on Salesforce. That is the conflict at the heart of her story. By any outside measure, she was established. Inside, a new platform meant being a beginner again, in a field where colleagues already had a head start. The confidence she had earned in COBOL and SQL did not automatically travel with her, and she knew it.

Anjali is honest about what that feels like, because the doubt did not only arrive at the start. It came back whenever she reached the edge of what she knew.

“I am eager to learn new things. But sometimes it happens that, no, this is done for me. Now, it’s done; nothing can be done beyond this.”

Most career stories skip this moment, the one where the person quietly decides the road has ended. Anjali puts it at the center of hers. She was eager and capable, and still there were times when the edge of her knowledge felt like a wall. The question was what she would do next.

What changed things was not one dramatic day. It was a decision, repeated, and the people who made it possible. Her entry into Cyntexa as a QA Lead was the first big yes. After that, each time she hit a wall, she found that she was not facing it alone.

“I have got a lot of help from leadership… and side by side, my team also helped me. That is why on my journey with Cyntexa, we matched like a vibe there.”

And then came the realization that rewrote the earlier doubt.

“But that was the first time I got to know that, yes, there is a lot more for me.”

Did you read that carefully? The same moment that felt like an ending became proof of how much ground was still ahead. Her leadership stood with her through the whole stretch, and her team stood beside her. At Cyntexa, hitting a wall was never treated as a failure of the person. It was treated as the next thing to work through together. That is the turning point of her story: not an event, but a discovery that willingness, backed by good people, can outlast the feeling of being finished.

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What followed was the hustle, and it was made of purposeful, progressive steps. As a QA Lead, Anjali learned Salesforce the way a mechanic learns an engine: every part, every connection, every place it can fail. Before she could advise anyone, she had to understand the product down to its smallest details, and she did. That mastery became the foundation for everything after it.

With time, the next step was the Consultant role, and it asked for a different Anjali. As a QA Lead, her question was whether the product worked. As a Consultant, the question became whether it was the right answer for this client. The focus moved from quality assurance to client-facing strategy, from checking someone else’s work to shaping the work itself.

Then her role evolved as a Project Manager. Here, she was now guiding teams and managing complex timelines, where one slipped date travels down the line and lands on everyone. Technical skill alone could not carry her here. She had to hold a plan, a client, and a group of people in her head at the same time.

This is also where she met the scenario every leader eventually meets. Team members came to her with problems nobody had solved before. She did not have a ready answer for every one of them, and she says so openly.

“Sometimes I am aligning them to some new projects and helping them in their scenarios. And sometimes they come to me saying, ‘ This is the kind of scenario we are stuck in. At that time also, I need to think, yes, this is correct, but I have never faced this. What should I do here?”

That last question is the whole method in one sentence. She did not pretend to know. She asked, thought it through, worked it out with her team, and came out the other side with experience she did not have before. Each unfamiliar scenario added a layer, and the layers became her expertise. This is what saying “I’ll figure it out” looks like when it is practised daily and not just said once.

Today, Anjali is the Practice Lead. She oversees an entire department, mentors her team members, and solves the high-level challenges that reach her. She also represents Cyntexa in the UK, which means working across three time zones- IST, UK, and US- from roughly seven in the morning to six in the evening.

Working this way is its own education. When people are remote, you cannot connect with the whole team at once. Every person needs a separate connection, and a task that would take ten minutes at an office desk can take an hour online. Anjali puts in that hour. She has understood that leading a distributed team is built out of many small, individual conversations.

Her style as a leader reflects the same thinking. She is not strict. She is the one who gives people room to think. When a challenge comes up, she hears her team’s ideas first and then offers her own suggestion. She is available to everyone, new joiners included. In return, she asks for one thing: that every issue comes to her first. It is a simple rule, and it keeps her close to the work and close to her people.

Ask her which Cyntexa value she connects with most, and the answer is immediate.

“The core value that Cyntexa and I matched with is willingness.”

Willingness is a quieter word than ambition. Ambition says, “I want that role.” Willingness says, “I have never done that, and I am ready to learn it.” It is what let her move from QA Lead to Consultant to Project Manager to Practice Lead without waiting to feel fully prepared. Each time, she was not the finished product. She was willing, and the rest followed.

Look at who she has become. The woman who once felt that nothing could be done beyond a certain point now sits on the other side of that conversation, mentoring people through the same walls. She is confident not because she has seen everything, but because she trusts herself to work out what she has not seen. That is the full arc of her story: from someone who braced at the edge of her knowledge to someone who walks toward it.

The change is visible in small things. She no longer treats a new scenario as a verdict on what she knows. She treats it as the next problem to solve with her team. She listens first, offers her view second, and stays available when someone needs her. A person who once wondered whether there was more to learn now leads others who are wondering the same thing, and the answer she gives them comes from experience: yes, there is more, and you will find it by stepping forward.

She has a few words for people building careers in tech, especially now, when everyone is talking about AI. Her view is calm and practical: AI’s work is limited, and it will not take your job. Use it to your benefit. And whether you are in QA, business analysis, or development, keep yourself up to date with new technologies, automation, and project management tools.

Ask how the whole experience has been, and her answer is short.

“It’s first class. It’s fantastic.”

Her first role was only the prologue, and the expertise she built there is what every later chapter stands on. So to anyone who feels stuck right now, wondering whether the next role is too big, too new, or too far from what you know: growth is a choice you make when you say “I’ll figure it out.” Anjali made that choice at every step, and there is, as she found out, a lot more ahead.