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 architectures, and the relentless demand for practical digital solutions. In the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization celebrates the women across its enterprise who are building impactful careers while actively helping others do the same. In the latest spotlight, the organization highlights Aakansha Bhalotia, Principal Product Manager, whose 13-year career has taken her from building enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to leading strategy and go-to-market execution for the Precisely Platform and its expanding suite of artificial intelligence products. Her journey offers a compelling look at the evolution of modern product management, the importance of foundational data pipelines, and the mindset required to navigate complex global markets.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
From an early age, Aakansha was naturally drawn to numbers. Because mathematics was her favorite subject throughout school, pursuing engineering felt like a smooth, logical path forward. However, the real catalyst that pulled her directly into the technology sector stemmed from a very personal place: helping her father run his business.
During those formative years, she assisted him with billing, financial tallying, and navigating a custom order management process that tracked incoming raw materials against outgoing revenue. As the business expanded, she quickly realized that replicating that operational model manually month after month was exhausting and unsustainable. It sparked a foundational question in her mind: What if there was a way to bring all of this operational data together seamlessly?
That critical instinct led her to launch her professional career building ERP systems. Working in that space, she saw firsthand how fixing a messy, fractured data pipeline could save professionals countless hours of tedious manual work every single week. Over the course of a 13-year career, she realized that the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the technical "how" of building a system—it is the strategic "what" and the crucial "why." Determining which problems are actually worth solving, and which initial ideas should remain just ideas, forms the core of effective product leadership.
Today, she leads strategy, product building, and go-to-market initiatives for Precisely’s business-to-business SaaS platform products, operating across both foundational architectures and the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence space. While the scale of her operations has changed significantly over the years, her core instinct remains entirely intact: find the operational friction, systematically remove it, and solve practical problems for customers.
Who has been your greatest professional mentor? What’s one thing you have learned from them?
Throughout her professional journey, Aakansha has been fortunate to learn from a wide array of dedicated teachers, university professors, and corporate managers. Yet, when reflecting on the figures who genuinely shaped her trajectory, she notes that the most impactful influences 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, paired closely with the supportive 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 safe, collaborative environment where she could pressure-test messy, unrefined ideas alongside other 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 a problem. When navigating ambiguous paths, they advised, professionals should build something tangible, demonstrate clearly how it benefits the customer, and make it as easy as possible for executive leadership to provide their backing.
What’s the biggest risk you took in your career? What was the reward?
Taking bold professional risks has been a defining characteristic of Aakansha’s career path. Twice, she deliberately walked away from comfortable, established positions to start entirely over as the beginner in the room.
The first major leap occurred when she left a successful career in ERP consulting to pivot 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 deep obsession with product development.
The second major risk involved relocating 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 product strategy across international teams. Both transitions felt uncomfortable and daunting at the time. Yet, she finds herself taking that exact same leap today whenever she steps into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives before any established playbook exists. Each career reset and formidable challenge has granted her the unique opportunity to successfully 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?
Navigating the technology sector as a woman has presented distinct hurdles across different stages of professional growth. Early in her career, while working within deep technical domains such as enterprise resource planning, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces (APIs), the challenge was frequently an unspoken pressure. She often faced the invisible burden of proving her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was genuinely heard and valued by colleagues.
Later, as her responsibilities expanded and she became a mother leading complex global initiatives spanning both United States and Indian time zones, the nature of the challenge shifted. The primary obstacle became sustaining high professional impact without falling into the pervasive trap of being "always on." She has successfully overcome both professional pressures by relying on rigorous, thorough preparation and practicing ruthless prioritization in her daily schedule.
Careers and Culture
Organizations like Precisely help market leaders make better decisions and build new possibilities for the future. For professionals interested in joining the team, the company offers extensive resources detailing what it is like to work within the organization alongside listings for current career openings. Finding out about working with the company and exploring its internal culture highlights an environment designed to foster innovation, autonomy, and continuous professional growth.
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 Aakansha ever received came from an early career leader who told her simply: "Never wait for a mandate to fix a problem you can already see." Over 13 years working in the technology industry, that single philosophy has steadily evolved into four guiding rules she uses to lead product development today.
These rules require having the intuition to recognize what is genuinely worth building, the clarity to frame the proposed solution simply, the taste to know when a user experience is truly great rather than merely functional, and the agency to execute all of those steps without waiting to be explicitly asked. Professionally, she notes, nobody ever hands an employee a completely finished playbook. When she spots a strategic gap, she steps directly into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a clear, unified thesis, and proves the ultimate value with real customers, turning an early conceptual bet into a recognized organizational priority.
On a personal level, possessing that same sense 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 daily routines to protect deep professional focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she refuses to wait for some distant "someday"—she makes a definitive decision 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 technical barrier to building software has collapsed dramatically, giving individuals unprecedented leverage to construct almost anything they can imagine. Because of this shift, deciding what to build and understanding why it matters has become the single most important question a professional can address. Regardless of a person’s specific title or corporate role, she urges younger professionals to grab every available opportunity to talk directly with customers and end-users.
The true differentiator in the modern workforce is having the absolute conviction to own one’s voice, ensuring that impostor syndrome never forces anyone to shrink back. Statistics show that women currently hold roughly 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up about 30 percent of software engineering teams, and secure roughly 2 percent of total venture capital funding. When a woman feels out of place inside a corporate room, Aakansha emphasizes that she is not experiencing a personal competence gap; rather, she is simply witnessing a representation gap. Her message to emerging professionals 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 for women in technology, in Aakansha’s view, requires actively building a culture rooted in high agency and accountability. This involves bringing the right people into critical decision-making rooms, pushing governance and operational decisions deep into the organization, and trusting talented individuals to exercise sound judgment.
At the present moment, the most powerful lever for career advancement across the technology sector is artificial intelligence fluency, and she remains deeply passionate about ensuring that women and the next generation are positioned at the absolute forefront of that structural shift. Within Precisely, she has paid this philosophy forward by leading an internal artificial intelligence pilot designed to upskill more than 30 product managers and user experience designers across the chief product officer organization.
Additionally, she regularly mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to strategically 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 specific focus on young girls—at the Naya Sawera NGO in her local neighborhood, aiming to open important doors for them early in life.
For those interested in learning more about the organization, its mission, and its workplace values, further details are available directly on the Precisely Careers and Culture page.
