A career in technology can take many unexpected and rewarding paths when it is shaped by genuine curiosity, bold decisions, and an unwavering willingness to solve meaningful, real-world problems. Across the global technology sector, professionals constantly navigate transitions, but few trace a path as dynamic as those highlighted in the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series. This ongoing initiative celebrates the women across the organization who are building highly impactful careers while actively clearing paths and helping others do the same.
In the latest spotlight of the series, the spotlight falls on Aakansha Bhalotia, a Principal Product Manager whose diverse 13-year career has spanned from building complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to leading global strategy and go-to-market initiatives for the Precisely Platform and its emerging artificial intelligence products. Bhalotia’s professional trajectory offers a compelling look at the evolution of modern enterprise technology, the challenges faced by women in deep technical domains, and the foundational mindset required to lead with agency in a rapidly shifting digital landscape.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
Bhalotia’s fascination with numbers and complex systems began long before she entered the corporate technology sector. Growing up, mathematics was her favorite subject in school, making engineering feel like a natural and straightforward academic path. However, the real, defining pull into the world of technology came from a very personal place: helping her father run his family business.
During those formative years, she assisted with billing, financial tallying, and navigating a custom order management process that carefully tracked raw materials coming into the business against revenue going out. As the business eventually expanded, the family faced a stark operational reality. Replicating that entire operational model manually month after month proved exhausting and inefficient. It sparked a critical question in her mind: what if there was a way to bring all of this fragmented information together seamlessly?
That initial instinct ultimately propelled her to start her career building ERP systems. Working in that domain, 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 realized that the hardest and most valuable problem to solve is rarely the technical "how" of building a product. Instead, the true challenge lies in the "what" and the "why"—determining precisely which problem is actually worth solving and deciding which ideas should remain on the drawing board.
Today, Bhalotia leads product strategy, building, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s business-to-business SaaS platform products, with a core focus spanning the foundations and artificial intelligence spaces. While the corporate scale has changed dramatically since her early days helping with her father’s business, her core operational instinct remains entirely unchanged: find the friction, remove it, and solve practical, everyday customer problems.
Who has been your greatest professional mentor? What is one thing you have learned from them?
Throughout her professional journey, Bhalotia has benefited from the guidance of great teachers, university professors, and managers. Yet, when reflecting on the people who shaped her trajectory most profoundly, she notes that they were not traditional mentors in the conventional sense. Rather, they were executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership looks like in practice, combined 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 to pressure-test messy, unpolished ideas alongside other like-minded builders. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered crucial strategic guidance, advising her to always bring a clear recommendation backed by solid evidence rather than just presenting an isolated problem to leadership. When navigating ambiguous paths, she learned to build something tangible, demonstrate clearly how it helps the customer, and make it as easy as possible for leadership to back the initiative.
What is the biggest risk you took in your career? What was the reward?
Taking bold professional risks has been a recurring theme in Bhalotia’s career. On two separate occasions, she consciously walked away from paths where she felt comfortable and secure in order to start over entirely as the beginner in the room.
The first major risk involved leaving a successful, established career in ERP consulting to pivot directly into Product Management. This transition coincided with building a new life in the United States, where she threw herself headfirst into local product communities to hone her craft alongside peers who were just as obsessed with product development as she was.
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 boundaries. Both moments felt profoundly uncomfortable and uncertain at the time. Yet, she embraces that exact same leap whenever she steps into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives before a formal playbook even exists. Each career reset and professional challenge has ultimately granted her the invaluable opportunity to connect customers, engineering teams, product groups, 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 unique obstacles, particularly during the earlier stages of Bhalotia’s career. Working in deep, historically male-dominated technical domains—such as ERP systems, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and APIs—she frequently encountered the unspoken, exhausting pressure to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was genuinely heard and respected.
Later in her career, as she stepped into motherhood while leading global initiatives spanning both United States and India time zones, the nature of the challenge shifted. The primary hurdle became sustaining exceptionally high professional impact without falling into the pervasive trap of being "always on." She has systematically overcome both challenges through rigorous preparation and ruthless personal and professional prioritization.
What is the best advice you have 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 a simple yet profound truth: never wait for a mandate to fix a problem you can already see.
Over her 13 years in the tech sector, that foundational guidance has naturally evolved into the four core rules she uses to lead product development today. First, she maintains the intuition to know what is actually worth building. Second, she exercises the clarity to frame complex solutions simply. Third, she retains the refined taste to know 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 to be explicitly asked by management.
Professionally, she notes that nobody ever hands an employee a completely finished playbook. If she identifies a strategic gap within the organization, she steps directly into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a clear strategic thesis, and proves the underlying value with real customers to transform an early, speculative bet into a core organizational priority.
On a personal level, maintaining that same sense of 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 designing intentional daily routines to protect deep focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she refuses to wait for "someday"—she decides on a direction and moves forward with purpose.
What is one piece of advice you’d offer to younger women entering the industry?
For young women stepping into the modern technology landscape, Bhalotia emphasizes that the barriers to building have fundamentally collapsed. In the era of artificial intelligence, individuals possess unprecedented leverage to build almost anything they can imagine. Consequently, deciding what to build and why remains the most critical question an innovator can ask. Regardless of what specific role a person holds in the corporate world, she advises them to grab every available opportunity to talk directly to actual customers and users.
The ultimate professional differentiator, she stresses, is having the foundational conviction to own your unique voice and refusing to let impostor syndrome diminish it. Statistics show that women currently hold roughly 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up about 30 percent of software engineering teams, and raise a mere 2 percent of venture capital funding. When women feel out of place in a corporate boardroom or engineering meeting, Bhalotia encourages them to recognize that they are not experiencing a personal competence gap, but rather a structural representation gap. In those moments, her message is clear: own your seat at the table anyway.
As a successful woman in technology, what is one thing you do to pay it forward and advocate for other women in the field?
True advocacy, in Bhalotia’s view, requires actively building a corporate culture rooted in high agency and accountability. This means deliberately bringing the right voices into critical rooms, pushing decision-making deep down into the organization, and trusting talented individuals to exercise sound, independent judgment.
Recognizing that artificial intelligence fluency is currently the single greatest lever for career advancement across 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. At Precisely, she has put this philosophy into action by leading an internal AI pilot designed to upskill more than 30 product managers and UX designers across the Chief Product Officer organization.
Beyond her daily corporate responsibilities, she regularly mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to strategically manage their own career trajectories. Outside of her professional obligations, she has recently begun 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, opening doors to future opportunities early in their lives.
For those interested in learning more about the workplace culture, professional opportunities, and ongoing diversity initiatives at the company, further details can be found on the official Careers and Culture page.
