About

The short version, then the long one.

Sumit Bhagat, looking at the camera — me, on a good day

I'm a product manager from India. I've spent about ten years building products at small companies. I write here about product, AI and work.

The long version

I studied chemistry at IIT Bombay and took a year off in the middle to start a company with friends. That company was Macroinfluence. We raised a small seed round and built an ed-tech SaaS product. Later I ran it as a digital marketing agency, with a team of eight and around twenty clients. That's where I learned the difference between what a client asks for and what they need.Also Sports Person of the Year at IIT Bombay, once.

In 2019 I worked with Nanonets, a YC company, on growth. Organic leads went from about 15 to 42 a day, and one of our launches reached number two on Product Hunt. Then I joined NeoStencil as head of product. Covid arrived a few months in and we moved offline coaching classes online within weeks. The company was later acquired by Unacademy. The main thing I took from both jobs: talk to customers more than you think you need to.

Since 2021 I've been head of product at Karkhana.io, where we help Indian manufacturers source custom parts. I built most of the internal software, the ERP and CRM and the rest, and then the thing I'm proudest of: a costing engine that quotes a CNC part in seconds instead of days. To build it properly I did a part-time M.Tech in data science at BITS Pilani. I started it to solve one problem and ended up much deeper in machine learning than I had planned.I did the degree on weekends. I'd recommend the degree, not the schedule.

What I believe, for now

Frameworks help when a team is new to product. After that they mostly get in the way.
My best product decisions came from sitting with customers, not from dashboards.
AI takes the busywork out of the PM job. Deciding what to build, and owning that decision, is still the job.
Writing makes you think more clearly. That's reason enough to do it.

Why this site exists

Two reasons. I think more clearly when I write for a reader. And I want to be known for my thinking on product and AI. That's an ambitious goal, and I'm fine saying it out loud.I've learned a lot from how Shreyas Doshi and Aakash Gupta write. This is my version.

Reach me

Email is best: hello@sumitbhagat.com. I'm also onLinkedIn.

If you're hiring for a senior product role that is centred on AI, I'd like to hear about it.

Letters from Sumit

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Thanks for reading this far,
Sumit