I left Amazon knowing how to build. I didn't know how to think about what to build, or why, or for whom. That gap bothered me. IIM Ahmedabad felt like the right place to close it.
I got into the programme, and for two years I sat in classrooms with people who thought about business in a way I genuinely hadn't. Case competitions. Finance. Strategy. Organizational behavior. The kind of thinking that isn't about the code — it's about the incentives, the market, the human beings making decisions under uncertainty.
I finished in the top 10% of my batch. That number doesn't mean much in isolation, but what it represents to me is that I was hungry. I wasn't coasting on my engineering background. I wanted to understand business the way I'd understood systems — from the inside, with rigor.
Goldman Sachs: learning how the world prices risk
My summer internship was at Goldman Sachs, in the structured products group. I was working on securitized derivatives — financial instruments that are themselves built on other financial instruments.
This was, on the surface, as far from software engineering as you can get. But the underlying skill is the same: you're modeling a system. You're trying to understand how components interact, how risk propagates, what happens at the edges. The fact that the components are mortgages instead of microservices doesn't change the fundamental challenge.
What I took away from Goldman was an understanding of how sophisticated institutions make decisions under uncertainty. Not the specific instruments — those were mostly curiosities — but the posture. The constant pressure-testing of assumptions. The habit of asking: what's the scenario where this model breaks? That's a question I still ask about every product strategy I work on.
The realization
Somewhere in my second year at IIM-A, I had a realization that seems obvious in retrospect but wasn't obvious at all at the time.
I had been thinking about my career as a sequence: engineer, then MBA, then something. The MBA was filling a gap. But the gap I thought I had — "I don't know business" — wasn't actually the gap. The gap was: I had a builder's instinct and no practitioner's framework for channeling it.
I didn't want to be in finance. I didn't want to be in consulting. I wanted to build things. But I wanted to build the right things — to be the person who sat at the intersection of the business problem, the user's reality, and the technical possibility.
That's product management. It had a name. I just hadn't named it for myself yet.
Sprinklr: first product role
After IIM-A, I joined Sprinklr as a product manager. Sprinklr was a social media management platform for enterprises — one of those tools that large companies use to manage hundreds of social accounts across dozens of markets.
My role was in the analytics product. And this is where I first got to do the thing I'd been preparing for — own a surface, understand the users, make decisions about what gets built and what doesn't, and be accountable for the outcome.
The first six months were humbling. Being a product manager isn't about being the smartest person in the room. It's about maintaining clarity when everything is ambiguous. It's about asking the right question when ten different stakeholders are pulling you toward ten different answers. It's about building trust with engineers, designers, researchers, and executives — and doing it simultaneously, with nothing but credibility to trade on.
I learned quickly that the gap between building and selling was real — but the gap I actually needed to close was between having ideas and executing on them in a real organization with real constraints. That's the craft. And it takes years to get good at it.
Sprinklr was year one.