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 sector, professionals constantly navigate shifting landscapes, emerging methodologies, and evolving business demands. Within this dynamic environment, the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series celebrates the women across the organization who are building impactful careers while actively helping others do the same. In the latest spotlight of this ongoing initiative, the spotlight turns to Aakansha Bhalotia, Principal Product Manager. Over a robust 13-year career, Bhalotia’s professional journey has taken her from the foundational world of building complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to leading global strategy and go-to-market initiatives for the Precisely Platform and its cutting-edge artificial intelligence products. Her story offers a compelling look at the evolution of modern product management, the importance of high agency, and the ongoing mission to champion representation and leadership for women in the technology sector.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
For Bhalotia, an affinity for analytical thinking and problem-solving emerged long before she entered the corporate technology landscape. Having always been drawn to numbers, with mathematics serving as her favorite subject during her school years, engineering felt like a natural and intuitive path to follow. However, the true, decisive pull into the world of technology originated much closer to home: helping her father run his business.
During those formative years, Bhalotia assisted with critical operational tasks such as billing, tallying figures, and managing a custom order management process that carefully tracked incoming raw materials alongside outgoing revenue. As the business eventually expanded, the reality of replicating that intricate operational model manually month after month became exhausting. That friction sparked a transformative question: what if there was a way to bring all of these disparate moving parts together seamlessly?
That initial instinct ultimately propelled her to kick off her professional career building ERP systems. In those early roles, she witnessed firsthand how fixing a messy data pipeline could save professionals countless hours of manual work every single week. Over the course of a 13-year journey, she came to understand that the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the technical "how" of building a solution—it is discovering the "what" and the "why." Determining which problems are genuinely worth solving, and identifying which ideas should remain strictly as ideas, became the cornerstone of her professional philosophy.
Today, Bhalotia leads strategy, product building, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s business-to-business SaaS platform products, spanning across foundational infrastructure and the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence space. While the overall corporate scale has changed dramatically since her days working in her father’s business, her core operational 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, perspective, and a strong support network. Bhalotia notes that she has been fortunate to learn from a wide array of great teachers, professors, and managers throughout her professional life. Yet, when reflecting on the individuals who truly shaped her trajectory, she points out that they were not necessarily traditional mentors in the conventional sense. Instead, they were executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership looks like in practice, paired closely with the vibrant peer community she discovered at ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first transitioned into Product Management after relocating to the United States.
Her peers in Pittsburgh provided a safe, collaborative environment where she could pressure-test messy, unpolished ideas alongside like-minded builders. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered invaluable guidance, teaching her the importance of bringing a clear recommendation backed by concrete evidence rather than simply presenting a standalone problem. When facing professional ambiguity, the lesson was clear: 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?
Growth rarely happens inside a comfort zone. Twice over the course of her career, Bhalotia made the deliberate choice to walk away from established paths where she was entirely comfortable, opting instead to start completely over as the beginner in the room.
The first major risk involved leaving a successful career trajectory in ERP consulting to pivot decisively into Product Management. This transition coincided with building a new life in the United States, where she immersed herself in local product communities to relentlessly hone her craft alongside peers who shared an equal obsession with product development.
The second major inflection point came when she decided to relocate back to Gurugram, India, with her family after spending nearly a decade living and working in the United States, all while continuing to lead global enterprise strategy remotely and across international borders. While both moments felt intensely uncomfortable at the time, those exact leaps continue to inform her work today—especially when stepping into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives long before an established playbook or standard operating procedure exists. Each professional reset and unique challenge ultimately provided her with the invaluable opportunity to seamlessly connect customers, engineering teams, product developers, and go-to-market strategies across completely different geographic and economic markets.
As a woman, what challenges have you faced in the technology industry? How have you overcome them?
The technology sector has historically presented unique hurdles for women, particularly those operating within heavily technical and strategic domains. Early in her career, while working across complex technical domains such as ERP systems, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces, Bhalotia frequently encountered an unspoken pressure. She often felt she had to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was genuinely heard and valued by her peers and leadership.
Later in her career, as a mother successfully leading complex global initiatives spanning multiple time zones between the United States and India, the primary challenge shifted. It became a delicate balancing act of sustaining high professional impact without falling into the pervasive trap of being "always on." Bhalotia notes that she has successfully overcome both professional hurdles through rigorous preparation and a commitment to ruthless prioritization.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? How do you apply it to your personal and professional life?
Guidance that stands the test of time often boils down to fundamental principles of ownership and action. The best advice Bhalotia ever received came from an early-career leader who told her never to wait for an official mandate to fix a problem she could already clearly see. Over the span of 13 years in the tech industry, that foundational advice has organically evolved into four core rules she uses to guide her product leadership approach today: maintaining the intuition to know what is actually worth building, possessing the clarity to frame the solution simply, holding the artistic taste to recognize when an experience is truly great rather than merely functional, and having the personal agency to execute all of the above without waiting to be asked.
In a professional context, this means recognizing that nobody ever hands a professional a completely finished playbook. If she identifies a strategic gap within an organization, 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 bet into an organizational priority.
On a personal level, maintaining that same level of agency means refusing to live life on autopilot. Whether it involved moving her family back to India after years abroad in the United States, or designing intentional daily routines that protect deep professional focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, Bhalotia does not wait for an abstract "someday"—she makes a decisive choice and moves forward.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
As the technology sector continues to change rapidly, particularly with the widespread rise of artificial intelligence, the barrier to building new tools and applications has collapsed dramatically. Today’s emerging professionals possess unprecedented leverage to build almost anything they can imagine. Because of this shift, Bhalotia emphasizes that deciding what to build and why those specific solutions matter is the most critical question an innovator can face. Regardless of an individual’s specific corporate title or role, she advises rising professionals to grab every available opportunity to talk directly with customers and users.
Furthermore, she stresses that the ultimate professional differentiator is having the unwavering conviction to own one’s voice, cautioning younger professionals never to let impostor syndrome diminish it. Current industry data underscores the ongoing reality of the field: women currently hold approximately 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up roughly 30 percent of software engineering teams, and secure approximately 2 percent of total venture capital funding. When a woman feels out of place in a corporate room or leadership meeting, Bhalotia encourages her to recognize that she is not experiencing a personal competence gap, but rather a structural representation gap. In those moments, her advice remains steadfast: own your seat 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 and structural support. Bhalotia believes that the most effective way to advocate for women in technology is to actively build a workplace culture rooted in high agency and accountability. This involves intentionally bringing the right people into important decision-making rooms, pushing major decisions deep into the organizational hierarchy, and trusting exceptionally talented people to exercise sound judgment.
Recognizing that artificial intelligence fluency currently serves as the single greatest lever for career advancement and mobility in the modern tech economy, Bhalotia remains deeply passionate about ensuring that women and the next generation are positioned at the absolute 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. Additionally, she regularly mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to proactively manage the trajectories of their own careers.
Outside of her corporate responsibilities, Bhalotia has recently begun delivering bi-weekly educational sessions focused on artificial intelligence and core technology concepts to underprivileged children in her local neighborhood—with a special emphasis on encouraging young girls—through the Naya Sawera NGO, aiming to open doors to the digital future for them early in life.
For those interested in learning more about the corporate environment, professional opportunities, and workplace culture at the organization, additional details can be found on the official Precisely Careers and Culture page.
