A career in technology can take many paths when it is shaped by curiosity, bold decisions, and a willingness to solve meaningful problems. Across the global tech sector, professionals constantly navigate shifting landscapes, emerging technologies, and complex enterprise needs. Within the technology industry, celebrating the journeys of women who build impactful careers while paving the way for others remains vital to driving broader industry transformation. As part of the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization continues to spotlight women across its enterprise who are leading critical initiatives and mentoring the next generation of builders.
In a recent organizational spotlight, the spotlight falls on Aakansha Bhalotia, a Principal Product Manager whose diverse 13-year career has spanned building early enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to currently leading strategy and go-to-market operations for the Precisely Platform and its growing portfolio of artificial intelligence products. Her journey offers an illuminating look at how foundational technical roots, combined with a strong sense of personal agency and strategic vision, can guide a long-term career in software development and product management.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
For Bhalotia, the gravitational pull toward the tech industry began early in life, rooted in an affinity for problem-solving and mathematics. Growing up, mathematics was her favorite subject in school, making engineering feel like a natural and intuitive path to follow. However, the true catalyst that pulled her directly into the practical application of technology came from a very personal place: helping her father run his family business.
During those formative years, she assisted with core operational tasks including billing, financial tallying, and navigating a custom order management process that tracked incoming raw materials alongside outgoing revenue. When the business eventually expanded, the family faced the exhausting reality of replicating that operational model manually month after month. That friction sparked a transformative question that would define her professional outlook: What if there was a way to bring all of this together seamlessly?
That initial instinct inspired her to start her professional career building enterprise resource planning systems. In those early roles, she witnessed firsthand how optimizing a messy data pipeline could spare workers hours of manual, repetitive labor every single week. Over the course of a 13-year career spanning multiple domains, she came to a fundamental realization: the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the technical "how" of building a solution. Instead, the real challenge lies in determining the "what" and the "why."
Professionally, this means deciphering which problems are truly worth solving and which ideas should remain on the drawing board. Today, that foundational mindset drives her current role, where she leads strategy, product building, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s B2B SaaS platform products, specifically focusing on the Foundations and AI space. While the scale of her responsibilities has grown exponentially over the years, her core instinct has remained entirely unchanged: find the operational friction, remove it, and solve practical, real-world customer problems.
Who has been your greatest professional mentor? What’s one thing you have learned from them?
Throughout a dynamic career that has crossed international borders and complex technical sectors, Bhalotia has been fortunate to learn from exceptional teachers, university professors, and department managers. Yet, when reflecting on the individuals who truly shaped her professional trajectory, she notes that the most impactful influences were not always traditional mentors in the classic sense.
Instead, her growth was heavily shaped by executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership looks like in practice. This guidance was matched by the vibrant peer community she discovered through ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first transitioned into formal Product Management roles upon moving to the United States.
The peers she collaborated with in Pittsburgh provided a vital, safe environment where she could pressure-test messy, early-stage ideas alongside other like-minded builders. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered invaluable advice on how to navigate corporate landscapes: always bring a clear recommendation backed by concrete evidence rather than simply presenting a problem. When navigating ambiguous paths within an organization, her mentors taught her to build something tangible, demonstrate its clear utility to the customer, and make it as easy as possible for leadership to support and back the initiative.
What’s the biggest risk you took in your career? What was the reward?
Taking bold professional risks has been a defining characteristic of Bhalotia’s career progression. Twice, she made the conscious decision to walk away from professional paths where she felt comfortable and secure, choosing instead to start over as the absolute beginner in the room.
The first major pivot occurred when she left a successful, established career in ERP consulting to transition entirely into Product Management. This transition coincided with building a new life in the United States, where she immersed herself in local product communities to sharpen her craft alongside peers who shared an obsessive dedication to product development.
The second major inflection point came years later when she decided to relocate back to Gurugram, India, with her family after nearly a decade living and working in the United States. Remarkably, she made this international move while continuing to lead global enterprise strategy across multiple regions. At the time, both transitions felt uncomfortable and daunting. Yet, she recognizes that she takes that exact same leap of faith today whenever she steps into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives before a formal playbook or historical precedent even exists. Each reset and professional challenge has ultimately rewarded her by granting her the unique opportunity to seamlessly connect customers, engineering teams, product developers, and go-to-market strategies across completely different global markets.
As a woman, what challenges have you faced in the technology industry? How have you overcome them?
Navigating the technology sector as a woman has presented distinct hurdles, particularly when operating within deeply technical domains. Early in her career—working across complex technical areas such as ERP systems, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and APIs—she frequently encountered an unspoken, pervasive pressure. She often felt she had to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was acknowledged and heard by her peers and leadership.
Later in her career, as her responsibilities expanded to include motherhood alongside leading global enterprise initiatives across competing time zones in the United States and India, the primary challenge shifted. The obstacle was no longer proving technical competence, but rather learning how to sustain high professional impact without falling into the modern trap of being perpetually "always on."
She has successfully overcome both challenges through rigorous preparation and an unwavering commitment to ruthless prioritization. By mastering her subject matter and fiercely protecting her time and focus, she has maintained a high standard of professional output while balancing the demands of a global leadership role and family life.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? How do you apply it to your personal and professional life?
The most resonant advice of her career came from an early leader who shared a simple yet profound directive: "Never wait for a mandate to fix a problem you can already see."
Over more than a decade in the tech industry, that foundational advice has evolved into four core operational rules that Bhalotia uses to lead product development today. First, cultivate the intuition to know what is actually worth building. Second, maintain the clarity needed to frame the proposed solution simply. Third, possess the taste required to recognize when a user experience is genuinely great rather than merely functional. Finally, maintain the professional agency to execute all of the above without waiting to be asked by superiors.
In a professional context, she notes that organizations rarely hand employees a finished playbook for success. If she identifies a strategic gap within the business, she steps directly into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a clear, unified thesis, and proves the underlying value with real customers to transform an early experimental bet into a core organizational priority.
In her personal life, maintaining that same sense of agency means refusing to live life on autopilot. Whether it involved moving her family back to India after a decade abroad or purposefully designing daily routines to protect periods of deep focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she does not wait for a vague "someday" to enact change—she makes a decision and takes action.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
For younger women stepping into the technology sector today, the current landscape offers unprecedented opportunities. In an era shaped by artificial intelligence, the traditional barriers to building technological solutions have largely collapsed, granting individuals the leverage to build almost anything they can imagine. Consequently, deciding what to build and why remains the most critical question an innovator can ask. Regardless of your specific corporate role, she advises women to grab every available opportunity to speak directly with customers and users.
The ultimate professional differentiator is having the internal conviction to firmly own your voice and refuse to let impostor syndrome diminish it. Current industry data highlights persistent representation gaps: women hold approximately 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up roughly 30 percent of software engineering teams, and secure an estimated 2 percent of venture capital funding. When a woman feels out of place in a corporate room, Bhalotia emphasizes that she is not experiencing a personal competence gap, but merely witnessing a broader industry representation gap. Her message to emerging professionals is clear: own your seat at the table anyway.
As a successful woman in technology, what’s one thing you do to pay it forward and advocate for other women in the field?
True advocacy for women in technology extends beyond mentorship; it requires actively constructing a corporate culture rooted in high agency and accountability. For Bhalotia, this means intentionally bringing the right voices into the room, pushing decision-making authority deep into the organization, and placing deep trust in talented individuals to exercise sound judgment.
Recognizing that fluency in artificial intelligence represents the single greatest lever for career advancement in the modern tech economy, she remains deeply committed to ensuring that women and the next generation are positioned at the absolute forefront of that technological shift. At Precisely, she has paid this forward by leading an internal AI pilot designed to upskill more than 30 product managers and UX designers across the Chief Product Office organization. Additionally, she actively mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to proactively manage and steer their own careers.
Outside the corporate environment, she has recently begun delivering bi-weekly educational sessions focused on artificial intelligence and core technology concepts to underprivileged children—with a special emphasis on young girls—through the Naya Sawera NGO in her local community, aiming to open doors and inspire early curiosity.
For those interested in learning more about workplace culture, professional opportunities, and current openings at the organization, further information can be found by visiting the official Precisely Careers and Culture page.
