About
I got into HR because I believe a company's most durable competitive advantage is its…
Articles by Tanvi
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Why High Agency and User Obsession Are Non-Negotiable at AppsForBharat
Why High Agency and User Obsession Are Non-Negotiable at AppsForBharat
As companies evolve, so do the challenges. Growth brings new layers, more complexity, and broader reach, the very…
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Hiring:Social Media Associate
Hiring:Social Media Associate
About the Organization: Villgro is India’s oldest and one of the world’s largest social enterprise incubators. We…
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31K followers
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Tanvi Lal posted thisHealth insurance is one of the most important benefits a company offers, and one of the biggest cost decisions for a People team. Having evaluated health insurance for nearly a decade, I have seen the landscape change significantly. New-age insurance providers are changing how companies approach healthcare, coverage and access. It is good to see the ecosystem evolve. Yet, with advances in healthcare and rising employee expectations, HR teams still face the same question: how do we offer better coverage without making costs unsustainable? My view is that health benefits should evolve with the company- • Early stage (up to 50 employees): Reliable hospitalisation cover, clear policy terms and a good hospital network. • Growth stage (50–200): Better family coverage, maternity benefits and preventive healthcare. • Scale-up (200–500): Broader dependant coverage, mental health support, accident and life insurance. Use claims data to make smarter renewal decisions. • Mature orgs (500+): Personalised benefits, preventive care and better use of claims data to negotiate with insurers. These are starting points, not fixed rules. Funding, cash flow, workforce demographics and claims experience matter just as much as headcount. With changing life stages, I have come to appreciate how much corporate health benefits matter. They are more than a policy on paper; they can make a real difference to employees and their families. The challenge for HR is to balance coverage with cost without compromising on essential protection. The right insurance strategy should work for both employees and the business ✌🏻
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Tanvi Lal shared thisI wrote about this some time ago, and the post blew up 😁 It led to a lot of DMs, questions and conversations with people trying to understand the nuances of the issue. What stayed with me was how many people were looking for a space to ask questions, share perspectives and make sense of something that isn't always easy to navigate. It made me think about how often workplace conversations get reduced to policies and rules, when what people really need is clarity, context and the space to talk about difficult things.
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Tanvi Lal posted thisWhat excites me most about AI? Healthcare access. Most AI conversations today focus on automation and productivity. That work matters. But the bigger opportunity is in healthcare, where the real gap is access. I grew up in Ranchi, where seeing a specialist or getting the right diagnosis sometimes meant travelling to another city. Things have improved a lot since then, but the gap hasnt closed across India. Rural community health centres are short of nearly 80% of the specialists they need. Breast cancer is now the most common cancer among Indian women, and most cases are still caught late. India cannot train specialists fast enough to reach every district. AI can help the specialists we have go further. Niramai Health Analytix and Qure.ai are good examples. Niramai is making early breast cancer screening possible outside large hospitals, and Qure. ai helps doctors read scans faster and flag urgent cases sooner. As a people leader, what I find most interesting is that the technology is only half the problem. The other half is building teams where clinicians and engineers work well together, and getting new tools adopted by health workers who have never used anything like them. Thats often where these companies win or stall ✌🏻 For those building in healthtech, whats been harder to scale so far: the technology or the team?
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Tanvi Lal shared thisNot every great hire is a “hell yes” in the interview. I’ve seen candidates who were around an 80% fit. Nobody on the panel was a table thumping yes. Something was missing, but they had the strengths we cared most about. We hired anyway, and some of those bets turned out to be some of our better calls. I think this is where hiring is still broken. We create an imaginary “perfect candidate” and then try to find someone who matches it. The right persona, qualifications, expertise, skills. Everything. But people rarely work that way. Ben Horowitz has a great line: hire for strength rather than lack of weakness. He also talks about writing down the strengths you want and the weaknesses you’re willing to tolerate. That’s how I’ve come to think about hiring: what are the non-negotiables, and where are we willing to take a big bet? If someone gets the important things right and the gaps are things they can learn or grow into, I’m comfortable taking that bet. You’re never hiring without some gaps. You’re deciding which gaps you’re comfortable with ✌🏻
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Tanvi Lal posted thisNobody fails ethics class. Plenty of people fail at ethics. In my MBA ethics class, like most of us, I read Barnes & Noble and Lehman Brothers. At Barnes & Noble, the board approved buying the founder's own college bookstore chain for $596 million. At Lehman, directors were told on a Tuesday that the firm had $42 billion in liquidity. By Sunday they were being pushed toward bankruptcy. In class, the mistakes looked obvious. Someone should have asked who benefits from the deal, and someone should have questioned the numbers. Leading a People function, I ask those same two questions almost every week. They're much harder to ask when you're the one in the room. "Who benefits" shows up in small ways, like a referral from someone I like or a senior leader asking for a policy to bend a little. In the moment, saying yes feels helpful. So I ask myself: would I make the same call if I didn't know this person? Questioning the numbers is the Lehman lesson. Dashboards usually look healthy and managers usually say the team is doing well. Most of the time they're right, and that makes it easy to stop checking. So before I accept good news, I look for one signal that could prove it wrong, often a skip-level conversation or a pattern in exit interviews. The moment from Lehman I think about most is the regulator telling the board the decision was theirs, while making clear what they wanted. I hear versions of that at work too. It reminds me that "I was asked to" doesn't take the decision off my plate ✌🏻
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Tanvi Lal shared thisEvery generation gets its iced coffee ☕ At some point it was showing up without a tie. Then sneakers with formals. Then visible tattoos, a phone on the table, and eventually turning up to a video interview from your bed with a very suspicious "home office" background. This month it's an iced latte. A recruiter on TikTok said candidates who walk in holding one look like the interview is just another errand in their day. My favourite reply so far: "But an interview IS just a stop in my day." Every one of those rules felt non-negotiable at the time. Most of them we've quietly let go of. I am fairly sure that ten years from now someone will post a deadly serious video about candidates bringing their AI agent to the interview. And someone younger will reply that it's just a stop in their day. Meanwhile, in most Indian offices, this debate would never have started. Someone would have handed the candidate a chai before they'd even found a seat ✌🏻 also, waiting for my coffee..
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Tanvi Lal shared thisAre we accidentally breaking the career ladder? McKinsey & Company published something recently that's been nagging at me. The ladder used to run through unglamorous work. Research nobody wanted to do. First drafts that got marked up in red. Data cleanup. Sitting in meetings mostly to watch how decisions actually got made, not to contribute to them. You got corrected constantly, and that correction was doing something. It was building instinct you couldn't get any other way. AI now handles a large part of that layer. Research, first drafts, summaries, even full builds, in minutes. I'm not writing this to argue against that. It's a genuine gain. But there's a question underneath it that doesn't get asked much. If AI is doing the work that used to teach people judgment, where does the next generation actually pick judgment up now? don't think the answer is protecting busywork just because it's tradition. That's nostalgia wearing the costume of principle. The real question is what replaces the learning that busywork used to provide, almost by accident. Maybe that's putting people in front of real, messy problems much earlier instead of protecting them from complexity until they're "ready." Maybe it's teaching people to push back on AI output instead of trusting it by default, so judgment gets built deliberately instead of as a side effect of drudgery. Maybe it's pairing juniors with experienced people on actual decisions, not just documentation of decisions already made. What worries me isn't that AI is doing the early work. It's that we might let the thinking that used to come attached to that work quietly disappear with it, and not notice for another five or ten years, when it's a lot harder to fix ✌🏻
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Tanvi Lal posted thisThere's a psychology term for something we all do without noticing: "naive realism" The quiet belief that we're not just seeing a perspective, we're seeing reality itself. Which is why disagreement so rarely feels like "we see this differently" and almost always feels like "they're wrong." There's an old joke about driving that gets at this better than any research paper. Anyone going faster than you on the highway is a maniac. Anyone going slower is an idiot. Somehow every single driver has landed on the one correct speed, and everyone else missed it. I think about this a lot at work. In a feedback conversation where you thought you were being clear and the other person heard something completely different. In a disagreement where both people walk away convinced the other one wasn't listening. We assume we saw it accurately and the other person is the one who's confused. It's a strange thing to sit with, that the version of events I'm so sure of is just one version. Not wrong, necessarily. Just not the only one. I don't think that makes certainty useless, but it's made me a lot more interested in the moments when I feel most sure of something ✌🏻
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Tanvi Lal posted thisThe interview question I retired. "Tell me about a time you failed." Asked some version of this for years. Got the same answer every time. Small mistake, lesson learned, moving on. Realized I wasn't learning anything except how well someone had rehearsed their humility story. So now I don't plan the follow up. I wait for the one thing they say that catches me off guard, and I just go back to it. "Wait, say more about that." The reactions are the interesting part. People used to prepped questions actually pause. A few visibly stall for a second. Turns out there's actual research on this, not just a hunch. Study looked at over 126,000 earnings calls, the ones where analysts ask execs questions after results come out. Found that questions tied to something the exec had just said, but impossible to see coming, rattled them more and actually shifted what investors believed after. Way more than the standard "tough" questions everyone preps for. Half of what we call a strong interview might just be good prep. The other half is what happens after the prep runs out ✌🏻
Tanvi Lal commented on a post
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I think the hard part is accepting that you can stop being close without anything going wrong. Life changes, your circles change, and a few people stay constant through it all.
Tanvi Lal replied to a comment
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Prasad Jandhyala Oh, that's an interesting idea! Have you seen companies try this? Would love to hear how it worked.
Tanvi Lal replied to a comment
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I have read the report, it's really comprehensive! Always been a big fan of Plum and Abhishek. Thanks for the great work you all do 🙌🏻
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Tanvi Lal liked thisTanvi Lal liked thisI'll be honest about something I've struggled with for a long time, and that's losing people. Moving has been a constant in my life, not just growing up but right up until now. 19 pin codes, five countries, a new city or a new job every two or three years, and every time, people quietly falling away. You don't have to move as much as I have to know the feeling, because people drift in and out of all our lives. For the longest time I took it personally. I'd replay it and wonder what I did, why it didn't last, and why it seemed to matter more to me than to them. Recently I was listening to Trevor Noah’s podcast what now? Where he had Adam Grant to talk about his book, Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. The conversation stayed with me. He sorts relationships not by how long you've known someone but by what the relationship actually is. Allies share your goals, pals share your joy, and companions are the people you lean on and confide in. People can be more than one, and they can move between them. What really stayed with me is that a relationship isn't the same thing to both people in it. Looking back, I can see it in every chapter of my life, in friendships from cities I've left, people from communities I was part of, in colleagues I’ve worked with and people I'd grown close to over the years. So many times I was an ally to someone, there for a shared purpose, while in my head they were a pal or a companion. When the purpose ended, so did the relationship, and I called it loss when often it was just a chapter closing. A lot of my relationships were built on need rather than want, and I've made peace with that because it's what a life in motion looks like. If you want someone to go from ally to pal or companion, that takes real investment. It doesn't happen just because you were in the same place at the same time. Understanding this has made my expectations far more realistic. So my advice is to be clear with yourself about what each relationship actually is, invest deliberately in the ones you want to grow, and when one fades, recognise it for the role it played rather than treating it as a failure. Some people come into your life for a purpose, some for joy, and a few for good, and all of them count.
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Tanvi Lal liked thisTanvi Lal liked thisOne of the easiest ways to convince yourself a startup will work is to imagine it already working. I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit. Imagine a marketplace with 1,000 agents and 500 housing societies. The agents get customers. The societies get services- everyone wins, it’s a great business. Now remove 999 agents and 500 societies. Why would that one remaining agent use your product? This is where a surprising number of startup ideas fall apart. We spend so much time thinking about how valuable our business will be when it’s big that we start treating that future value as something that exists today. And whenever someone questions the value of what we’re building, we explain what it will eventually become. But that’s circular reasoning, you are assuming the very thing you’re trying to achieve. Some businesses genuinely become more valuable with scale. But even those businesses need a reason for the first few customers to show up. I’ve started asking myself a different question when evaluating ideas. If this product never got any bigger than its tiniest useful version, would someone still want it? Because if the answer is no, scale isn’t your growth strategy, it’s your assumption.
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Tanvi Lal reacted on thisTanvi Lal reacted on thisI'm taking on a new role leading Founders Peak at peakst8. peakst8 (peak-state) is a health, fitness and active lifestyle company - an initiative by Rainmatter and Zerodha. Focussed on the health and wellbeing of the everyday athlete, it brings people together through sport, movement and community. Founders Peak is one of peakst8’s initiatives, alongside HYROX INDIA, IRONMAN INDIA, No Parking by one8world and the peakst8 Festival. At Founders Peak, we're building a community through shared fitness experiences and meaningful connections - with founders’ mental health and wellbeing at its heart. Dilip Kumar, Sagar Gudekote, Deepak Raj, Shreyans Jain, Aisha Sayed, Arvind Subramanian, Shravankumar Suvarna.
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Tanvi Lal liked thisOctober has been our best month so far. (Actually, every new month is the best month, touchwood 🙏 ) We delivered 10X more minutes than we did six months ago. While the interesting thing is, most of that growth came from expanding the work we do with existing clients. That kind of expansion happens when you understand a company’s product, customers, and systems deeply enough to keep finding new ways to help. We recently completed our October monthly business reviews (MBRs). We looked at what happened, where we stand against the outcomes we set out to achieve, and what the data is telling us to do next. And not only in terms of calls, but also what we have learnt from these calls - customer insights, and the new feature requests users have! Those conversations also gave our clients’ leadership teams product insights they can act on. This is the work behind Ringg AI. We’re more than a voice AI platform. We’re an AI transformation and implementation partner for the enterprises we work with. And that's why the stickiness comes from. Our AI strategists and TPMs spend time learning the products they support, researching new ideas, and building a case for where AI can make a meaningful difference. Then we work with our clients to put those ideas into practice and measure the results. **It's like a traditional consulting job, but here you're not just presenting your findings but also taking action and executing things. and that makes the job very interesting. October’s growth is exciting. What matters even more to us is that our clients are seeing enough value to ask, “What should we solve together next?” We do think more than a per-minute cost! If you’re thinking through where AI could make a real difference in your business, we’d love to talk. (First slide is attached - We need to work together to unfold other slides :) ) #VoiceAI #AItransformation #Implementation #Enterprise #AI #Agents
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Wingman
Make A Difference
- 1 year 6 months
Education
Mentoring 17 year old girl youth in inculcating transition and life skills targeted career counseling and academic support.
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Young Advisory Board
NHRD Bangalore Chapter
- Present 3 years 3 months
Education
The National HRD Network is the National Apex body of professionals committed to promoting the HRD movement in the country and enhancing the capability of human resource professionals to compete globally and thereby creating value for society.
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Contributing Member
seachange by NewCampus
- Present 3 years 2 months
Education
seachange is a dedicated network for SEA HR builders to gather, learn and grow. Our community is the go-to forum for HR professionals at the startups powering the tech and innovation behind Southeast Asia’s incredible growth story. I contribute my experience through co-creating content and events, and learning alongside my peers to stay effective.
Projects
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Work life balance and studying the correlation between its various facets.
Study of the work life balance in education sector through primary research.The objective was to measure the correlation between the parameters- Overall work life Index (Which is the measure of Social needs, Personal needs, Time management, Team work, Compensation and benefits and work), Job satisfaction and Job commitment.
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HR Internship
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Designed Job description for VSoft Technologies Pvt Ltd for 20+ IT roles
Languages
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English
Full professional proficiency
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Hindi
Native or bilingual proficiency
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French
Elementary proficiency
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