People often ask me about my journey - how I went from manufacturing to government innovation to product management. I just say what Steve Jobs once said, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.”

It might seem random, but every dot connected me to building things from scratch.

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NRB Bearings

I was the only female executive in the shop floor managing processes and innovating to reduce waste by 90%. I built some processes to reduce and reuse wastage which was pioneering. Even today, 7 years later, my old colleagues reach out to me for advice.

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Founding Innovation Fellow, Government of Telangana

Serendipitously Government of Telangana fellowship happened - a once in a lifetime opportunity to work with the Chief Innovation Officer, Principal Secretary and Minister of IT.

I was one among 6 fellows (out of 1000+ applicants!) for the founding batch of Innovation fellowship. They gave us different mandates to choose from - grassroots innovation, school innovation, investor ecosystem, Hyderabad startup ecosystem, and more. I picked grassroots innovation, and honestly, it turned out to be one of the most fulfilling choices I’ve ever made.

I collaborated with hundreds of organisations, colleges, schools - Invest India, Ministry of External Affairs, HoneyBee Network, News Network etc. to design programs and implement them at the grassroots for promoting and nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship. I launched campaigns, did entrepreneurship workshops and what not.

The impact? It still blows my mind. Netflix commissioned a movie about one of our innovators! Another innovator’s work was so impressive that the Ministry of External Affairs had them gift their innovation to the Government of Kenya. We created India’s only state with a Grassroots Innovation Policy, impacted 10,000+ aspiring entrepreneurs, and worked across 31+ districts and 30+ colleges.

Something crazy happened one day. One day, I was waiting for a friend at IIIT Hyderabad when a stranger approached me. He recognized me from an entrepreneurship drive we’d done in his city. He told me how that program led him to get selected for the CIE incubator program, and now he was building his startup. He actually saluted me before leaving!

Everything I started from scratch and now Telangana Innovation Cell is still continuing most of the programs that I have started.

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Product Management happened

At Five Elements SDG, I literally cold-called hundreds of fiberglass manufacturers through IndiaMart - wild times but now, I know the fiberglass market inside out! I had to get some huge machine parts manufactured in India for a French company to build sustainable housing. Super interesting project!

Then Mason happened. Something just clicked there. The team helped me find my groove. We did everything from marketing to community building to random startup things. We even launched products on Product Hunt and won Product of the Year in the eCommerce category!

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DevOps & Developer tooling

At Facets.cloud, I became their founding product manager, and here’s a secret - on my first day, I asked “What is cloud infrastructure?” Yeah, I was that clueless about the field!

But this is my thing - learn and be curious. I took courses, bugged our engineers with endless questions, and talked to every customer I could find to understand DevOps from their perspective. I realized something important - my superpower isn’t knowing everything, it’s being able to thrive in any field where there are interesting problems to solve.

I can jump into the things and figure out things. And, I enjoy building products and features from scratch. That’s exactly what I did at Facets. Every feature, every flow and every page was implemented by me.

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Now: Building with AI

These days, I’m at Mantis as a Product Consultant, diving deep into AI. We’re building AI workflows for websites, products, marketing collateral - you name it. It’s like every experience I’ve had is coming together in this wild world of AI and product development.

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Connecting The Final Dots

Looking back now, I can finally see how it all fits. That manufacturing experience? It taught me how to break down complex processes and make them better - something I use every day in product management. My time in government showed me how to create impact at scale, which is crucial when building products that serve thousands of users. Even those cold calls to manufacturers? They taught me persistence and how to really understand user needs.

You see, when I was standing on that manufacturing floor, I couldn’t have predicted I’d be building AI products today. When I was working with grassroots innovators, I didn’t know I’d use those skills to understand developer pain points. As Steve Jobs said, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

I trusted my instinct to solve meaningful problems wherever I found them. And somehow, all these seemingly random dots - manufacturing, government innovation, startups, tech - they’ve connected to give me a unique perspective on building products from scratch that matter.

I’m still collecting dots, still learning, still creating impact wherever I go. If you’re working on something interesting where these connected experiences might help, let’s talk! I’m always up for a good conversation about innovation, product development, or really anything that involves solving meaningful problems.

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