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 complex operational hurdles. In the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization celebrates the women across its enterprise who are building impactful careers while simultaneously helping others do the same. In the latest spotlight of this ongoing series, the industry is introduced to Aakansha Bhalotia, a Principal Product Manager whose impressive 13-year career has spanned from building foundational 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.
Bhalotia’s professional journey offers a compelling look at the evolution of modern product management, the importance of foundational technical knowledge, and the distinct challenges and triumphs experienced by women carving out leadership roles in high-tech environments. Her story highlights how early practical experiences can spark a lifelong dedication to streamlining operations and solving tangible customer problems.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
Reflecting on her earliest inspirations, Bhalotia notes that she has always been naturally drawn to numbers and logic. Because mathematics served as her favorite subject throughout her school years, pursuing engineering felt like a smooth and natural path forward. However, the real pull 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 daily administrative tasks, including billing, financial tallying, and navigating a custom order management process designed to meticulously track raw materials coming into the business and revenue going out. As the enterprise eventually expanded, the family faced the exhausting reality of replicating that complex operational model manually month after month. This daily friction planted a persistent question in her mind: What if there was a way to bring all of this disparate data and process together into a unified system?
That single instinct ultimately propelled her to kick-start her professional career building enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. In those early roles, she saw firsthand how fixing a messy, disjointed data pipeline could save professionals countless hours of tedious manual work every single week. Over the course of a 13-year career, she gradually realized that the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the technical "how" of building a feature or system; rather, it is determining the "what" and the "why." She learned to ask critical questions regarding which problems are actually worth solving and which ideas should remain strictly on the drawing board.
Today, Bhalotia leads strategy, product building, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s core business-to-business software-as-a-service (B2B SaaS) platform products, spanning both foundational infrastructure and the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence space. While the operational scale has expanded dramatically since her days of helping her father’s business, her core professional instinct remains entirely unchanged: find the 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 extensive career, Bhalotia has been fortunate to learn from a wide array of great teachers, university professors, and department managers. Yet, when reflecting on the individuals who truly shaped her professional trajectory, she notes that the most influential figures 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, alongside the vibrant peer community she discovered at ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first made the transition into professional product management in the United States.
Her peers in Pittsburgh provided a safe, collaborative environment where she could pressure-test messy, half-formed ideas alongside other like-minded builders who shared her passion for product craft. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered invaluable guidance, teaching her the importance of bringing clear recommendations backed by concrete evidence rather than simply presenting isolated problems to leadership. When navigating ambiguous paths in a corporate environment, she learned to build something tangible, demonstrate its clear utility to 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?
Taking bold professional leaps is a recurring theme in Bhalotia’s career trajectory. Twice, she deliberately walked away from areas where she was comfortable and established, choosing instead to completely start over as the novice in the room.
The first major risk involved leaving a successful, stable career in ERP consulting to pivot entirely into product management. At the same time, she was building a personal life in the United States, throwing herself deeply into local product communities to hone her craft alongside peers who were equally obsessed with the intricacies of product development.
The second major risk occurred 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 geographical shift, she seamlessly continued to lead global enterprise strategy across international time zones. Both moments felt acutely uncomfortable and daunting at the time they occurred. Yet, she observes that she takes that exact same leap today whenever she and her teams step into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives long before a formal playbook or industry standard has been established. Each reset and challenge has ultimately granted her a rare, holistic ability to effectively connect customers, engineering teams, product developers, and go-to-market strategies across completely distinct 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 unique obstacles that required intentional strategies to overcome. Early in her career—while working in deeply technical domains such as enterprise resource planning, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces—the primary hurdle was frequently the unspoken pressure to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was acknowledged and heard.
Later in her progression, as a mother successfully leading complex global initiatives spanning both United States and India time zones, the challenge naturally shifted. The struggle became maintaining a high level of professional impact without falling into the pervasive modern trap of remaining "always on" at the expense of personal well-being. Bhalotia has successfully overcome both sets of challenges through meticulous preparation and a commitment to ruthless prioritization in her daily schedule.
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 from an early-career leader who told her simply: "Never wait for a mandate to fix a problem you can already see." Over her 13 years in the technology industry, that foundational advice has organically evolved into the four guiding rules she now uses to lead product development: possess the intuition to know what is actually worth building, maintain the clarity to frame the solution simply, retain the taste to recognize when an experience is genuinely great rather than merely functional, and exercise the personal agency to do all of the above without waiting to be explicitly asked.
Professionally, she notes that organizations rarely hand employees a neatly finished playbook. If she identifies a strategic gap, she willingly steps into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a unified thesis, and proves the underlying value with real customers to transform an early internal bet into a top organizational priority.
On a personal level, possessing that same agency means she refuses to live her life on autopilot. Whether it involved moving her family back to India after years abroad in the United States or carefully designing her daily routines to safeguard deep professional focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she refuses to wait for a hypothetical "someday"—she makes a definitive decision and takes action.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
As the technology landscape changes rapidly, Bhalotia encourages younger women entering the workforce to recognize the unprecedented power at their fingertips. In an era shaped by artificial intelligence, the technical barrier to building products has effectively collapsed, giving individuals the unique leverage to build virtually anything they can imagine. Consequently, deciding what to build and understanding the underlying motivation behind it has become the most critical question an innovator can ask. Regardless of a person’s specific title or role within the corporate world, she advises everyone to grab every available opportunity to talk directly to customers and users.
Furthermore, she emphasizes that the true differentiator in a modern career is having the unwavering conviction to own one’s voice, cautioning professionals not to let impostor syndrome diminish their presence. Statistics show that women currently hold approximately 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up 30 percent of software engineering teams, and secure roughly 2 percent of venture capital funding. When women feel out of place in a boardroom or technical meeting, Bhalotia urges them to recognize that they are not experiencing a competence gap; rather, they are simply witnessing a representation gap. Her message 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, in Bhalotia’s view, goes beyond mere words and requires active structural support. She believes the most effective way to advocate for women in technology is to build a culture rooted in high agency and accountability. This is achieved by actively bringing the right people into critical rooms, pushing decision-making deep down into the organization, and trusting exceptionally talented individuals to exercise sound judgment.
Recognizing that artificial intelligence fluency is currently the single greatest lever for career advancement in the tech sector, she 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 designed to successfully upskill more than 30 product managers and user experience designers across the chief product officer organization. In addition to these corporate initiatives, she frequently mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to proactively manage their own career trajectories. Outside of her professional responsibilities, she has recently begun delivering bi-weekly sessions on artificial intelligence and technology to underprivileged children, with a particular focus on empowering young girls through the Naya Sawera NGO in her local neighborhood to open vital educational and career doors for them early in life.
