Building software today, exploring product management roles

The more software I built, the more my attention moved to the problems behind it: why something should exist, who needs it, how the workflow around it should run, and what could be better.

So this isn’t a sudden career change. It has been a steady progression, from developer to builder to problem solver to product thinker, and product management is where that line leads next. I still like learning new tools by building with them: SYNAPSE and SignBridge used tools outside my PPFAS stack, such as NestJS, FastAPI and three.js.

At Mansha Distributors I handled pricing, billing and sales-support analysis and implemented pricing strategies that increased net profit by 150%, so I’ve seen pricing and billing from the business side, not only through software.

Writing code taught me how a product works on the inside. What draws me now is the thinking that has to happen before any code: which problem is worth solving, what the right solution looks like, which constraints matter, and, once it’s out, whether it actually made a difference.

Some of my PPFAS work already sits on that line. With the portals I built, the value was in what business teams could now run themselves, more than in the code behind them.

So the move towards product management is deliberate, and I intend to keep building: understanding engineering constraints first-hand is part of what I’d bring to the role. I’m also currently enrolled in the Certification in Product Management with Applied AI Program from iHUB DivyaSampark, IIT Roorkee, delivered with Masai School.

One before-and-after example: business teams used to depend on the technology team for document updates. The self-service system I created lets them select the document type, upload the file directly to S3 and have the corresponding document links update across the website. The PPFAS case study shows the workflow step by step.

Three problem areas show up in work I’ve built:

• Internal workflows and what they cost. Internal tools can reduce a recurring cost or a dependency on another team. The PPFAS portals I built, described under “What I do today”, are my clearest example.
• Payments. I built the PPFAS Gift investment platform and integrated it with a third-party payment gateway, including international payment support; I did not build the gateway itself. SYNAPSE includes Razorpay subscription billing, with checks that payment notifications are genuine; it has not been connected to live payments.
• Accessibility beyond captions. Captions help many people, but they aren’t sign language, and spoken video isn’t automatically available in sign-language form. SignBridge is my research prototype for exploring that gap in Indian Sign Language.

The evidence is in the case studies

The case studies show the problems, decisions and trade-offs behind SYNAPSE and SignBridge, and the work I built at PPFAS. If any of it is relevant to your team, I’d like to hear from you.