A product career shaped by unfinished handovers

I grew up in Arunachal Pradesh and moved to Guwahati for commerce study and work. After completing my degree at Pelvani Commercial College in May 1998, I joined Avenroth Industrial Controls as a commercial assistant. The business supplied and serviced control panels for industrial customers. My job involved order documents, billing schedules and correspondence about payment milestones. I did not design the equipment or negotiate the major contracts. I learnt how a seemingly small ambiguity in a document could leave several capable people believing that someone else had completed the next step.

The work gave me a practical interest in business systems. By 2001 I was coordinating the commercial schedules for a small group of accounts and helping colleagues reconcile their records with service visits. A screen could show a job as complete while a customer still waited for acceptance paperwork. That experience made me pay attention to the meaning of status labels. I was not yet thinking in terms of product management, but I was learning to distinguish the state recorded by a system from the state understood by the person relying on it.

In August 2003 I moved to Kelvori Finance Systems as an implementation analyst. Kelvori supplied accounting and treasury-support software to regional institutions. I worked with client staff to map their processes, prepare test scenarios and explain configuration choices. Over time I led small implementation teams, without taking over a client's accounting policy or treasury authority. The work exposed me to the gap between a feature demonstrated in a sales meeting and a task completed by someone with real deadlines and limited permissions. I wanted to influence those choices before implementation began.

Sarnovel recruited me as a product manager in July 2009. The company was small enough that product managers spent substantial time with users, but established enough to need repeatable decisions across clients. I worked on deposit inventories and internal treasury proposals. I had three product analysts and no engineering line management. My responsibility was to explain which problem a release would solve, what it would leave outside scope and how we would know whether the workflow was understood. I learnt to resist treating every configuration request as evidence for a new common feature.

In October 2016 I became head of the treasury-workflow portfolio. I led ten product and design colleagues with a ₹3.1 crore annual function allocation. The wider company had twenty-two institutional clients and FY 2022 revenue of ₹61 crore by the end of that appointment. My work expanded from individual screens to the relationship between research, packaging, implementation and support. I also began presenting product choices to the executive team. The difficult discussions were usually about obligations: what a client would reasonably expect from the thing we had promised to build.

I became chief product officer in April 2022. Sarnovel now serves thirty-two banks and finance companies across India, with ₹94 crore FY 2026 revenue and 186 staff at March 2026. I lead twenty-two colleagues through four managers and report to the CEO. The CTO leads engineering separately. Our software supports planning and internal workflows; it does not hold funds, execute transactions or recommend investments. I make that boundary explicit because product language can otherwise imply powers that the company does not possess. I am not a director and do not approve clients' treasury decisions.

Several recent decisions have tested that position. Renaming a renewal action made the demonstration less dramatic but reduced an important misunderstanding. Requiring fresh sign-off after material changes made a workflow slower but gave approval a clear object. Including read-only reviewers changed the economics of our proposed package. Declining an in-house valuation engine meant giving up a potential three-year ₹2.2 crore contract. I regard these as product decisions because they concern what we ask users to trust, the work we are prepared to support and the revenue we are willing to pursue.

I am now developing four managers who can lead those arguments without relying on my personal intervention. I also want to contribute to a board where specialist software is becoming consequential to customers' operations. I would bring experience of product scope, customer interpretation and recurring obligations, while learning from directors with deeper financial and legal expertise. I have no current directorships. My proposed twenty-day annual allowance is conditional, and my preparation includes learning the requirements relevant to a first appointment rather than treating an executive title as evidence of readiness.

Open to Board appointments

Languages / English · Hindi · Assamese