如今，帕丽萨·萨德扎德（Parisa Sadrzadeh）身为这家市值870亿美元的外卖巨头DoorDash的高管，负责推动旨在助力餐厅与零售商强化现有业务的新举措，还主导了公司近期一项十亿美元的收购决策以推进相关战略落地。
然而约15年前，她还只是一名英语专业的大学毕业生，怀揣着在新闻领域大放异彩的梦想。直到一次偶然的机遇，加上对自己的坚定信念，为其在全球最具影响力的科技公司之一中迅速崛起奠定了基础。
2010年，萨德扎德从华盛顿大学毕业，彼时她急需一份工作。她的长期职业目标是从事故事讲述工作，但她接受了亚马逊的一个临时职位，以赚取一些收入，直到她能找到理想的发展路径。在那里，她以小时计薪审核自出版书籍，确保内容不违反Kindle政策——这显然与她的宏大抱负相去甚远。
“我甚至不是亚马逊的用户，” 她最近在接受《财富》杂志采访时说，“我当时对亚马逊一无所知。”
但萨德扎德自称怀有“求知欲”，这一特质被公司一位总监注意到。很快，她就被安排与一支工程师团队合作，负责推进部分任务的自动化工作。该项目进展顺利，上级旋即建议她申请产品经理职位，该职位通常负责统筹和监督产品或服务从概念到发布的全流程。她采纳了建议，并在一年内获得该职位。
她表示：“我觉得就是从那时起，我的人生轨迹开始转变，我觉得自己能在亚马逊工作一辈子。”
从那时起，萨德扎德始终展现出“盲目自信”，主动请缨为上司解决棘手难题，即使缺乏相关经验，她也坚信自己定能寻得应对之策。她在亚马逊之前的快速配送服务Prime Now担任年轻项目经理期间就如此行事，这为她加入亚马逊Flex（亚马逊面向零工劳动者的配送项目）创始团队奠定了基础。
她表示：“一旦你被公认为能在面对模糊问题时高效破局的人，那么当你想在公司迎接新挑战时，上司便更倾向于信任你。”
到32岁时，萨德扎德已晋升为亚马逊副总裁——她是亚马逊历史上最年轻的女性副总裁之一，而亚马逊在全球150万员工中仅有数百名副总裁。她执掌亚马逊全球需求方平台（即“配送服务提供商”）业务，该业务是亚马逊最后一公里配送运营的核心，由专为亚马逊客户配送包裹的中小型配送企业组成。
然而，对新挑战的渴望，驱使她追随亚马逊前高管戴夫·克拉克（Dave Clark）及一众同事，加入物流初创公司Flexport。在那里，她习得了如何在风云变幻的初创环境中引领团队。
“我极易心生倦意。”她坦言道。
如今35岁的萨德扎德完成了其职业生涯中迄今为止“最惊险的一跃”——去年，她悄然加入DoorDash，担任战略与运营副总裁，此前与这家公司并无深厚渊源。她最初肩负的使命是拓展DoorDash为餐厅和其他零售商提供的软件工具套件（即DoorDash Commerce Platform），助力它们在实体门店内构建和管理业务。
为此，萨德扎德近期主导了公司斥资12亿美元收购酒店软件公司SevenRooms的决策，该公司研发的产品旨在助力餐厅和酒店管理预订、预约及客户关系。交易达成后，萨德扎德将负责管理该团队及相关业务。
她对《财富》杂志表示：“虽然DoorDash在疫情期间为商家解决了重大难题……使许多此前从未考虑过外卖服务的商家具备了配送能力，但另一个挑战在于，如何提升实体店的实际客流量，因为这些顾客才是利润最高的消费群体。”
回顾自己职业生涯的快速晋升，萨德扎德承认，这在一定程度上归功于在亚马逊“天时地利”，以及上级的鼎力举荐。不过，她觉得其他年轻专业人士若能对她的职业发展路径加以调整，也能实现类似的职业轨迹。
“你不能坐等别人为你开门，”她说，“你必须主动出击寻找挑战，并展现自己是能破局解难的实干者。”（财富中文网）
译者：中慧言-王芳
Today, Parisa Sadrzadeh is a top exec at the $87 billion food-delivery giant DoorDash, leading new initiatives aimed at strengthening restaurants and retailers’ businesses inside their existing four walls—and guiding the recent decision to make a billion-dollar acquisition to boost those efforts.
But about 15 years ago, she was a young college graduate with an English degree and dreams of a big future in journalism. Until a bit of luck, and a whole lot of betting on herself set the stage for a rapid ascent inside one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.
After graduating from the University of Washington in 2010, Sadrzadeh found herself in need of a job. Her long-term professional goal was to make a career out of storytelling but she took what she envisioned as a stopgap role at Amazon to make some cash until she could figure out a path forward. There, she was paid an hourly rate reviewing self-published books to make sure they didn’t violate Kindle policies. Not exactly her grand vision.
“I wasn’t even a customer,” she told Fortune recently. “I literally knew nothing about Amazon.”
But Sadrzadeh had a self-described “thirst for learning,” and a director at the company noticed. She was soon partnered with a team of engineers and a mandate to automate some of the tasks. The project was going well enough that the superior quickly recommended she pursue a position as a product manager, a role that typically helps orchestrate and oversee the development of a product or service from conception to public launch. She took the advice and earned a product manager role within a year.
“I think that’s when the game changed for me and I thought I could be at Amazon forever,” she said.
From there, Sadrzadeh consistently exhibited a “blind faith” in herself, volunteering to solve hard problems for her bosses, confident she could figure it out even if she had no experience tackling similar issues. She did it as a young project manager on Amazon’s former express delivery service known as Prime Now, which helped lead her to a role on the founding team of Amazon Flex, Amazon’s delivery program for gig workers.
“Once you are known as somebody who can get shit done when there’s an ambiguous problem ahead of you,” she said, you are more likely to have bosses trust you when you want to take on new challenges at the company.
By the time she was 32, Sadrzadeh had risen to a vice president role at Amazon–one of the youngest women to ever achieve the rarefied title at Amazon, which counts just a few hundred VPs across its 1.5 million-person workforce. She led the company’s global DSP – or “delivery service provider” business – the backbone of Amazon’s last-mile delivery operation powered by small and mid-sized delivery businesses often dedicated exclusively to deliver packages to Amazon customers.
But soon her desire for new challenges led her to accompany former top Amazon exec Dave Clark and a team of fellow colleagues to the logistics startup Flexport, where she would learn about leading teams in a tumultuous startup setting.
“I get bored pretty easily,” she said.
Now 35, Sadrzadeh recently took her “scariest jump” to date—quietly joining DoorDash, where she had no deep prior relationships, last year as a vice president of strategy and operations. Her initial mandate was to expand DoorDash’s suite of software tools for restaurants and other retailers—the DoorDash Commerce Platform—to help them build and manage their businesses inside their physical locations.
To that end, Sadrzadeh recently guided the company’s decision to spend $1.2 billion to acquire the hospitality software company SevenRooms, which makes products aimed at helping restaurants and hotels manage bookings, reservations, and customer relationships. Sadrzadeh will manage that team and business after the deal closes.
“While DoorDash solved a massive problem for merchants during the pandemic…introducing a delivery capability to many who had never considered doing it before,” she told Fortune, “[another] challenge ended up being how do you grow my actual volume in my physical store because those are my most profitable consumers.”
Reflecting on her rapid professional ascent, Sadrzadeh admitted that she owes some of it to being at the “right place, right time” at Amazon and to a strong support system of superiors advocating for her. But she also believes other young professionals are capable of similar trajectories with their own twist on her approach to professional growth.
“You can’t wait for someone to open doors for you,” she said. “You have to just find the challenges and present yourself as a person who can solve them.”