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About Me
Hi, thanks so much for stopping by my abode on the internet. My name is Akshay Deshmukh.
Since you’ve landed here, I’m assuming that my articles managed to pique your interest in wanting to know about me. So here goes…
After completing my Bachelors in Information Technology from the 2nd oldest engineering college in India - C.O.E.P, I worked as a Java developer at SunGard (now FIS) for 3.5 years where I primarily built parsers to parse market data from various commodity exchanges in the world. While it felt great in the beginning, the work turned mundane after a while and I stopped enjoying it.
Next, I moved to a startup named ShopSocially where I learned a lot about internet products and B2B SaaS. At ShopSocially, while being an engineering lead and hacking products that contributed to the company’s topline revenue, I also dabbled in writing product specifications, creating mockups, managing the roadmap, and talking to customers primarily for solution purposes. I absolutely loved what I was doing. It was in one of the appraisal meetings that my Boss made me understand that what I was doing falls under the area of responsibilities of a Product Manager and that’s how I became a chance Product Manager.
My next year-long stint at Druva introduced me to the nitty-gritties of product management where I worked as a Product Manager for Druva’s flagship product - inSync. At Druva, I contributed towards COGS optimization, API revamps, GTM for a couple of features, defining EOL policy, running a closed beta program from a couple of high impact releases, and sun-setting legacy products.
I believe execution and people management to be my strongest assets but I am big on strategy and customer insight too. Simple yet fascinating product experiences give me a high and I’m gung-ho about building products that provide a “Wow” feeling to users while solving a significant problem for them. These are the things I believe make me a customer champion!
I’m highly inspired by the community of indie-hackers and totally sold on the idea of building micro-SAAS businesses. My next goal is to put myself out of my day job by creating a sustainable micro-SAAS that provides value to its users while making me $1000 per month. Yes - just $1000 per month! Until that happens, I’m continuing working as a Sr. Product Manager at Zinrelo where I help build a loyalty platform aimed at improving the retention rate for e-commerce retailers.
I am constantly on the lookout for opportunities to learn and share my learnings. My recent pursuit of becoming a better product manager led me to build - Zero To PM - which is a curated library of product management related resources. Since it’s launch, it has been used by thousands of product management enthusiasts to upskill themselves. I read sporadically and write at whim on this blog but I’m relatively less erratic with my jibber jabber on Twitter. (Not sure where my alter ego gathers the audacity of desiring to write an ebook from, in spite of being so regularly irregular with writing)
If I managed to hold you for this long, please pat my back by following me on Twitter or letting me know by connecting on Linkedin.