Chief Product Officer India
The work kept spilling beyond our neat outline
I approved the word compact before asking enough questions about the work beside the bench. Its drawn footprint was 0.9 square metres, which seemed easy to communicate. Then Sana showed me the customer study: the median observed working envelope was 1.7 square metres, and fourteen of twenty-four teams needed the wider arrangement. Parts, unfinished work and access to storage had not disappeared simply because our product occupied a smaller rectangle. The drawing was accurate; the promise I allowed it to carry was too broad.
My interest in those everyday arrangements began in Agartala and developed through industrial-design study at the fictional Telqeri Design College, completed in May 2000. I joined Vorzena Metal Products that July as a product researcher in a six-person group. The company employed 190 people and recorded ₹44 crore revenue for the year ending March 2001. I had neither direct reports nor expenditure authority. My task was to observe how customers used workshop furniture and bring those observations back without turning one person's arrangement into a rule for everyone.
I became product manager in June 2006. Thirteen colleagues worked through two managers within ₹1.5 crore annual product expense. Vorzena then had 340 employees and ₹96 crore revenue in the financial year ending March 2007. I learned how easily a product proposition could become split between departments: the base item in one quotation, the necessary accessory in another, and the room arrangement assumed by someone who had never seen the customer work. Part-time management study at Zhevani Management Institute, completed in November 2009, helped me connect those questions with a commercial account while continuing in the role.
In March 2012 I joined Zerqeli as range head. Thirty-four people and three managers supported the portfolio within ₹4.2 crore annual expense. Company scale at entry was 480 employees and ₹172 crore revenue for the year ending March 2013. The range included benches, drawer cabinets and related arrangements for ordinary industrial work. I became more attentive to the difference between a feature customers admired in a demonstration and a feature they needed during a full working day. Product research had to include the material arriving at the bench and the unfinished work leaving it, not just the clean display between those events.
The vice-president of product role began in September 2017. I led sixty-two colleagues through five managers with ₹9.6 crore annual product expense, within a 650-person company reporting ₹246 crore revenue for the year ending March 2018. The broader role added delivery propositions and evaluation programmes to the range discussion. A flat presentation could hide assembly work; a reusable package could hide the return journey. I learned to ask which part of an appealing product story somebody else would have to make true after we had finished explaining it.
I became CPO in January 2023. Today ninety-six colleagues work through six managers within ₹18 crore annual product-development expense. The company's 820 employees recorded ₹314 crore revenue and ₹26.2 crore operating profit for the year ending March 2026. An employee trust holds 52%, a regional industrial investor 33% and the founder 15%. CEO Vikram Nerzhani owns executive business commitments, while Sana Kelvethi leads design coordination with the engineering and quality owners. I can recommend the shape of the offer and the development work, but I do not independently approve factory capital or declare a workplace safe.
The compact-bench review led to ₹36 lakh of study and development around two depth propositions. A separate ₹22 lakh review changed how we presented task configurations: the ₹41,000 base bench did not contain the ₹17,000 storage needed by twenty-seven of forty reviewed workflows. We also spent ₹47 lakh on a returnable-crate pilot whose ninety-five dispatches produced sixty-one usable returns, eighteen repair cases and sixteen outstanding returns at review. Finally, a ₹68 lakh combined fleet and programme allocation supported workplace evaluations. Of eighteen participating teams, nine bought, four declined and five remained undecided; that snapshot did not establish a final conversion rate or a programme return.
I have no statutory directorship. In this fictional account I registered with the IICA independent directors databank in August 2026, with assessment preparation still to be completed and no exemption claimed. Twenty-two annual days is a provisional allowance for one first external role. I would bring a product leader's attention to the undertaking behind a proposition: the space, the configuration, the return journey and the opportunity to try ordinary work before committing. I would also bring the experience of having to correct a simple claim I had supported. That is more useful to a board than pretending every careful question originated with me.
Open to Board appointments
Languages / English · Hindi · Bengali
A leadership conviction
I like a product brief that follows the customer past the moment of purchase: into the room, through the first ordinary task and back to the packaging left behind. That is where a neat proposition meets its real cost.
Perspectives from colleagues
Mitali brought the cost of a more specific offer into the same discussion as its customer benefit. She did not ask us to believe that a corrected claim or a limited pilot had already paid for itself.
When our task observations challenged the compactness wording she had approved, she changed the proposition itself. The two depth choices retained the difference we had seen instead of hiding it in a note.