The Long Route to Program Management

I did not set out to become a program manager. Nobody in my batch at college would have guessed it either. But when I look back at the sequence of things, a motorcycle, a shipyard, a design studio, a mountain, a store floor, a farm, and now a room full of contributors and vendors, there is a thread running through all of it. I just did not have a name for it until much later.

2013 to 2016: the trip we had to earn

It started with a plan that 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. It was small and probably insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but it mattered to us at the time to leave something behind rather than just pass through. The trip ended up getting some quiet recognition later, which surprised us both. We had not done it for that.

It was not a professional milestone by any stretch. But 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. I did not call it project management then. It just felt like keeping a promise to myself and one other person.

A month at the shipyard

Right after the trip, in September 2016, I did a short stint as an in plant trainee at Cochin Shipyard. One month is not long, but it was enough to see, up close, how a huge and complicated build like a ship gets planned from design all the way through to execution. I got my first real look at how resource management and logistics actually work on the ground, at a scale far beyond anything I had dealt with before. It planted an early seed, even if I did not notice it at the time.

Designing in three dimensions

After college, I joined a startup called Flowstate Systems as a Product Designer. I worked on functional, user focused product enclosures, the physical shells that hold electronics together. That meant constantly balancing how something looked with whether it could actually be manufactured, and working closely with engineers to turn technical requirements into real, testable prototypes. It is detailed, unforgiving work. Tolerances matter, and market research has to inform decisions long before anything gets built. It taught me to respect the gap between an idea and the thing that finally gets made. That gap, it turns out, exists in every kind of project, not just hardware.

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 different outlook. A comfort with discomfort, and a clearer sense of what I actually wanted from work. Something with movement, with people, with a goal you have to earn.

Decathlon: learning to build for people I would never meet

That outlook is probably what pulled me toward Decathlon, where I ended up leading the mountain sports department, a nice and unplanned echo of the expedition I had just come back from. The role was hands on. Sales performance, inventory, merchandising, hiring and developing a team of full time and part time staff. But the part I still think about most is the Second Life Project, an in store initiative to repair and resell returned products instead of throwing them away. It was my first time seeing sustainability built directly into how a business runs, rather than added on as an afterthought. It was also my first real exposure to working inside a large, structured organisation, where a process that works well can travel far beyond your own team.

Back to the farm, and a master’s on the side

After two years, I came back home to help run our family owned farm. It is a completely different rhythm from retail. I supported day to day planning, resource allocation, and workforce coordination, and got to work on circular economy practices that had genuinely stuck with me since that motorcycle trip years earlier. Composting, biogas energy, rainwater harvesting, organic farming, and agroforestry. It is a slower kind of work. Longer timelines, quieter feedback loops, decisions that show their results in seasons rather than sprints. Alongside it, I went back to studying, this time economics, at the master’s level, which gave me language for the systems level thinking I had been doing instinctively for years. How incentives, resources, and behaviour connect.

Green Worms, and the shape it is taking now

Last year I joined Green Worms, first as Assistant Manager for Social Impact and Advocacy. I designed monitoring frameworks, ran field research, and worked with government bodies and community partners to turn what we learned on the ground into actual program strategy. It was hands on, human, and often unpredictable work, and it sharpened exactly the kind of stakeholder management and program governance I would need next.

That next step came a few months later, when I moved into an Assistant Program Lead role. What started as one thread has grown into leading cross functional initiatives across operations, technology, and commercial functions at the same time. I work closely with IT teams, vendors, and commercial stakeholders to drive platform implementation, coordinate agile releases, support UAT and go live activities, and standardise how we work through SOPs and KPI driven reporting. It is the closest thing I have had yet to a role that asks for everything I have picked up along the way, all at once.

None of this happened because I woke up one day and decided to become a program manager. It happened because every chapter before it, the trip we funded ourselves, the month at the shipyard, the enclosures I designed down to the smallest detail, the mountain, the store floor, the farm, was quietly teaching me the same underlying skill. How to hold a goal steady, keep people moving together, and adjust the plan without losing sight of the destination.

Where I am headed

These days that same instinct is pointed at AI and GenAI, not as a trend to chase but as another complex system worth understanding properly and applying with the same discipline I have carried through everything else. I am currently building an internal knowledge assistant pilot, which feels like the next honest extension of this journey rather than a departure from it.

If you are looking at my work now and wondering how a product designer ends up managing programs, 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.