Responsibility beyond the research report

Mandate

Sustain useful product commitments through research, investment, commercial discipline and accountable leadership.

Outcomes

• Obtained approval for a ₹63 lakh export rebuild and deferred associated upgrades
• Funded supported research participation that changed product priorities
• Negotiated a defined reseller arrangement after rejecting unlimited support terms

Decisions in context

As CEO I lead the company through six functional heads and report to its board. My executive directorship began two years after the management appointment, so I distinguish the dates and responsibilities. I have focused on the points where a promise crosses functions: a sales description becomes a product commitment, a research result changes investment, or a licence creates future service work. The three cases here reflect those decisions at the scale of our business. They required me to accept immediate commercial consequences and explain them without presenting every sacrifice as an assured future gain. I also work on the capability of the leadership team to make similar judgements without routing every issue through me. The next stage depends on clear ownership and credible evidence, as well as the confidence to challenge an attractive proposal.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; developing the next stage of product and leadership capacity.

Concurrent appointment

CEO throughout; executive director appointment added in April 2021 within the same company, not a second employment role.

Mandate

Connect licensing and service terms with delivery capacity and customer understanding.

Outcomes

• Separated licence rights from implementation and support obligations
• Brought operating estimates into significant commercial proposals
• Established clearer handovers between sales and customer-support owners

Decisions in context

This was a functional director title, not a board seat. I led commercial operations and worked closely with product, finance and legal advisers on how offers were constructed. The move helped me understand why a simple purchase description could be valuable to a customer and dangerous to a supplier if it concealed the work required later. I did not want every agreement to become a defensive document. I wanted both parties to understand the product rights, the service being provided and the conditions for extending it. Support colleagues were particularly important to that account because they saw obligations after the sale had been celebrated. By the end of the role I was managing thirty-one colleagues and ₹5.6 crore of annual operating expenditure. The board's CEO selection gave me responsibility for reconciling these questions across the company.

Reason for the move

Selected by the board to become chief executive.

Mandate

Set product priorities and delivery commitments within an approved budget.

Outcomes

• Compared customer requests by affected task and severity of barrier
• Included maintenance effort in proposals for new product features
• Explained deferred work and remaining limitations in release decisions

Decisions in context

The product-manager appointment made prioritisation a personal responsibility. I could no longer present every worthwhile improvement as if somebody else would resolve the capacity question. I worked with fourteen colleagues and an approved delivery budget to decide which work belonged in each release. Large customers had legitimate needs, but their commercial importance was not the only consideration. A less visible task barrier could affect users across several organisations. I learnt to explain why a request was deferred and what evidence might change that decision. The role also exposed the continuing cost of features after launch. Training, compatibility and support did not disappear when development ended. I became interested in how the commercial model funded those obligations, which led to a move beyond product management into the operating terms of the business.

Reason for the move

Moved to commercial operations to connect product commitments with contract economics.

Mandate

Translate observed access barriers into product requirements and release evidence.

Outcomes

• Connected requirements with a task rather than an isolated feature request
• Included output and handover steps in product demonstrations
• Documented unsupported combinations for product owners to decide

Decisions in context

Joining Tervaqi changed my relationship with a research finding. I now helped decide how it should become a requirement and how the team would know whether the response was useful. Engineers needed enough precision to build; customers needed a workflow they could understand; product owners needed to choose between competing requests. I learnt to describe those needs together rather than pass a report from one function to another. I also saw how demonstrations could become more convincing than the underlying product. We began including the step before and after the feature being shown, because those transitions often revealed a barrier that the feature itself concealed. I did not own the roadmap, but I became more useful to the people who did by explaining the consequence of a proposed choice and the evidence still missing.

Reason for the move

Promoted to manage a product portfolio and its delivery trade-offs.

Mandate

Observe workplace tasks and prepare evidence of barriers for product teams.

Outcomes

• Recorded the task and surrounding tools alongside interface observations
• Separated participant statements from researcher interpretation
• Prepared findings that described unresolved questions as well as observed problems

Decisions in context

My first role gave me a disciplined way to watch how software was used. I prepared sessions, recorded task attempts and helped senior researchers compare observations. I had no authority to change a client's product, which made the quality of our explanation important. A report needed to show what happened and why it mattered without pretending that a small study established every user's experience. I learnt to retain disagreement between participants instead of smoothing it into a single convenient story. The work also showed me the limits of a consulting handover: a clear finding did not determine whether a client would fund the response. I wanted to understand that next decision, so I moved to a company where research, product development and delivery had to meet inside the same organisation.

Reason for the move

Moved into a product company to work on the response to research findings.