A career in technology can take many unexpected and rewarding paths when it is shaped by genuine curiosity, bold executive decisions, and an unwavering willingness to solve meaningful problems. In the ongoing Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization celebrates the remarkable women across its global enterprise who are building impactful careers while actively clearing the path for others to do the same. In the latest leadership spotlight, the focus turns to Aakansha Bhalotia, Principal Product Manager at Precisely. Over a dynamic 13-year career, Bhalotia’s professional journey has spanned from the foundational architecture of enterprise resource planning systems to leading cutting-edge strategy and go-to-market initiatives for the Precisely Platform and its expanding portfolio of artificial intelligence products.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
Bhalotia’s fascination with structure and logic began early in life. She has always been deeply drawn to numbers, and because mathematics was her favorite subject throughout her school years, pursuing engineering felt like a completely natural academic and professional path. However, the real catalyst that pulled her directly into the technology sector came from a very personal place: helping her father manage and scale his business operations.
During those formative years, she assisted him with billing, financial tallying, and navigating a custom order management process that carefully tracked incoming raw materials against outgoing revenue. When the business expanded, attempting to replicate that complex model manually month after month became physically and mentally exhausting. It sparked a foundational question in her mind that would ultimately define her life’s work: What if there was a way to bring all of this operational chaos together seamlessly?
That single instinctual query led her to start her career building enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. In those early roles, she saw firsthand how fixing a messy, disjointed data pipeline could save professionals countless hours of tedious manual work every single week. Over the course of 13 years in the industry, she came to a profound realization: the hardest and most valuable problem to solve in technology is never the technical "how" of building a feature. Instead, it is always the "what" and the "why."
Professionals must constantly evaluate which problems are actually worth solving and which clever ideas should simply remain ideas. Today, Bhalotia leads product strategy, development, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s core business-to-business software-as-a-service platform products, spanning across foundational data services and the fast-evolving artificial intelligence space. While the operational scale has changed dramatically since her days helping her father’s business, her core professional instinct remains entirely unchanged: find the operational friction, remove it systematically, and solve practical, everyday problems for customers.
Who has been your greatest professional mentor? What’s one thing you have learned from them?
Throughout her extensive career, Bhalotia has been fortunate to learn valuable lessons from exceptional teachers, university professors, and department managers. Yet, when reflecting on her trajectory, she notes that the individuals who shaped her professional path most profoundly were not traditional mentors in the conventional sense. Rather, they were executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership looks like in practice, paired closely with the supportive peer community she discovered through ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first transitioned into product management after moving to the United States.
Her peers in Pittsburgh provided a safe, collaborative environment where she could pressure-test messy, half-formed ideas alongside other like-minded builders. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered crucial strategic guidance, teaching her the importance of bringing a clear, evidence-backed recommendation to the table rather than merely presenting an unresolved problem. When navigating ambiguous paths and uncharted corporate territory, the key is to build something tangible, demonstrate clearly how it benefits the customer, and make it as easy as possible for executive leadership to support and back the initiative.
What’s the biggest risk you took in your career? What was the reward?
Taking calculated risks has been a recurring theme in Bhalotia’s professional life. Twice during her career, she made the bold choice to walk away from paths where she was entirely comfortable, choosing instead to step completely out of her comfort zone and start over as the ultimate beginner in the room.
The first major risk involved leaving a highly successful and stable career in ERP consulting to pivot entirely into product management. At the same time, she was building a new life in the United States, throwing herself headfirst into professional product communities to hone her craft alongside peers who shared her obsession with product excellence.
The second major inflection point came when she decided to relocate back to Gurugram, India, with her family after nearly a decade living and working in the United States, all while continuing to lead complex global enterprise strategy across international markets. Both moments felt profoundly uncomfortable and uncertain at the time they occurred. Yet, she finds herself taking that exact same leap today whenever she and her teams step into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives long before an established playbook exists. Each career reset and professional challenge has given her a unique opportunity to connect customers, engineering talent, product teams, and go-to-market strategies across entirely different geographical and economic 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 obstacles over the years. Early in her career, while working in deeply technical domains such as ERP systems, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces, the primary challenge was often the unspoken, persistent pressure to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was seriously heard or valued.
Later in her career, as a working mother leading complex global initiatives spanning across both United States and India time zones, the nature of the challenge shifted. The hurdle became learning how to sustain high professional impact without falling into the exhausting trap of being "always on." Bhalotia has successfully overcome both sets of challenges through meticulous preparation and a commitment to ruthless professional prioritization.
Market leaders rely heavily on organizations like Precisely to make better decisions and build new possibilities. For professionals interested in joining this dynamic team, the company maintains dedicated resources on its Careers and Culture page to share information about working environments and current job openings.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? How do you apply it to your personal and professional life?
The most impactful advice Bhalotia ever received came from an early-career leader who told her a simple yet transformative truth: never wait for a formal mandate to fix a problem you can already see. Over more than a decade in tech, that piece of advice has naturally evolved into the four foundational rules she uses to guide her product leadership today.
First, a leader must have the intuition to know what is actually worth building. Second, they must possess the clarity required to frame the resulting solution simply. Third, they need the refined taste to recognize when a user experience is truly great rather than merely functional. Finally, they must have the personal agency to execute all of the above without waiting around to be explicitly asked.
In her professional life, she understands that nobody simply hands employees a finished, step-by-step playbook. If she spots a strategic gap in the organization, she actively steps into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a cohesive thesis, and proves customer value early to turn an initial bet into a broader organizational priority.
On a personal level, maintaining high agency means refusing to live life on autopilot. Whether it involved moving her family back to India after years abroad or designing daily routines that carefully protect deep focus time alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she refuses to wait for a hypothetical "someday." She makes a decisive choice and takes action.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
In the current era of artificial intelligence, the barrier to building technology has collapsed significantly, granting individuals unprecedented leverage to create almost anything they can imagine. Because of this shift, deciding what to build and why those specific solutions matter are the most critical questions a professional can ask. Regardless of a person’s specific title or department within the corporate world, Bhalotia advises everyone to grab every available opportunity to talk directly to actual customers and users.
The ultimate professional differentiator is having the internal conviction to firmly own one’s voice—ensuring that impostor syndrome is never allowed to shrink it. Current industry data highlights that women hold roughly thirty percent of senior leadership roles, make up about thirty percent of software engineering teams, and secure approximately two percent of venture capital funding. When women feel out of place in a corporate boardroom or engineering meeting, Bhalotia emphasizes that they are not experiencing a personal competence gap; rather, they are simply observing a broader industry representation gap. They should own their seats 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, in Bhalotia’s view, requires actively building a corporate culture rooted in high agency and accountability. This is achieved by bringing the right people into crucial rooms, pushing decision-making authority deep into the organization, and trusting talented individuals to exercise sound judgment.
At the present moment, the most significant lever for career advancement across the technology landscape is AI fluency. Bhalotia is deeply passionate about ensuring that women and the next generation of technologists are positioned securely at the very forefront of that shift. At Precisely, she has paid this forward by leading an internal artificial intelligence pilot designed to upskill more than thirty product managers and user experience designers across the chief product officer organization.
She also actively mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to proactively manage their own career trajectories. Outside of her corporate responsibilities, she recently began delivering bi-weekly educational sessions on artificial intelligence and technology to underprivileged children—with a special focus on young girls—at the Naya Sawera NGO in her local neighborhood, aiming to open doors of opportunity for them as early as possible.
Readers interested in learning more about the company’s work environment can visit the official Precisely Careers and Culture page.
