A career in technology can take many unexpected and rewarding paths when it is shaped by natural curiosity, bold decisions, and an unwavering willingness to solve meaningful problems. Across the technology sector, professionals constantly navigate shifting landscapes, but few stories mirror the rapid evolution of modern enterprise software quite like those of the leaders building its foundational layers. As part of the ongoing Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization celebrates the women across its enterprise who are building impactful careers while actively clearing the path for others to follow.
In the latest spotlight of this series, the spotlight falls on Aakansha Bhalotia, Principal Product Manager at Precisely. Over a dynamic 13-year career, Bhalotia has navigated a remarkable professional evolution, transitioning from the foundational world of building complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to spearheading global strategy and go-to-market initiatives for the Precisely Platform and its emerging artificial intelligence products. Her journey offers a compelling look at the instincts, challenges, and strategic choices that define modern product leadership in an increasingly automated world.
Why did you choose to pursue a career in technology?
Bhalotia’s foundational attraction to technology began long before she ever wrote her first line of enterprise code or managed a software release cycle. Growing up, she was naturally drawn to numbers, finding that mathematics was her favorite subject in school. Because of this affinity, pursuing engineering felt like a straightforward and natural path forward.
However, the real, tangible pull into technology came from a very personal place: helping her father run his business. Long before entering the corporate software arena, Bhalotia was hands-on with daily business operations, assisting her father with billing, tallying figures, and managing a custom order tracking process that monitored raw materials coming in and revenue going out.
As the business expanded, the limitations of those manual operations became glaringly obvious. Replicating that custom tracking model manually month after month proved exhausting. It sparked a foundational question in her mind that would ultimately dictate the trajectory of her professional life: "What if there was a way to bring all of this together?"
That critical instinct led her directly into the technology sector, where she began her career building ERP systems. Immersed in enterprise environments, she saw firsthand how fixing a messy data pipeline could save professionals countless hours of tedious manual work every single week. Over the course of 13 years in the industry, she arrived at a profound realization: the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the technical "how" of building a solution. Instead, it is understanding the "what" and the "why."
Determining which problems are actually worth solving, and identifying which ideas should remain on the drawing board, forms the bedrock of effective product management. Today, Bhalotia leads strategy, product building, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s business-to-business software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform products, operating extensively across the foundations and artificial intelligence space. While the operational scale has changed drastically since her days helping in her father’s business, her core instinct has remained entirely unchanged: find the friction, remove it, and solve practical customer problems.
Who has been your greatest professional mentor? What’s one thing you have learned from them?
Throughout a diverse and demanding career, Bhalotia has had the opportunity to learn from numerous skilled teachers, university professors, and department managers. Yet, when reflecting on the figures who truly shaped her professional trajectory, she points out that the most influential voices were not traditional mentors in the classic sense.
Instead, her career path was heavily influenced by executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership looks like in practice. This guidance was matched by the vibrant peer community she discovered through ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first made the professional transition into product management after moving to the United States.
Her peers in Pittsburgh provided a vital, safe environment where she could pressure-test messy ideas alongside other like-minded builders who were deeply immersed in the craft. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered crucial strategic advice that redefined how she approached leadership: always bring a clear recommendation backed by solid evidence, rather than simply presenting a problem. When navigating ambiguous paths and uncertain territory, her experience taught her to build something tangible, demonstrate clearly how it benefits the customer, and make it effortless for executive leadership to back the initiative.
What’s the biggest risk you took in your career? What was the reward?
Taking bold risks has been a recurring theme in Bhalotia’s professional life. Twice throughout her career, she deliberately walked away from comfortable, established paths to start entirely over as the beginner in the room.
The first major leap occurred when she left a successful, stable career in ERP consulting to pivot entirely into product management. This professional 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 shared her obsession with building great products.
The second major risk involved relocating back to Gurugram, India, with her family after nearly a decade living and working in the United States, all while continuing to lead global enterprise strategy across international markets. While both transitions felt deeply uncomfortable and uncertain at the time, those exact leaps continue to mirror the mindset she embraces today whenever she steps into fast-moving artificial intelligence and platform initiatives before a formal playbook even exists. Each career reset and geographic challenge provided her with a rare opportunity 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 distinct obstacles at various stages of Bhalotia’s professional journey. Early in her career, when she operated primarily within deep technical domains such as enterprise resource planning, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces, the challenge frequently manifested as an unspoken pressure. She often felt she had to prove her technical depth twice before her strategic point of view was genuinely heard and respected.
Later, as her career evolved into motherhood while simultaneously leading major global initiatives spanning both United States and Indian time zones, the nature of the challenge shifted. The primary hurdle became sustaining high-level professional impact without falling into the pervasive trap of being "always on." Bhalotia has successfully overcome both of these enduring challenges through rigorous preparation and a commitment to ruthless prioritization.
Careers and Culture
Precisely continues to help market leaders make better decisions and build new possibilities through innovative software and data integrity solutions. For professionals interested in joining the team, the organization offers numerous opportunities across various departments. Individuals can find out more about working with the company and explore current job openings by visiting the official Precisely Careers and Culture page.
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 a simple yet definitive truth: "Never wait for a mandate to fix a problem you can already see." Over 13 years working in the tech industry, that foundational advice has organically evolved into the four core rules she uses to lead product development today.
Those rules require having the intuition to know what is actually worth building, the clarity to frame the proposed solution simply, the taste to recognize when a user experience is truly great rather than merely functional, and the agency to execute all of the above without waiting to be explicitly asked. Professionally, she notes that no one ever hands an employee a completely finished playbook. If she spots a strategic gap, she willingly steps into the white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a clear thesis, and proves the value directly with real customers to turn an early, unproven bet into a core organizational priority.
On a personal level, exercising that same agency means she refuses to live her life on autopilot. Whether it involved making the deliberate decision to move her family back to India after years abroad, or carefully designing her daily routines to protect periods of deep focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she does not wait for a distant "someday." Instead, 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, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence, Bhalotia emphasizes that the traditional barrier to building software has largely collapsed. Today, emerging professionals possess incredible leverage to build nearly anything they can imagine. Consequently, deciding what to build and why remains the most critical question an innovator can ask. Regardless of an individual’s specific corporate title, she advises young professionals to grab every available opportunity to talk directly with customers and users.
The ultimate professional differentiator is having the genuine conviction to own your voice and refusing to let impostor syndrome diminish it. Statistics show that women currently hold approximately 30 percent of senior leadership roles, make up roughly 30 percent of software engineering teams, and secure only about 2 percent of venture capital funding. When women feel out of place in a corporate room, Bhalotia encourages them to recognize that they are not experiencing a competence gap; rather, they are simply witnessing a representation gap. Her message to them 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?
Bhalotia firmly believes that the most effective way to advocate for women in technology is to actively build a workplace culture grounded in high agency and accountability. This is achieved by bringing the right people into critical decision-making rooms, pushing major decisions deep down into the organization, and trusting talented professionals to exercise sound judgment.
With artificial intelligence fluency serving as the single greatest current lever for career advancement in the tech sector, she is deeply passionate about ensuring that women and the next generation are positioned at the absolute forefront of that shift. At Precisely, one primary way she pays this commitment forward is by leading an internal artificial intelligence pilot 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 their own career trajectories. Outside of her corporate responsibilities, Bhalotia recently began 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 located in her neighborhood, aiming to open doors of opportunity for them early in life.
To learn more about workplace culture, employee initiatives, and professional opportunities, visit the official Precisely Careers and Culture page.
