Dec 2023 – Apr 2025 · 1 yr 4 mos

• May 2025 Update: Available now for FT opportunities

Sep 2022 – Nov 2023 · 1 yr 2 mos · Seattle, Washington, United States · Remote

• Responsible for CFK - a K8s based orchestration and packaging software product to deploy self-managed Confluent Platform (CP). 50% of new CP customers driven by CFK.
• Deliver usability enhancements related to custom resources used for security, cluster roll, and topic delete management.

Mar 2021 – Aug 2022 · 1 yr 5 mos · Seattle, Washington, United States · Remote

• Define object cache product requirements targeted for analytics workloads.
• Reduce ambiguity in product definition by developing insights into analytical workload characteristics.
• Discover key customer value proposition, and build initial customer pipeline for this new product.
• Execute towards initial release to validate the product value hypothesis.

Apr 2019 – Aug 2020 · 1 yr 4 mos · Mountain View, California, United States

• Introduced 2 new products, targeting software developers, within our 'Modern SaaS' product portfolio that leverages kubernetes.
• Won the Intuit Platform Excellence Award. Improved NPS score by double-digit points and saved $1M in operational costs, within first 2 quarters.
• Products delivered -
• (a) Service Mesh based on open source Istio to manage east-west traffic, and
• (b) In-session Customer Engagement (ICE), to enable engagement at appropriate point within an application, and provide a platform approach for application developers to instrument relevant business metrics for post-processing analytics.

Aug 2016 – Apr 2019 · 2 yrs 8 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Consult on high value-add projects and engagements that cover product/corporate positioning, competitive analysis and product pricing.
• Developed rapid capability to come up to speed on particular products, market, and competition by engaging select leaders in sales, engineering, and product management.

Oct 2014 – Jul 2016 · 1 yr 9 mos · Mountain View

• Tintri storage is purpose-built for virtualized environments.
• Responsibilities include extending Tintri technology & product leadership around its core platform OS.
• Delivered storage industry's first and only storage performance guarantee capabilities for individual VMs with detailed contention latency visualization. Allowed VM-native storage provisioning and management from vSphere, delivering easier storage management for virtualization administrator persona.

Oct 2013 – Oct 2014 · 1 yr · Sunnyvale

• Lead product strategy & roadmap development for NFS-protocol based enterprise application workload segment that brings in about ~$2B run-rate revenue. Focus on High-performance and In-memory databases workloads.
• Increased performance by over 40% for meta data operations, placing company on par with competition.
• Successfully delivered a business case and product requirements for a scale-out architecture to further drive NetApp's clustered storage leadership within the first few months.

Nov 2011 – Jul 2013 · 1 yr 8 mos · San Jose

• Maiden startup adventure that delivered CRM and E-Learning capabilities for coaches to help them scale their business. Drove concept to product, which generated sales, after an useful pivot.
• Gained operational experience in getting those first initial customers & aligning product/value offering with an established business-model. Eventually ran out of cash before we could get to product/market fit.
• Along the way, built some muscles in UX design, behavioral aspects, mobile app design, and in general, getting out of my comfort zone.
• Huge satisfaction in having bootstrapped a product that people paid actual dollars for.
• A bit disappointed by rookie entrepreneur mistakes along the journey, and having learned on my dime :-)

Mar 2010 – Oct 2011 · 1 yr 7 mos

• Team & Charter: Lead a team of Product Managers to leverage Cisco assets in server, cloud & router business lines to drive insertion of Cisco WAN Optimization in clouds.
• Contributions:
• ==========
• Cloud Strategy & Roadmap: Detailed business case & customer use-cases with early adopter customer list for SaaS applications, IaaS-powered cloud applications and MSP/CSP channel-led opportunities.
• Execution: First product version integrated with data center virtual switches. Concept-to-Launch of Virtual WAAS product line to deliver industry’s first Cloud-Ready WAN Optimization solution for private clouds. Led key aspects required to transition a hardware product line to a software product line.
• Product Evangelist: Worked with sales to close nearly first two dozen early enterprise customer wins for Virtual WAAS.
• Product Launch: Leveraged deep customer relationship to generate enterprise customer references for external product launch.
• Other Activities: Messaging, Launch activities, Collateral, Pricing, Demand generation, Sales support, promotion, bundles & revenue/unit forecasts.

Dec 2006 – Feb 2010 · 3 yrs 2 mos

• Product Manager for the Award-winning Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS) - Cisco's WAN Optimization product line.
• Lead Product Manager for key software & hardware (appliance) releases.
• Contribution Areas:
• ==============
• New Product Introduction and Platform Transition: Pricing, Packaging, Promotion, Unit Forecasts & managing End-of-life(EOL) process.
• Sales Support: Assist sales in key competitive wins
• Collateral: MRD, Technical PRDs, Datasheet, Ordering Guide, BDM & Roadmap presentations, Customer-case studies, FAQs & competitive documents.
• Market Launch: Generate enterprise customer references for public launch & co-ordinate with outbound marketing team.
• Business Intelligence & Analytics: Generated a ‘high target customer list’ for a marketing program intended to up-sell value-added software options on the base platform purchased.

Aug 2005 – Dec 2006 · 1 yr 4 mos

• Contribution Areas:
• =============
• Successful Product Demonstrations, Proof-of-Concept engagements. Prove value, influence technical buyers and build business justification.
• Market Segment: Enterprise IT Sales.
• Domain Expertise: Networks and Applications.
• 1) Application Performance Monitoring.
• 2) Network Configuration & Validation.
• 3) Capacity Planning.
• 4) Various Network Routing layer protocols and network architecture.
• International Experience in India: (Oct '05-Jan'06)
• Some business development experience such as evaluating potential VARs (Value-Added Resellers) in India.
• Successfully closed 3 dormant accounts - overall worth around $200K.
• Train existing VAR personnel.

Jul 2003 – May 2005 · 1 yr 10 mos

• Layer-3 based network management product that built network topology in real-time based on OSPF & BGP protocols.
• Contribution Areas:
• Product Development, Delivered technical Func Spec and Design Specs.
• Multiple roles:
• Software Engineering: Delivered product technical requirements for visualizing network events including functional and design specs.
• Sales Engineering/Product management:
• Developed product positioning by contributing to white papers.
• Designed customer support process.
• Participated in customer product demos.
• Involved in product strategy and planning process - MRD,PRD.

Dec 2002 – Jul 2003 · 7 mos

• • Investigated possible communication paradigms for inter-module communication in SITAR, an intrusion-tolerant web-server architecture developed at MCNC-RDI – improved performance by 200%.
• • Coauthored a research proposal to the to US Navy, as part of US Department of Defense’s (DoD) ‘Small Technology Transfer Program’ (STTR).
• • Researched and proposed independent topics, resulting in research grants, during my spare time.