A career in the technology sector can unfold across countless diverse paths when it is consistently guided by innate curiosity, courageous decision-making, and an unwavering commitment to solving meaningful, real-world problems. Through the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization frequently shines a spotlight on the exceptional women across its global enterprise who are actively forging impactful professional paths while simultaneously clearing the way for others to follow in their footsteps. In the latest installment of this ongoing spotlight series, the focus turns to Aakansha Bhalotia, a Principal Product Manager whose diverse, 13-year career has spanned from constructing complex Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to spearheading the comprehensive strategy and go-to-market execution for the Precisely Platform and its growing portfolio of artificial intelligence products.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
Reflecting on her early inspirations, Bhalotia notes that she has always possessed a natural affinity for numbers. Because mathematics served as her absolute favorite subject throughout her formative school years, pursuing engineering felt like an entirely organic and expected direction. However, the true, decisive pull toward the technology industry originated much closer to home: helping her father manage and scale his growing business operations.
During those formative years, Bhalotia routinely assisted him with essential administrative tasks, including billing, financial tallying, and navigating a custom order management process designed to meticulously track incoming raw materials alongside outgoing enterprise revenues. As the enterprise eventually expanded, the sheer realization that they were forced to manually replicate that complex operational model month after month became profoundly exhausting. It sparked a critical question that would ultimately define her life’s work: What if there was a way to seamlessly bring all of these fragmented pieces together into a unified system?
That initial practical instinct ultimately propelled her to launch her professional career building robust ERP systems. In those early roles, she witnessed firsthand how smoothing out a messy, inefficient data pipeline could directly save hardworking teams countless hours of tedious manual labor every single week. Over the course of a 13-year trajectory, she came to understand a fundamental truth of software engineering and product development: the hardest and most valuable problem is rarely the mechanical "how" of building a solution, but rather the crucial "what" and the "why."
Specifically, product leaders must continually determine which problems are genuinely worth solving and which initial concepts should remain merely ideas. Today, Bhalotia leverages that hard-earned perspective to lead strategy, product development, and comprehensive go-to-market initiatives for the Precisely B2B SaaS platform products, working extensively across the critical Foundations and artificial intelligence spaces. While the corporate scale has naturally evolved and expanded over the years, her core professional instinct remains completely unchanged: find the operational friction, systematically remove it, and solve practical problems for the customer.
Who has been your greatest professional mentor? What’s one thing you have learned from them?
Throughout her extensive career journey, Bhalotia has considered herself exceptionally fortunate to learn valuable lessons from a wide array of dedicated teachers, university professors, and seasoned corporate managers. Yet, when reflecting candidly on the individuals who most profoundly shaped her professional trajectory, she points out that her most influential guides were not traditional mentors in the conventional sense. Instead, they were executive sponsors who vividly modeled what a high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership environment truly looks like, working alongside the vibrant peer community she discovered through ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first made the professional transition into product management after relocating to the United States.
The supportive peers she encountered in Pittsburgh provided a safe, collaborative space where she could freely pressure-test messy, unpolished ideas alongside like-minded builders. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered invaluable guidance, teaching her the importance of bringing a clear, evidence-backed recommendation to the table rather than merely presenting an isolated problem to leadership. When navigating ambiguous professional terrain, she learned that the most effective approach is to build something tangible, demonstrate precisely how it benefits the customer, and make it exceptionally easy for executive leadership to confidently 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 hallmark of Bhalotia’s career progression. On two separate occasions, she consciously walked away from familiar paths where she enjoyed stability and comfort, choosing instead to start completely over as the designated beginner in the room.
The first major pivot occurred when she left behind a successful, established career in ERP consulting to dive headfirst into product management. This transition coincided with the monumental task of building a new life in the United States, where she immediately immersed herself in local product communities to relentlessly hone her craft alongside peers who shared her profound obsession with product development.
The second major leap involved relocating back to Gurugram, India, alongside her family after spending nearly a decade living and working in the United States, all while continuing to successfully lead global enterprise strategy across international divides. While both of these pivotal moments felt deeply uncomfortable and uncertain at the time, she recognizes that she takes that exact same leap today whenever she steps fearlessly into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives before any established playbook or precedent exists. Each successive reset and professional challenge has ultimately granted her the invaluable opportunity to effectively connect customers, engineering teams, product developers, 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?
Navigating the technology sector as a woman has presented distinct hurdles, particularly during the earlier stages of her career. Working within deep, highly technical domains such as enterprise resource planning, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces, Bhalotia frequently encountered the unspoken, exhausting pressure to prove her technical depth twice over before her strategic point of view was genuinely heard and respected by her peers.
Later in her career, as she stepped into the demanding role of a mother leading complex global initiatives spanning both United States and Indian time zones, the primary challenge shifted dramatically. She had to learn how to sustain a high level of professional impact without falling into the pervasive modern trap of remaining "always on." She has successfully overcome both of these persistent challenges through meticulous, rigorous preparation and a commitment to ruthless personal and professional prioritization.
Careers and Culture
Precisely continues to help global market leaders make better, more informed decisions while unlocking exciting new technological possibilities. For professionals seeking to join an innovative, forward-thinking team, the organization invites prospective candidates to explore its current career openings and learn more about its workplace culture by visiting the dedicated Careers and Culture page on the company website.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? How do you apply it to your personal and professional life?
The most impactful piece of advice Bhalotia ever received came early on from a perceptive corporate leader who told her a simple yet transformative truth: never wait for an official mandate to fix a problem you can already clearly see. Over the course of her 13 years in the technology sector, that foundational guidance has organically evolved into the four core rules she now relies on to successfully lead product strategy today.
First, she maintains the professional intuition required to know what is genuinely worth building. Second, she exercises the clarity needed to frame the proposed solution in simple, understandable terms. Third, she applies the refined taste necessary to recognize when a user experience is truly great rather than merely functional. Finally, she holds the personal agency to execute all of the above without waiting around to be asked by management.
Professionally, she notes that nobody ever simply hands an employee a finished, step-by-step playbook. Whenever she identifies a strategic gap within the enterprise, she proactively steps directly into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a unified, clear thesis, and empirically proves the value with real customers to successfully transform an early, speculative bet into an established organizational priority.
On a personal level, maintaining that same level of high agency means she categorically refuses to live her life on autopilot. Whether it involved making the bold decision to move her family back to India following their years in the United States, or intentionally designing her daily routines to fiercely protect periods of deep focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she refuses to wait for some distant "someday." She simply decides on a path and moves forward with purpose.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
For younger women stepping into the modern technology landscape, Bhalotia emphasizes that the overall barrier to building has collapsed dramatically in the age of artificial intelligence. Today, individuals possess unprecedented leverage to construct virtually anything they can possibly imagine. Consequently, determining precisely what to build and understanding the deeper "why" behind it remains the single most important question a professional can ask. Regardless of your specific title or corporate function, she strongly advises seizing every available opportunity to speak directly with end users and customers.
The ultimate differentiator in the modern workforce is having the inner conviction to firmly own your unique voice—reminding rising professionals never to let impostor syndrome diminish their presence. Statistics indicate that women currently occupy approximately 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up roughly 30 percent of software engineering teams, and successfully raise a mere two percent of total venture capital funding. When women experience moments where they feel momentarily out of place in a corporate room, Bhalotia encourages them to recognize that they are not witnessing a personal competence gap, but rather a persistent industry representation gap. In those moments, she advises them to proudly claim and own their 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?
For Bhalotia, the most effective way to actively advocate for women in the technology sector is to cultivate a robust organizational culture rooted in high agency and accountability. This involves intentionally bringing the right, diverse voices into critical rooms, pushing decision-making authority deep down into the organizational structure, and trusting exceptionally talented people to exercise sound, independent judgment.
Recognizing that artificial intelligence fluency currently serves as the single greatest accelerator for career advancement in the modern tech landscape, she remains deeply passionate about ensuring that women and the next generation of professionals are positioned squarely at the forefront of that monumental shift. At Precisely, one tangible way she has paid this philosophy forward is by leading an internal artificial intelligence pilot program designed to successfully upskill more than 30 product managers and user experience designers across the chief product officer organization.
Furthermore, she routinely mentors emerging product owners and recent university graduates on how to strategically product-manage their own long-term careers. Outside of her corporate responsibilities, she recently initiated bi-weekly educational sessions focused on artificial intelligence and technology for underprivileged children—with a special emphasis on encouraging young girls—at the Naya Sawera NGO located in her local neighborhood, aiming to open critical technological doors for them early in life.
