Who am I?
A software product management executive with more than 20 years of software product management experience (15+ years in SaaS). I have led product teams that defined and launched highly successful SaaS-based B2B and B2C software products that generated annual revenues upto $300M and with a customer base of thousands of companies to millions of consumers.
I am a “mass market” software product executive – I love building products for consumers and small businesses that are simple to use, yet very powerful. I believe in “Less is more”. I don’t enjoy building super complex, highly flexible, do everything under the sun, implementation heavy, training heavy “enterprise” products. I do not believe any product needs to be complex. Businesses don’t use products, humans do. And humans inherently don’t like to use complex things. Plain and simple.
How do I help companies succeed?
I help software companies build products that solve “real” customer needs using insights generated via a “customer centric” product management process. I have personally conducted more than 300 on-site customer visits in 10 countries –Â where I spent time doing a deep dive into the user’s life observing them using my product or competitive products, listening to them and then creating products to solve their problems.
My key strengths
- Listening to customers and discovering their unmet needs which if solved will end up in products that customers would happily buy.
- Communicating the discovered customer insights to internal stakeholders via business cases to justify new product development investments.
- Leading cross functional or direct report teams in successfully delivering products that solve these needs.
- Communicating the benefits of the products back to the market using user terminology as opposed to marketing jargon (that “scalable, fault tolerant, flexible, highly configurable, robust three tier architecture using web services” – you know what I mean).
My Experience
I have held different product management roles ranging from VP of Product to individual contributor roles at Wiser Solutions, Toast, Alignable, Care.com, Gazelle, OnForce, and 11 years in various roles of increasing responsibility at SolidWorks Corporation the leading manufacturer of 3D mechanical CAD software used by over a million users worldwide.
Three of my favorite products
- Waze mobile app – the numerous hours it has saved me in working around traffic is too many to count.
- Shazam – the simplest app with minimal UI – classic example of how to envelope something really complex into a very minimal UI.
- SolidWorks – OK, I had a big role to play in defining this product having worked on it for 11 years. But cannot think of another product that helps save and improve lives more than this one – has been used to design everything from medical stents to automatic defribillators to premie baby incubators.
What else do I do?
While not having fun leading teams to build amazing products, I enjoy spending time with my family. I am a fan of New England Patriots (worried about that the good old days have ended and the long dark spell of rebuilding is on us) and Boston Celtics.
How can you contact me?
gopal {dot] shenoy {at) gmail (dot} com
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 
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