From Web Engineer to Senior Product Manager: Lessons from a Decade in Commerce Tech

My career has taken me from the nuts and bolts of web engineering to leading products used by enterprise brands and millions of shoppers. It hasn't been a straight line — more of a rollercoaster — but every turn added something I still use every day. Here's the path from Yahoo web engineer to Senior Product Manager for Rewards+ at Capillary Technologies.

Building the foundation: web engineering at Yahoo

I started at Yahoo Small Business helping merchants get their online stores running. Domains, hosting, DNS, business email, HTML and CSS — basic on paper, but they taught me how the web works underneath every product. The real education came from merchants' problems: catalog management, SEO, third-party APIs and the order, logistics and payment flows behind every online purchase. That's where I first connected technology to business outcomes.

The turning point: delivery and product at Capillary

Moving to Capillary's startup pace changed how I worked. As Delivery Head for Southeast Asia, I worked with brands like Fabindia, Unilever, Levi's and ASICS — creating Fabindia's omnichannel strategy (+30% revenue YoY) and launching Unilever's hyperlocal commerce in Indonesia in 45 days. Then, as Product Manager, I conceived an API-based headless OMS and led its scalability roadmap as order value processed doubled from ~$500M to ~$1B. Six years there taught me that agility and adaptability aren't buzzwords — they're survival skills.

Leading at scale: Group Product Manager at Bazaarvoice

Bazaarvoice was a different challenge: mature products inside a highly structured organisation. Leading UGC Display, I migrated and relaunched Ratings & Reviews (75X engagement) and Q&A (25X engagement), added predictive search, and led an NLP feature that generates review titles and descriptions. I learned to be a more process-driven leader — planning further ahead and running discovery and go-to-market with discipline.

Operating at logistics scale: Xpressbees

At Xpressbees I led consumer experience products and a team of seven product managers. Logistics is unforgiving — small failure rates become huge numbers. We cut unverified non-delivery reasons by 99% (saving ₹1.5 Cr a month), took OTP delivery to 99.5% success, introduced call masking and PII encryption, and used AI chatbot workflows to capture delivery exceptions 80% more accurately. It's where I saw AI deliver hard, measurable results in operations.

Coming back: Rewards+ at Capillary, with GenAI

Today I'm back at Capillary Technologies as a Senior Product Manager, overseeing Rewards+ — an AI-driven rewards marketplace that lets brands offer vouchers, cashback, partner rewards and experiences their customers redeem with loyalty points. To go deeper on AI, I went back to school and completed IISc Bangalore's Generative AI programme with an A+. The aim isn't AI for its own sake; it's using it where it measurably helps customers and the business.

Lessons from the journey

• Basics matter. A strong foundation — in web technology or anything else — is what you fall back on when things get hard.
• Know the domain deeply. Order management, logistics, payments and loyalty each have their own physics; understanding them is a product manager's edge.
• Stay adaptable. Startups reward quick thinking and experimentation; bring that energy wherever you go.
• Respect process at scale. In larger organisations, disciplined planning and execution is what turns good ideas into shipped products.
• Measure everything. Engagement, fulfilment, fraud, cost — the numbers keep a roadmap honest.
• Never stop learning. From an M.Tech at BITS Pilani to a GenAI certification at IISc, deliberate learning has opened every new chapter.

What's next

Loyalty and commerce are full of unsolved problems, and GenAI has opened a new set of them. If you're hiring for senior product roles, need help with loyalty, commerce or GenAI product strategy, or just want to swap notes, I'd love to hear from you.