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 technology landscape, organizations increasingly recognize that diverse leadership is a cornerstone of innovation and sustainable growth. Through initiatives like the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the company celebrates the women across its organization who are building impactful careers while actively clearing the path for others to follow.
In the latest spotlight of this ongoing series, the spotlight falls on Aakansha Bhalotia, a Principal Product Manager whose diverse 13-year career has spanned multiple continents and critical technical domains. Her professional trajectory has evolved from building foundational enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to currently leading product strategy, development, and go-to-market execution for the Precisely Platform and emerging artificial intelligence products. Her journey offers a compelling look at the realities of modern product leadership, the evolution of software engineering, and what it truly takes to carve out an influential space in a rapidly changing industry.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
For Bhalotia, an affinity for structured thinking and logic appeared early in life. Mathematics was her favorite subject throughout her school years, making engineering feel like a natural and intuitive path to pursue. However, the true catalyst that pulled her directly into the world of technology came from a very personal place: helping her father run his business.
During those formative years, she assisted him with the day-to-day operational mechanics of the business, handling billing, financial tallying, and navigating a custom order management process designed to track incoming raw materials and outgoing revenue. As the business eventually expanded, the family faced the compounding friction of replicating that complex operational model manually month after month. The process was exhausting and prompted a question that would ultimately define her professional outlook: What if there was a way to bring all of this together through software?
That initial instinct inspired her to start her career building ERP systems. Immersed in enterprise software, she saw firsthand how streamlining a messy data pipeline could save professionals countless hours of manual work every single week. Over the course of 13 years in the industry, her perspective matured. She realized that the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the "how" of building a solution—it is discovering the "what" and the "why." Determining which problems are actually worth solving, and identifying which ideas should remain on the drawing board, separates good technology from transformative technology.
Today, that same foundational instinct drives her work leading strategy, building, and go-to-market initiatives for Precisely B2B SaaS platform products, specifically focusing on Foundations and the fast-moving AI space. While the scale of the enterprise has changed dramatically since her days helping with her father’s business, her core mission remains entirely unchanged: find the friction, remove it, and solve practical customer problems.
Who has been your greatest professional mentor? What’s one thing you have learned from them?
Navigating a demanding technical career requires guidance, insight, and support. Throughout her professional life, Bhalotia has been fortunate to learn from a wide array of exceptional teachers, university professors, and department managers. Yet, when reflecting on the individuals who truly shaped her trajectory, she notes that the most impactful figures were not always traditional mentors in the conventional sense.
Instead, her career was profoundly shaped by executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership looks like in practice. These leaders were complemented by the vibrant peer community she discovered at ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first transitioned into product management after moving to the United States.
Her peers in Pittsburgh provided a secure, collaborative space where she could pressure-test messy, unrefined ideas alongside other like-minded builders who were equally passionate about the craft. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered critical career advice: when approaching leadership, bring a clear recommendation backed by evidence, not merely a problem waiting to be solved. When navigating periods of organizational ambiguity, the most effective approach is to build something tangible, demonstrate clearly how it benefits the customer, and make it as easy as possible for leadership to back the initiative.
What’s the biggest risk you took in your career? What was the reward?
Risk-taking is frequently a prerequisite for meaningful professional growth, and Bhalotia’s career features pivotal moments where she willingly walked away from comfort to embrace a fresh starting point.
The first major risk occurred when she walked away from a successful and established career in ERP consulting to completely pivot into product management. This transition coincided with her efforts to build a new life in the United States, where she actively immersed herself in local product communities to hone her craft alongside peers who shared her obsession with product development.
The second major risk came years later when she made the decision to relocate back to Gurugram, India, with her family after nearly a decade living and working in the United States. Despite the physical move across the globe, she maintained her responsibilities leading global enterprise strategy across international time zones. Both transitions felt uncomfortable and daunting at the time. Yet, she recognizes that she takes that exact same leap of faith today whenever her teams step into fast-moving AI and platform initiatives long before an established playbook exists. Each career reset and geographical challenge has ultimately rewarded her with a unique ability to bridge the gaps between customers, engineering teams, product groups, and go-to-market strategies across entirely different global markets.
As a woman, what challenges have you faced in the technology industry? How have you overcome them?
The technology sector has historically presented distinct hurdles for women, particularly those operating within deeply technical disciplines. Early in her career—working across complex domains such as ERP systems, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces (APIs)—Bhalotia frequently encountered the unspoken pressure to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was genuinely heard and respected.
Later in her career, as a mother leading complex global initiatives spanning the vast time zones between the United States and India, the nature of the challenge evolved. The primary obstacle shifted toward sustaining a high level of professional impact without falling into the pervasive trap of being "always on."
She has successfully navigated and overcome both sets of challenges through rigorous preparation and a commitment to ruthless prioritization. By mastering her subject matter and focusing her energy where it yields the highest practical return, she has maintained both professional excellence and personal balance.
Careers and Culture
Organizations that empower their workforce help market leaders make better decisions and build new possibilities for the future. For professionals interested in joining the team, Precisely maintains dedicated resources outlining its workplace culture and current career openings. The company emphasizes a collaborative environment centered on data integrity, innovation, and customer success, welcoming talent from diverse backgrounds to contribute to its global mission.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? How do you apply it to your personal and professional life?
Perspective often crystallizes around foundational pieces of guidance received early on. For Bhalotia, the single best piece of advice she ever received came from an early leader who told her: "Never wait for a mandate to fix a problem you can already see."
Over the course of 13 years in the tech sector, that single directive has organically evolved into four core rules she uses to guide product development and leadership today. First, cultivate the intuition to know what is actually worth building. Second, maintain the clarity required to frame the solution simply. Third, possess the taste to recognize when a user experience is truly great rather than merely functional. Fourth, retain the agency to execute all of the above without waiting to be asked by management.
Professionally, she notes that no one ever hands an employee a finished, step-by-step playbook. If a strategic gap is visible, the right course of action is to step directly into that white space, rally cross-functional teams around a clear, unified thesis, and prove the value of the solution with real customers to transform an early bet into an organizational priority.
On a personal level, maintaining that same sense of 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 protect periods of deep focus alongside the demands of motherhood, she refuses to wait for an abstract future. She decides on a path and takes action.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
As the technology landscape changes—particularly with the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence—the barrier to building software has collapsed. Today, individuals possess unprecedented leverage to build almost anything they can imagine. Because of this shift, Bhalotia emphasizes that deciding what to build and why it matters is now the most critical question an innovator can ask. Regardless of your specific title or corporate role, she advises younger professionals to grab every available opportunity to talk directly with customers and users.
The ultimate differentiator in a competitive market is having the unwavering conviction to own your voice and refuse to let impostor syndrome diminish it. Industry statistics highlight ongoing representation gaps: women currently hold approximately 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up roughly 30 percent of software engineering teams, and secure only about 2 percent of venture capital funding. When women feel out of place in a corporate room, Bhalotia urges them to recognize that they are not experiencing a competence gap; they are simply witnessing a representation gap. 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 requires intentional action to open doors and lift others as you climb. Bhalotia believes that the most effective way to advocate for women in technology is to deliberately build a culture founded on high agency and accountability. This involves bringing the right people into critical decision-making rooms, pushing major decisions deep into the organizational structure, and trusting talented professionals to exercise sound judgment.
Recognizing that AI fluency is currently the single greatest lever for career advancement in the tech sector, she is deeply committed to ensuring that women and the next generation are positioned at the very forefront of that technological shift. Within Precisely, she has put this philosophy into action by leading an internal AI pilot program designed to upskill more than 30 product managers and user experience designers across the company’s chief product officer organization. In addition to internal initiatives, she actively mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to proactively manage and strategize their own careers.
Outside the corporate environment, her commitment to community advocacy extends into education. She recently began delivering bi-weekly sessions on artificial intelligence and technology to underprivileged children—with a special focus on encouraging young girls—at the Naya Sawera NGO in her local neighborhood, working to open doors to the digital future early for the next generation.
Those interested in learning more about the company’s initiatives, workplace environment, and career opportunities can explore the official Precisely Careers and Culture page.
