I did not set out to work in product. Nobody in my batch at college would have guessed it either. But when I look back at the sequence of things, a motorcycle, a design studio, a mountain, a store floor, a sports-tech startup, a brain-mapping headband, and now a platform serving more than 20,000 clients, there is a thread running through all of it. I just did not have a name for it until much later.
Where it starts: a farming family
I come from a family of farmers. Growing up around that work, you absorb things before you have words for them. Seasons do not wait for you. Resources are always limited. A decision made at planting time shows its results months later, and there is no undo. Long before I knew what a roadmap or a backlog was, I had seen what it looks like to plan carefully against constraints you cannot negotiate with, and to judge a plan by what it actually produces.
2013 to 2016: the trip we had to earn
The first real project I ever ran had nothing to do with a career. In 2013 I started college, and somewhere in that first year, a friend and I decided that after our third semester, in 2016, the two of us would take a long motorcycle trip across India. No one was going to fund that for us. So for the next couple of years, alongside classes, I worked part time jobs wherever I could find them, saving toward something that existed only as a route sketched out on paper.
We pulled it off in 2016, just the two of us, on two wheels, for weeks on end, through more states than I had ever set foot in before. We made it a point to plant seeds along the way, which, given where I come from, felt like the natural thing to do. It was the first time I understood, in a very physical way, what it takes to turn a shared idea into a real, moving thing. You set a target. You work steadily toward it for longer than feels reasonable. You plan for a hundred variables you cannot control, and you keep going even when the finish line is two years and thousands of kilometres away.
Designing in three dimensions
After college, I joined a startup called Flowstate Systems as a Product Designer. I designed five recyclable enclosures for electronic prototypes in Fusion 360, the physical shells that hold electronics together. That meant using user centred design and market research to decide on form and materials, and then working with engineers and vendors to validate prototypes against compliance standards. It is detailed, unforgiving work. Tolerances matter, and a decision made early is expensive to undo later. It taught me to respect the gap between an idea and the thing that finally gets made. That gap, it turns out, is where all product work lives.
A friend, a mountain, and March 2019
Somewhere in that period, a friend introduced me to mountaineering, almost in passing, the way life altering things often arrive. We trained, we applied, and in March 2019 we went on the expedition. I will not pretend the mountain taught me neat lessons in real time. Mostly it just demanded everything I had. But it left me with a comfort with discomfort, and a clearer sense of what I wanted from work. Something with movement, with people, with a goal you have to earn.
Decathlon: listening before building
That outlook pulled me toward Decathlon Sports India, where I worked as a Project Leader. For the Local Sport Project, I researched what customers in our area actually wanted and how they behaved, and turned those findings into engagement programmes, including a trekking workshop that ran across four stores. Customer penetration grew from 4% to 11%. I also owned department sales and margin targets, and wrote a Karnataka SOP that was later rolled out nationwide, improving store productivity by 20%. It was my first real lesson that the best ideas come from understanding customers rather than guessing at them, and that a process that works well can travel far beyond your own team.
Softfruit: learning the language of requirements
At Softfruit Solutions, a sports technology company, I moved into business analysis. I ran stakeholder workshops to draw out requirements and wrote them down properly, in BRDs, as-is and to-be process flows, and user stories. I supported QA with UAT scenarios and defect triage, and analysed sports booking demand, competitors and market data across Indian cities to help shape product strategy. Most of all, I learned to translate what the business needed into features a team could actually prioritise and build. A product is only as good as the shared understanding behind it, and this is where I learned how to build that understanding.
Neurotech Labs: owning the product
Neurotech Labs was where I first became a Product Owner. I owned the strategy and roadmap for an EEG headband and its brain mapping app, and defined the MVP. I turned user needs into a prioritised backlog and led refinement, sprint planning and sprint reviews with hardware, software and neuroscience teams, accepting stories against acceptance criteria and a clear Definition of Done. I set success metrics and validated the product through user tests and pilots. Connected hardware does not forgive a vague requirement, and the designer in me recognised the same tolerances I had worked with years earlier, now applied to a whole product.
Green Worms, and the shape it is taking now
In mid 2025 I joined Green Worms, a waste management and recycling company, as Assistant Program Lead, working as the Product Owner for our operations platform. I own requirements and the product backlog with IT for a scheduling, billing and payments platform serving more than 20,000 clients and 100+ vehicles, writing user stories and acceptance criteria across 14 Agile releases. I prioritise releases using WSJF and value versus effort, manage dependencies and risks across IT, Finance and operations, and explain roadmap trade-offs to leadership.
I led UAT, go-live and training for more than 1,000 users, and worked with Finance to get GST related requirements right. I defined KPIs, SOPs and SLA workflows and ran KPI reviews, and in six months active clients grew from 5,000 to 7,000, while process efficiency improved by 15 to 20%. Along the way I became SAFe POPM certified, which gave a shared vocabulary to much of what I had been doing for years. And for someone from a farming family, building products for a company that keeps waste out of the ground feels close to home.
Where I am headed
These days I am also building GenAI products, and I build them eval-first. My internal RAG assistant answers questions over Google Drive documents, with guardrails against hallucination and prompt injection, and it gave grounded answers on all 50 questions in its test set. I am now working on an AI voice-of-customer copilot, a multi-agent pipeline on local models that turns app reviews and support tickets into pain-point themes, verified quotes and roadmap items, with counts computed in code and checked by a critic agent. Not a trend to chase, but another complex system worth understanding properly and building with the same discipline as everything else.
My next step is a Product Owner or Associate Product Manager role. If you are looking at my work and wondering how a product designer ends up owning products, this is the answer. It was never really a pivot. It was the same person, learning the same lesson, in a lot of different places.