Mechanical engineering taught me to find the constraint before touching anything else. Cloud economics turned out to be the same habit with a different unit: not stress and tolerance, but spend and utilization. Applied AI is the same habit again, except now the unit itself is often still being defined mid-project.
THE TRANSFERABLE PART IS THE METHOD
Domain knowledge expires. Problem structuring doesn't. I didn't learn cloud and then separately learn product. I kept reapplying the same first-principles habit from NIT Trichy and swapped the vocabulary each time. That's far cheaper than it sounds from the outside, and far less linear than any resume line makes it look.
WHAT ACTUALLY COSTS TIME
Not the learning. The credibility. Nobody hands you authority in a new domain because you were sharp in the old one. You rebuild it by shipping something small and specific before you claim any of it out loud. At Deloitte that meant running the monthly billing cycle and rebuilding the chargeback logic before I called myself a FinOps person. At PwC it meant owning the client analytics application end to end before I pointed to the product work by name.