Headline

Product Manager | SMB Payroll & Attendance (Hardware + Software) | Across 27+ Industries | Driving Business Growth | Product Strategies | Duke PM

About

I build payroll and attendance products for India's SMBs, the kind of businesses that still track attendance on paper and calculate salaries in Excel. At Petpooja, I own the Payroll product. It's hardware and software together: biometric attendance devices and the payroll platform that runs on top of them. We've shipped 36,500+ devices across 27+ industries so far in manufacturing floors, corporate offices, hotels, retail shops, schools, hospitals, and about 20 more verticals. The interesting part of my job is that payroll looks completely different in each industry. A manufacturing unit with 200 workers on three shifts has nothing in common with a school tracking 30 teachers. But both need attendance, salary processing, and PF/ESI compliance. Building one product that works for all of them without becoming complicated and that's what I spend my time on. Before Petpooja, I was at TechBlocks building e-commerce features for Michaels - one of North America's biggest retailers (1,600 stores, 49 US states + Canada). Shipped features that drove 103% GMV growth in a single quarter. Before that, I spent about 5 years on the consulting side: built an ERP for the one sector of Government of Gujarat, designed an HR and payroll system for an NGO with 250+ employees, and shipped a legal tech product for lawyers in Germany. The thread through all of it: I keep ending up building products for people who don't think of themselves as 'tech users.' Factory owners, government officers, NGO admins, restaurant managers. Making software simple enough for them is harder than building for developers. And more interesting. Duke University - PG Certificate in Product Management

Location

Ahmedabad

AI stack

antigravity

codex

claudecode

Work experience

Product Manager at Petpooja, Jul 2025 - Present · 1 yr 2 mos, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, I own the Payroll Management System at Petpooja: a product that combines biometric attendance hardware with payroll software. We've deployed 36,500+ devices across 27 industries. My product handles: Attendance: Biometric fingerprint devices and GPS-based tracking for on-site and field workers. The hardware is ours. I manage both the device experience and the software that reads it. Payroll processing: Salary calculation, PF, ESI, Professional Tax, TDS compliance. For most of our customers, this is their first time moving off paper or Excel. Workforce management: Blue-collar and white-collar. Shift scheduling, overtime, attendance penalties, leave management. The challenges are very different on a manufacturing floor vs a corporate office vs a hospital. Our biggest verticals: - Manufacturing (24% of devices) - factory floor attendance, shift rotation, daily wage - Corporates & Offices (19%) - standard payroll + compliance - Hospitality (15%) - high turnover, irregular shifts - Retail (12%) - multi-location, mixed part-time/full-time - Plus education, healthcare, automobile, real estate, and 15+ more The product bet: keep it simple enough for an SMB owner who's never used payroll software, while adding depth that eventually makes it ready for mid-market and enterprise.

Product Manager at TechBlocks, Mar 2024 - Jun 2025 · 1 yr 4 mos, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, Client: Michaels - a leading North American arts & crafts retailer with 1,600 stores across 49 US states and Canada. I worked on the seller tools and e-commerce platform: - Shipped features that contributed to 103% GMV growth and a 63.8% GMV increase in Q3 2024 alone - Improved seller adoption by 10-15%, average order value by 5-8%, and reduced cart abandonment by 7-10% - Ran quarterly feature planning sessions across business, customer support, product, and engineering teams

Product Manager at Pragmatic Techsoft Pvt Ltd, Aug 2021 - Apr 2024 · 2 yrs 9 mos, Pune Division, Maharashtra, India, Launched 10 products across different verticals. A few highlights: - Built a GenAI voice-enabled dashboard for ERP systems. Users spoke plain language commands which got converted to SQL queries and returned visual reports. Collaborated with a third-party AI/ML partner on the LLM integration. - Developed a promotional app for a chain of 30 gas stations. Customer journey mapping, feature scoping, launch. - Market research and customer interviews across products drove a 30% increase in sales. - Wrote PRDs and BRDs for every product and feature launch during this period. - Built a GenAI voice dashboard that let ERP users ask questions in plain English and get data reports back -- natural language to SQL under the hood.

Functional Consultant at Evozard Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd., May 2020 - Jul 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos, Vadodara, Gujarat, India, Shipped a legal tech product for lawyers in Germany - from ideation to requirements to UAT to live deployment. My first experience building software for an international market. - Owned the full delivery lifecycle: requirements gathering, solution design, coordinating with developers, testing, client demos, and production deployment - Ran pre-sales for multiple client accounts, contributing to a 20% increase in company revenue - Customized ERP and workflow products across industries.

Functional Consultant at Digital Trinity, Oct 2019 - Apr 2020 · 7 mos, Gandhinagar, Implemented an ERP system for the Government of Gujarat - project covering billing and connectivity across all 33 districts of the state. - Delivered the full implementation in 7 months with a team of 4 people - Reported monthly to an IAS officer and weekly to an IES officer overseeing the project - Managed coordination across multiple government departments, RFP documentation, and compliance requirements

Education

Product Management, Duke University

Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Savitribai Phule Pune University