I learned that understanding a request is different from committing the product to it.

I started as a business analyst at Dharvilen Software in July 1991, two months after completing technology studies at the fictional Kervanul Institute. The work involved understanding what an enterprise user needed to accomplish before specifying the software response. I belonged to a nine-person analytical group without management or spending authority. A request could sound like a feature while actually describing a sequence of decisions, a working constraint or a task whose interruption had not been considered.

I became a product manager in July 1998. The appointment made me responsible for selecting an approach rather than only describing the requirement. By 2004 I led eighteen colleagues through three direct reports with ₹2.8 crore annual product expense. Dharvilen’s ₹126 crore revenue and 510 employees described the company around that remit. Engineering and service colleagues retained their own responsibilities. I needed to explain why the chosen interaction served the user’s task, not merely why it made an attractive demonstration.

I failed that test in a 2002 planning prototype. I approved replacing keyboard entry with a drag-only scheduling interaction because it looked more immediate. In a test with twenty-six planners, eleven could not complete three defined planning tasks without a pointer. Suresh Dharveth challenged the assumption that the new appearance was sufficient reason to remove the existing route. ₹52 lakh supported restoring a keyboard-operable path alongside pointer interaction. The correction did not establish every accessibility requirement, but it made my omitted product decision explicit. I began asking reviewers to follow the whole task without borrowing the demonstrator’s familiarity with the intended route.

In April 2005 I joined Mervanith Systems as director of enterprise products. Moving into a shared workflow platform changed the consequences of saying yes to a customer. A specific request could affect the product used by many organisations and the work scheduled for teams they depended on. The director title described an executive job, not a statutory seat. I wanted the customer conversation to reveal the underlying need before committing the common product to a separate version that would require continuing support.

The vice-president of platform products role began in July 2012. A field-service proposal in 2016 made the boundary of a capability especially important. Research with forty-seven firms found nineteen needing to work through intermittent connectivity. We offered assigned-job viewing and capture in six specified forms, with updates queued for reconnection and conflicts made visible for resolution. Seven of ten pilot firms accepted that scope; three needed broader offline capability. I did not describe the limited offer as an entirely offline product simply because that phrase would have been easier to sell.

I became CPO in July 2019. My current function includes 188 product colleagues through seven direct reports with ₹62 crore delegated FY 2026–27 expense. Company revenue of ₹1840 crore and 3200 current employees are separate institutional context. Engineering, service operations, sales, security, finance and legal retain their mandates. I present product matters to the board as an executive and have no statutory-director appointment in this fictional career. The product remit is substantial without becoming authority over every capability or commercial result around it.

In 2023 an enterprise buyer proposed ₹18 crore for an exclusive workflow expected to occupy three shared teams for fourteen months. I declined the separate branch and supported a configurable common module with ₹8.4 crore product work. Four of six pilot clients adopted it and two declined. The proposed contract amount was never earned revenue, and the chosen spend was not a demonstrated saving. The decision kept the roadmap shared while accepting that the resulting product would not satisfy every buyer.

I am also interested in where a product appears complete before useful work has occurred. Machine-assisted status suggestions remained drafts after a review found wrong context in 180 of 1500 items. Onboarding moved towards a first completed service workflow rather than a feature tour, with thirty-four of 120 pilot teams still short of that outcome after thirty days. I want those limits retained in the account. Every example is invented. A possible first board contribution would build on the judgement behind these choices, with preparation and an assessment of relationships and time rather than an assumption that a confident product story establishes appointment readiness.