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 landscape, women are carving out impactful paths while actively paving the way for those who follow. As part of the ongoing Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization celebrates the trailblazers within its ranks who are building transformative careers and empowering others to do the same. In this latest spotlight, we explore the professional journey of Aakansha Bhalotia, Principal Product Manager, whose impressive 13-year career has spanned from developing complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to spearheading strategy and go-to-market initiatives for the Precisely Platform and cutting-edge artificial intelligence products. Her story offers a compelling look at the evolution of modern tech leadership, the challenges of navigating deeply technical domains, and the importance of high agency in driving professional success.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
For Bhalotia, the gravitational pull toward technology began long before she entered the corporate workforce. Having always been drawn to numbers, mathematics naturally emerged as her favorite subject during her school years, making engineering feel like a logical next step. However, the true catalyst that cemented her passion for technology came from a very personal place: helping her father run his business.
During those formative years, she assisted with billing, financial tallying, and navigating custom order management processes designed to track incoming raw materials alongside outgoing revenue. As the business expanded, the process of replicating that operational model manually month after month became increasingly exhausting. It sparked a critical question that would ultimately define her career trajectory: "What if there was a way to bring all of this together?"
That foundational instinct led her to begin her professional life building ERP systems. Immersed in this space, she witnessed firsthand how fixing a messy, inefficient data pipeline could save professionals hours of manual work every single week. Over the course of a 13-year journey, she came to a profound realization: the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the technical "how" of building a solution, but rather the strategic "what" and "why." The crucial challenge lies in determining precisely which problems are worth solving and which ideas should remain on the drawing board.
Today, Bhalotia leads strategy, product building, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s B2B SaaS platform products, focusing specifically on foundational infrastructure and the rapidly evolving AI space. While the operational scale has shifted dramatically from her early days helping her father’s business, her core instinct remains entirely unchanged: find the 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?
Navigating a successful technology career often requires guidance, wisdom, and support from seasoned professionals. Throughout her career, Bhalotia has learned valuable lessons from exceptional teachers, professors, and managers. Yet, she notes that the individuals who shaped her trajectory most profoundly were not traditional mentors in the conventional sense. Instead, they were executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership truly looks like, complemented by the vibrant peer community she discovered at ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first transitioned into Product Management in the United States.
Her peers in Pittsburgh provided a vital, psychologically safe space where she could pressure-test messy, early-stage ideas alongside like-minded builders who shared her deep passion for product development. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered invaluable guidance on how to navigate corporate landscapes: always bring a clear recommendation backed by concrete evidence rather than merely presenting a problem. When navigating ambiguous paths, her experiences taught her to build something tangible, demonstrate its direct value to the customer, and make it seamless for leadership to offer their backing.
What’s the biggest risk you took in your career? What was the reward?
Risk-taking is often a prerequisite for growth in the fast-paced technology sector. For Bhalotia, stepping out of her comfort zone meant willingly starting over as a beginner on multiple occasions.
The first major pivot occurred when she walked away from a successful, established career in ERP consulting to dive headfirst 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 her dedication to the field.
The second major inflection point came when she decided to relocate back to Gurugram, India, with her family after spending nearly a decade in the United States, all while continuing to lead global enterprise strategy remotely and across international boundaries. Both transitions felt uncomfortable and daunting at the time. Yet, she continues to embrace that exact same leap today whenever she steps into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives before a definitive playbook even exists. Each reset and challenge has granted her a rare, holistic capability: the power 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?
Building a career in highly specialized sectors comes with its own unique set of obstacles. Early in her career, working within deep technical domains such as ERP systems, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces (APIs), Bhalotia frequently encountered the unspoken, exhausting pressure to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic perspective was truly heard and acknowledged.
Later in her journey, as a mother leading complex global initiatives across North American and Indian time zones, the challenge evolved. The hurdle shifted toward sustaining high professional impact without falling into the pervasive trap of being "always on." She has systematically overcome both hurdles through rigorous preparation and ruthless prioritization.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? How do you apply it to your personal and professional life?
Insights that resonate early in a career often form the bedrock of future leadership styles. The best advice Bhalotia ever received came from an early leader who told her simply: "Never wait for a mandate to fix a problem you can already see."
Over more than a decade in the technology industry, that single piece of guidance has matured into four core rules she uses to lead product development today: maintaining the intuition to know what is genuinely worth building, possessing the clarity to frame solutions simply, having the discerning taste to recognize when a user experience is truly great rather than merely functional, and retaining the personal agency to execute all of the above without waiting to be asked.
Professionally, she recognizes that organizations rarely hand out a finished playbook. If she identifies a strategic gap, she willingly steps into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a cohesive thesis, and proves customer value to turn an initial bet into a broader organizational priority. Personally, exercising that same agency means refusing to live life on autopilot. Whether relocating her family back to India after years abroad or structuring daily routines to fiercely protect periods of deep focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she refuses to wait for an abstract "someday"—she decides and she moves forward.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
As the technology landscape continues to evolve, particularly with the advent and proliferation of advanced artificial intelligence tools, the fundamental barrier to building has collapsed. Today, professionals possess unprecedented leverage to construct nearly 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, Bhalotia stresses the importance of grabbing every available opportunity to speak directly with customers and end users.
The ultimate professional differentiator, she emphasizes, is having the unwavering conviction to own your voice—cautioning younger women never to let impostor syndrome diminish their presence. Statistics highlight ongoing disparities in the sector, with women currently holding approximately 30 percent of senior leadership roles, making up roughly 30 percent of software engineering teams, and securing only about 2 percent of venture capital funding. When women feel out of place in a boardroom or technical meeting, Bhalotia advises them to recognize that they are not experiencing a competence gap, but merely a representation gap. Her message to the next generation 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 goes beyond personal achievement; it involves actively dismantling barriers and creating pathways for others. Bhalotia believes that the most effective way to advocate for women in technology is to foster a robust culture of high agency and accountability. This involves bringing the right people into the room, pushing critical decision-making deep into the organizational structure, and trusting talented individuals to exercise sound judgment.
Recognizing that artificial intelligence fluency is currently the single greatest catalyst for career advancement in the tech sector, 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 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 Chief Product Officer organization.
In addition to her corporate initiatives, she regularly mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to proactively manage their career trajectories. Outside of her professional 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 and spark curiosity early in their lives.
For those interested in exploring similar opportunities, learning more about the company’s vibrant professional community, and viewing current career openings, further details are available on the official Precisely Careers and Culture page.
