Inside Twilio Product: Aakansha Bhalotia

Inside Twilio Product is a series designed to shine the spotlight on the talented team of product people behind Twilio & Segment products. We’ll publish a series of articles that will follow each team member on their career path and journey to Twilio. 

Today I’m very excited to introduce you all the Aakansha Bhalotia. Aakansha recently joined the Twilio Segment product team focused on our Public API & core services. Aakansha’s team thinks about how to make the lives of developers managing Segment implementations easier.

So Aakansha, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into product?

I did my undergrad in Electronics Engineering but my passion shifted to building algorithms and number crunching. So, I joined one of the major India IT organizations and built large scale supply chain ERP and financial applications to assist our enterprise customers in managing their day-to-day operations. But the endless curiosity and zeal to understand the customers and their needs pushed me to technical consulting at Deloitte and I enjoyed that thoroughly. 

This paved way to take a shot at product management and I found myself unfolding the layers of WHAT and WHY at Highmark Health, building data products that power their insurance business. Since that day, I have only loved what I do and kept expanding in different avenues of data products - lakes, warehouses, marts, APIs, pipelines, etc. I joined a healthcare startup, Bind Benefits, in 2021 fall which intrigued my interest into the API world - how to start treating APIs as products and build developer-friendly tools that power those APIs

Why did you choose to join Twilio Segment?

My search for next gig ended at Twilio as an API Product Manager in Strategy. This was quite an interesting role as Twilio, being a communication company, building enterprise APIs at scale serving large B2B/B2C customers was the perfect place to work with. Secondly, the culture/people and magic values would be the #1 reason to be a Twilion.

What is your role at Twilio Segment?

I am the PM for API and Common Service team on Enablement Pillar at Segment Core/Engage. We work with different teams like processing, storage, etc to understand their needs and then provide infrastructure for them to build the customer engagement platform. The primary and first goal is to bring Public API to market, add transformations and bring the legacy Config API to sunset.

I know you’ve recently started, what are some early things you’ve learned about the Twilio Segment product?

Well, there is so much to learn about the product itself. With great customer feedback and product research, there is a huge opportunity to put on the design thinking caps, take an outside in approach, continuously iterate through MVP,  and improve our time to market. This will ultimately help growing our business and generate higher revenue. While doing so, it is equally important to link the API program back to Twilio BPMs.

Where do you plan to take the Public API?

My plan is to build a world-class Public API, opening the entire Twilio Segment platform for developers to configure and manage their Twilio Segment implementation via API. This will enable the developer community to gain programmatic access to the Segment platform to manage and scale their Segment instances.

What’s a book that’s changed your thinking?

For me, it was Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book changed the way I think, process, manage, and live my life. My productivity is at least 5X higher and I have got better at managing my work and life.

What’s a guilty pleasure right now?

For me, it’s eating desserts and frozen yoghurt, Mexican food, and some India street snacks that I always wished for but could not. My next phase as a new mom gives me that freedom ;)