NextGen & Frollo – One Piece of Advice Series

Ask someone about their career and you will usually get the highlights reel. The promotions, the projects, the wins. What you rarely get is the moment somebody said something to them that quietly changed everything.

That is what this series is about.

The idea

One Piece of Advice is exactly what it sounds like. We are sitting down with leaders across NextGen and Frollo and asking each of them to share the single best piece of advice they have ever received.

Not a career retrospective. Not a keynote. One question, one answer, and a short read you can finish with your morning coffee.

We gave each person four questions to choose from:

The pivot point. What is the best advice you received when you were facing a major professional risk, a setback, or a daunting career change?

People and influence. What advice completely changed the way you view leadership, manage teams, or build relationships with others?

The unconventional truth. What is the most unconventional or surprising piece of advice you have ever received that actually changed your career for the better?

The daily grind. What advice helped you master your daily workflow, protect your time, or maintain a healthy balance between work and life?

Each person answers whichever one resonates most. Some, it turns out, cannot pick just one.

Why we are doing it

Career advice has a habit of being abstract. Follow your passion. Play the long game. Back yourself. All fine sentiments, and all nearly impossible to act on by Tuesday.

The advice that actually sticks tends to be different. It is specific. It came from a real person at a real moment. And it changed something concrete about how the recipient works, decides or leads. That is the advice we are after: the kind you can take away and apply to your own day-to-day, not just nod along to.

We also think there is something valuable in hearing it from the person themselves. The leaders in this series are not sharing polished theory. They are sharing the thing someone once told them, why it landed, and how it still shapes what they do today. Good advice demystifies success. It is a reminder that the people a few steps ahead of you got there partly because someone helped them along the way.

What we hope you take from it

Our bar for each piece is simple. It should be short enough to read in a few minutes, honest about where the advice came from, and practical enough that you could try it this week. If even one post gives you a framework you adopt, a new habit you start, or a sentence that reframes how you think about your work, the series has done its job.

The series so far

We will add each new piece here as it lands.

• Nas Raja — Our Head of Delivery and AI Enablement. We asked for one piece of advice. Nas gave us four: on planning your career backwards, servant leadership, a three-point filter for career decisions, and the one-document productivity system he runs his day on. 
• Jo Cooper — Our Head of Product Management: on the difference between technical capability and influence, and why the ability to communicate your work is the race car that accelerates a career.
• Rich Williams — The CTO of Frollo: on the shortest and perhaps hardest advice in the series: don’t take anything personally.
• Sincy Chacko — Our Mobile Engineering Manager at Frollo: on why being constructive beats being agreeable, and how you don’t need every answer before taking the next step.
• Adrian Dharma — Our Creative Lead: on taming a heavy workload by compartmentalising tasks, and using an AI-powered brain dump to beat overwhelm.

If these insights have made you curious to learn more about the people who make NextGen special, you can:

• Explore our current openings: Find your next challenge on our Jobs Page.
• Stay connected: Not ready to apply just yet? Join our Online Community to stay updated on new roles and see what is happening behind the scenes.
• Get to know us: Learn more about our mission, our values, and our people by visiting our Careers Page.