नमस्कार Hallo Hello
Engineer by training. Builder by habit.
Twenty years of growing products, teams and P&Ls — the record is summarised in my portfolio, and how I lead an organisation is my core OS. This page is the rest: where I come from, life off the clock, and what I start because nobody asked me to.
- now
- VP Digital Products · tonies
- home
- Berlin ← Dubai ← Mumbai
- building
- Product Builder aaka
- studied
- Harvard Business School · BITS Pilani · Mumbai University
- languages
- English · Hindi · Marathi · German — can understand and babbel in a few more
02 // off work
Son. Husband. Father. Foodie. Explorer.
Off the clock I am with family, in the kitchen, or somewhere I have not been. A grateful son, a typical husband, an imperfect father. Nothing fancy comes out of my kitchen — honest home cooking, eaten with more enthusiasm than it is made — but I do hold strong and unwelcome opinions about pani puri.
My appetite for travel survived a decade of business trips — 50+ countries so far, and three cultures lived in properly rather than visited. I walk or cycle rather than drive, read non-fiction, and still collect coins.
The food and travel writing is all here
03 // what shaped me
At 17, I left home. Twice more since.
My family has a history of immigration: moving when it feels too comfortable. At 17 I left home the same way — a new city, a university where nobody knew my name. Dubai in 2015 and Berlin in 2017, this time with a young family, repeated the move by choice. Each one was a full reset — network, domain knowledge, local expertise — rebuilt from zero, faster every time.
Those resets are what shaped the four things I bring to every room.
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Synthesis
Five industries, three countries. Range is what lets me borrow a solution from a domain nobody else in the room has worked in.
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Stewardship
Build products, teams and cultures that outlast me. The test is whether it still runs after I have moved on.
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Resilience
Three full restarts in three countries. Composure under ambiguity is practised, not a personality trait.
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Empathy
I have been the outsider who did not speak the language. High standards and genuine care have never been in conflict.
04 // ventures
What I build on my own account.
I cannot leave an idea alone: a startup that failed taught me a product is not a business, and everything since is built on my own time, at my own cost.
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Training practice · 2026
Product Builder
Cohorts that take product, design and tech teams AI-native on their own backlog — curriculum, a live case product, an MCP sandbox, a credential.
See the practice -
Open source · 2025
aaka
A self-hosted assistant running our family calendar, lists and reminders over WhatsApp and Telegram. The schedule never leaves the house.
See aaka.life -
Pro bono · ongoing
Coaching & mentoring
Free, confidential 1:1s for product leaders in transition. Someone gave me their time at every stage — this is the repayment plan.
How it works
05 // always learning
I never stopped being a student.
Three degrees, three different lenses — how things are made, how systems are built, how a business is run. The combination was deliberate.
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BE Mechanical Engineering Mumbai University -
MS Software Systems BITS Pilani -
General Management Program Harvard Business School
The formal part finished; the habit did not — every year, one thing I cannot do yet. The ones that stuck:
- 2025
The General Management Program at Harvard Business School, taken while running the day job. Strategic finance and capital allocation stopped being someone else’s language.
- 2024
German. Berlin stopped being a city I lived in and became one I could argue in.
- 2020
Human-centred design at IDEO U — and, the same winter, learning to ski from scratch: two hours of instruction, two days of practice, then down the blue runs on stubbornness alone.
- 2021 – 25
Trained as a Leader Coach with IntelliCoach, certified at ICF Level 1 in early 2025. It changed how I lead, listen and develop people — and became the backbone of the pro-bono mentoring.
- 2019 – 20
Reforge growth and retention programs — the experimentation and retention frameworks I later ran at scale.
Prasad
Write to me