A career in technology can take many paths when it is shaped by curiosity, bold decisions, and a willingness to solve meaningful problems. In the Precisely Women in Technology (PWIT) series, the organization celebrates the women across its ranks who are building impactful careers while actively helping others do the same. In the latest spotlight, the organization highlights Aakansha Bhalotia, a Principal Product Manager whose 13-year career has spanned from building enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to leading strategy and go-to-market initiatives for the Precisely Platform and its emerging artificial intelligence products.
Bhalotia’s professional journey offers a lens into the evolving landscape of modern software development, enterprise architecture, and the growing influence of AI in business-to-business environments. Her trajectory reflects not only technical adaptability across different continents and corporate structures, but also a persistent focus on addressing practical friction points for customers.
Why Choose a Career in Technology?
For Bhalotia, the gravitational pull toward technology began long before she entered the corporate workforce. Drawing from an early affinity for numbers, mathematics was her favorite subject during school, making engineering feel like a natural academic and professional path. However, the true catalyst for her entry into the tech sector came from helping her father operate his business.
During those formative years, she assisted with billing, tallying accounts, and managing a custom order management workflow that tracked incoming raw materials against outgoing revenue. When the business expanded, she quickly realized that replicating that model manually month after month was exhausting. It sparked a fundamental question that would define her career: What if there was a way to bring all of this operational data together seamlessly?
That initial instinct led her to begin her professional life building ERP systems. Immersed in enterprise software, she saw firsthand how repairing a messy data pipeline could save professionals countless hours of manual work every single week. Over the course of a 13-year career, she observed that the hardest and most valuable problem in technology is rarely the "how" of building a system, but rather the "what" and the "why." Determining which problems are genuinely worth solving and which ideas should remain on the drawing board became central to her philosophy.
Today, Bhalotia leads strategy, product building, and go-to-market execution for Precisely’s B2B SaaS platform products, focusing specifically on the foundations and artificial intelligence space. While the scale of her projects has expanded dramatically since her days working with her father’s business, her core instinct remains identical: find operational friction, remove it, and solve practical problems for the customer.
Finding Guidance Through Mentorship and Peer Communities
Throughout her professional life, Bhalotia has learned from numerous teachers, professors, and managers. Yet, she notes that the individuals who shaped her trajectory most profoundly were often not traditional mentors in the conventional sense. Instead, they were executive sponsors who modeled what high-trust, high-autonomy product leadership looks like, combined with the peer community she discovered through ProductTank Pittsburgh when she first transitioned into Product Management after relocating to the United States.
Her peers in Pittsburgh provided a secure environment where she could pressure-test messy ideas alongside other like-minded builders. Meanwhile, her executive sponsors offered crucial strategic advice: always bring a clear recommendation backed by evidence, rather than simply presenting an unresolved problem. In environments defined by ambiguity, her sponsors taught her to build something tangible, demonstrate its utility to the customer, and make it straightforward for leadership to endorse the initiative.
Taking Calculated Risks and Embracing New Beginnings
Growth in the technology sector often requires stepping away from stability. Twice in her career, Bhalotia walked away from established comfort to start over as a beginner in the room.
The first major pivot occurred when she left a successful career in ERP consulting to transition into Product Management. Simultaneously, she was building a life in the United States, throwing herself into local product communities to hone her craft alongside peers who shared her intense dedication to product development.
The second major transition involved relocating back to Gurugram, India, with her family after nearly a decade living and working in the United States, while continuing to lead global enterprise strategy across international markets. Both transitions felt uncomfortable in the moment. Yet, she faces that exact same leap today whenever she steps into fast-moving AI and platform initiatives before an established playbook exists. Each reset and professional challenge has given her the unique opportunity to connect customers, engineering teams, product groups, and go-to-market strategies across entirely different geographical and economic landscapes.
Overcoming Industry Challenges and Maintaining Focus
Navigating the technology sector as a woman comes with unique obstacles. Early in her career, while working in deep technical domains such as ERP systems, data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and application programming interfaces (APIs), 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 by peers and leadership.
Later in her career, as a mother leading global initiatives spanning both United States and Indian time zones, the challenge evolved. The primary hurdle shifted from proving technical competence to sustaining high professional impact without falling into the pervasive trap of being "always on." She has systematically overcome both hurdles through rigorous preparation and ruthless prioritization of her time and energy.
Internalizing Core Leadership Advice
Reflecting on the best advice she has ever received, Bhalotia points to guidance offered by an early leader who told her never to wait for a mandate to fix a problem she could already see. Over 13 years in the technology sector, that single piece of advice has evolved into four foundational rules she uses to lead product development today: having the intuition to know what is actually worth building, the clarity to frame the solution simply, the taste to recognize when an experience is truly great rather than merely functional, and the agency to execute all of the above without waiting to be asked.
Professionally, she notes that no one ever hands an employee a finished playbook. When she identifies a strategic gap, she steps directly into that white space, rallies cross-functional teams around a clear thesis, and proves the value of the solution with real customers to transform an early bet into an organizational priority. On a personal level, maintaining that same agency means refusing to live life on autopilot. Whether relocating her family back to India or intentionally designing daily routines to protect periods of deep professional focus alongside the responsibilities of motherhood, she declines to wait for a distant future, choosing instead to make deliberate decisions and take action.
Advising the Next Generation of Women in Technology
For younger women entering the technology industry today, Bhalotia emphasizes that the barrier to building has collapsed in the age of artificial intelligence. Modern professionals possess unprecedented leverage to build almost anything they can imagine. Consequently, deciding what to build and why remains the most critical question. Regardless of one’s specific corporate title, she advises individuals to grab every available opportunity to speak directly with customers and users.
The ultimate professional differentiator, she asserts, is having the conviction to own one’s voice without letting impostor syndrome diminish it. With women currently holding roughly 30 percent of senior leadership roles, making up 30 percent of software engineering teams, and raising approximately 2 percent of venture capital funding, feeling out of place in a corporate room does not reflect a competence gap, but rather a representation gap. Her message to emerging professionals is clear: own your seat anyway.
Paying It Forward Through Advocacy and Education
Bhalotia believes the most effective way to advocate for women in technology is to build a culture rooted in high agency and accountability. This involves bringing the right people into the room, pushing critical decisions deep into the organization, and trusting talented individuals to exercise sound judgment.
Recognizing that AI fluency currently serves as the single greatest lever for career advancement in the tech sector, she is dedicated to ensuring that women and the next generation remain at the forefront of that structural shift. At Precisely, she has put this philosophy into action 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 office organization. In addition, she regularly mentors product owners and recent university graduates on how to proactively manage their career paths.
Outside of her corporate responsibilities, Bhalotia has recently begun delivering bi-weekly educational sessions on artificial intelligence and technology to underprivileged children, with a particular focus on young girls, at the Naya Sawera NGO in her neighborhood. Through these grassroots efforts, she aims to open professional doors early and inspire the next wave of technical talent.
For individuals interested in learning more about career opportunities and workplace culture at the organization, further details can be found on the Precisely Careers and Culture page.
