About me

I grew up in Chennai and Mumbai and came to the U.S. for grad school at the University of Minnesota. I never left. As a kid I took things apart to see how they worked, then built something else out of the parts, so engineering made sense.

I’ve had three quite different jobs since. I started as an electrical engineer at Joby Aviation, working on eVTOL aircraft systems with NASA. Then I spent nine years at Rockwell Automation, where I moved from embedded engineering into product management. Now I run engineering at Williams AV, where we make assistive listening systems for live events, houses of worship, classrooms, courtrooms and other places that need to work for people with hearing loss.

Going from engineer to PM at Rockwell was the hardest of those changes. Engineering is mostly black and white: the math works or it doesn’t, the schematic works or it doesn’t. Product management is gray. You’re sorting out what customers say they want from what they need, building business cases on projections instead of first-principles math, and making calls before all the information is in. It took me a while to get comfortable with that.

It also made me a better director. When a PM on my team doesn’t have an answer yet, or changes the one they gave me yesterday, I know what they’re dealing with. So we work the problem together instead of me waiting for a clear answer that isn’t coming.

I’ve also learned, more painfully than I’d like, that not everyone on a team has the same goal. I used to assume shipping the product was everyone’s priority. Often it is. But people bring other incentives too: career visibility, team boundaries, how a project will be remembered. None of that is bad faith, but it doesn’t always point the same way as the project. I’ve gotten better at spotting it early. Sometimes that means a direct conversation, and sometimes it means restructuring the work so it stops being a blocker. Either way, the goal is still to ship the product.

Williams is also where I’ve seen most clearly what a small company can do that a big one can’t. At one point we were stuck on defining the next product for a key segment. We had meetings every week and opinions in every direction, but no written requirements and no vision anyone could get behind. The engineers were ready to build and we had nothing to give them. I’d been reading about the Google Ventures design sprint and proposed a modified version. Over two weeks we sketched, built rough prototypes and ran user interviews, and by the end we had a product vision the team believed in.

We also killed a feature that would have been an expensive mistake. We’d planned to make the device rechargeable, which sounded obviously good in a meeting room. Almost every user we talked to said they wouldn’t have time to charge it, or would forget. That one feature would have cost us months of engineering on a product nobody wanted.

I could only run that experiment because I work somewhere small enough to read about an idea, propose it and try it without months of approvals. At a Fortune 500 it might have died in a slide deck. That’s the part of small-company engineering I keep coming back to.

I’ve started sharing more of this in public. My first talk was at Minnebar 20 in May 2026, and more writing is on the way.