Why did you decide to become a mentor?
Most people I meet who are stuck in their careers aren't short on talent. They're missing a clear path and someone who'll give them honest feedback. I saw this a lot in Dubai and Lagos, with smart engineers and ops people who could have moved into product if someone had shown them how. I started mentoring to give back, and I kept going because it makes me better at my own job. If I can't explain a decision to someone else, I usually don't understand it well enough. I've mentored 500+ aspiring and working PMs through upGrad, Master's Union and Seekho, and I advise founders at Techstars and Next Billion Advisors. My favourite part is when someone ships their first real thing and starts seeing themselves as a builder.
How did you get your career start?
I started as a systems engineer at Infosys in Bengaluru, on a payments program for a Fortune 500 client. That's where I learned how production systems break and what it takes to fix them under pressure. At souKare in Dubai I did a bit of everything across growth and product. We grew from 180 to 57K+ customers, and checkout experiments took conversion from 1.5% to 3.2%. That's when I learned that in product, you earn the right to make calls by bringing evidence. At Alerzo in Nigeria I led product for a B2B marketplace and fintech for small retailers. Alerzoshop grew to $160M GMV across 180K+ retailers, we launched stock financing, and we cut KYC verification time 85%. Today I'm the founding PM at Partao, a marketplace with 5M+ SKUs. Working in low-trust, low-bandwidth markets taught me to start from real customer pain and skip the rituals.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
Most come to move into product from engineering, analytics or operations, or to step up to senior PM in e-commerce or fintech. Some want help with PM interviews. We usually work in 6 to 8 week sprints. We pick one goal, break it into the metrics that move it, and check progress every week. Every session ends with something real: a PRD, a problem statement, a GTM plan, an experiment design or a dashboard. We practise presenting to leadership so you get used to defending tradeoffs. I'll help with your résumé and portfolio, but only once there's real work to show. Interview prep covers estimation, product sense and strategy, and I'll point out exactly where your answer loses the interviewer. You leave with work you can point to and the judgment to do it again.
What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
A., an ops lead in Delhi, wanted to move into fintech product. We picked a real problem: approving more thin-file small businesses for credit without raising defaults. Over six weeks she mapped the underwriting flow, found signals in transaction and repayment history, sketched a simple risk tiering, and designed an A/B test with guardrails. She built a rough dashboard, wrote a one-pager for leadership and practised presenting it. She landed a PM role at a Series A fintech and shipped her first MVP within a quarter. What I liked most was watching her stop thinking in tasks and start thinking in outcomes.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
It keeps me current. Every week I see new problems, tools and markets, and I have to explain my thinking in plain language, which shows me where it's weak. Working with founders and PMs across India, the Middle East and Africa has sharpened how I think about 0 to 1, go-to-market and credit risk, and it's raised my bar for hiring. And I still enjoy the moment something clicks for someone. If you're trying to break into product or get to the next level, send me a message here on MentorCruise.
