Run Toward the Fire - by Creena Mehta (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book is for the engineering manager whose team is on fire, the senior IC who is being pushed into leadership and isn't sure she wants it, the parent building a career in the margins between school pickups and stand-ups, and the woman in a room where she is still the only one.

From a dusty garage in Indore, India, to the escalation rooms of Microsoft, Creena Mehta's journey is a story of grit, trust, and running toward the fires others tend to avoid. Raised by a father who taught her that trust is built "pebble by pebble" and a mother who taught her to become "salt" -- essential, even when unseen -- Creena carried those lessons into twenty-five years of building products, rebuilding teams, and leading through chaos.

RUN to FIRE is not a traditional leadership manual. It is a collection of stories: late-night customer crises, fragile teams searching for identity, products breaking in front of executives, motherhood colliding with ambition, and career pivots that demanded courage before clarity. Through Intel, Cisco, HP, Microsoft India, and Microsoft Canada, Creena shows how high-performing teams are not created by frameworks alone, but by trust, recognition, courage, customer obsession, and leaders willing to stand in the trenches first.

This is a book for engineers, managers, builders, parents, and anyone standing before a fire wondering whether to step forward. Creena's answer is clear: warriors are not born. They are built one pebble, one person, one hard choice at a time.

About the Author

Creena Mehta is a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft, based in Vancouver, Canada. Over 25 years in the software industry, she has built and led high-performing engineering teams across five companies and three continents -- beginning her career in Indore, India, and spanning organizations including Intel, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Microsoft. In her current role, she leads PowerPoint Live (PPTL) -- the feature that lets millions of presenters share slides directly inside Microsoft Teams meetings. Prior to PPTL, she shipped features like Teams Video Clips and Bing Visual Search in Photos.

In Microsoft India, she led cross-geo engineering for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, where she grew customer-satisfaction levels in a matter of months and shipped flagship features like Inspections and ML-based Similar Case Prediction. She also worked across Project Service and Customer Service, holding various portfolios in Microsoft Bangalore. She holds a Master's in Information Technology from IIT Bombay, with a research focus on machine learning and data mining.

A three-time hackathon winner in Vancouver and recipient of Microsoft's Customer Obsession award, she is known for building self-driven, customer-obsessed teams in highly challenging environments.