The next group arrived before the room was ready

The gap between two bookings is where I first learned to doubt a clean calendar. A room looked free because one session ended before the next began. The people working there knew that chairs had to move, equipment had to be checked and the first group might still be packing away. The product represented occupation while the operator was managing a changeover. I did not need a more attractive calendar to understand the problem. I needed to ask whose work had been left out of its definition of time.

I was born in 1978 and completed a BDes in Interaction Design at Narsheli Design Institute in June 2000. The following month I joined Vardheni Interface Studio in Jaipur as an interaction designer. I worked in a six-person design team under a studio director, without hiring or budget authority. Client assignments taught me to observe how people interpreted a screen and then explain what I had seen without turning a handful of conversations into a claim about every user. A design could be internally consistent and still rely on knowledge that a new staff member did not possess.

In January 2006 I moved to Trelshavi Scheduling Systems as a product designer. The company built appointment and shared-resource software. I became design lead in 2010, with seven colleagues and a ₹85 lakh annual team budget. That period made me interested in the people affected by a change who had not made it themselves. The person entering an appointment could understand the intended exception, while another colleague saw only the resulting time. I began to treat explanation, confirmation and the ability to inspect a proposed change as parts of the product rather than supporting instructions added after release.

I joined Oshveri Venue Software in July 2012 as product manager. It then employed seventy-six people and had recorded ₹19 crore revenue in FY 2012. I led an eight-person product and design group with ₹1.6 crore annual operating expense, working alongside a separate engineering manager. Rehearsal spaces and cultural venues brought a tangible dimension to scheduling. A booking could be correct in the database while leaving too little preparation time, confusing a visiting group or creating an assumption about equipment that the venue had never agreed to provide.

In April 2018 I became head of product, leading twenty-four colleagues through two managers with a ₹6.1 crore annual function budget. Oshveri had reached 225 employees and ₹64 crore revenue in FY 2018. I spent more time deciding which customer requests described a common product problem and which depended on an individual venue's operating model. We could offer clearer tools for recording a commitment, but we could not remove the operator's need to decide what a space could accommodate or who was responsible for its preparation.

I became CPO in September 2023. The company now employs 410 people across Ludhiana, Kochi and Jaipur, with ₹132 crore revenue and ₹16 crore operating profit for the year ended March 2026. Founders hold 51%, an employee trust 19% and regional investors 30%. My forty-six colleagues work through four leads, with ₹12.6 crore annual operating expense. I report to Anita Sernethi, while Gurmeet Valsheni leads engineering. I present product priorities and user evidence to directors in an executive capacity and hold no directorship myself.

The recent work has involved the less glamorous parts of a scheduling product. We made preparation and clearing windows visible after eighteen conflicts appeared in a prepared set of bookings. We invested in keyboard interaction after twenty-one of thirty staff could not complete representative tasks, while acknowledging the three who still needed help on repeat testing. We revised recurring-series changes after twenty-three holiday mismatches appeared in 140 reviewed series. And we changed the handling of tentative reservations after operators showed us that an expired hold could remain visible without making its status clear. Each case required a narrower, more useful account than a claim that the calendar had become universally reliable.

I am exploring whether this experience could support a first board contribution. I have begun structured learning about directors' duties, financial statements and how a board examines management's product commitments. I have not yet registered with India's independent directors' databank, and I do not describe executive presentations as board service. My provisional capacity is twenty days a year, subject to employer approval and the demands of a particular appointment. I would bring questions about how a business tests a promise before making it and how it hears from the people who must live with the result.

Open to Board appointments

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