From Lotus Notes Developer to Product: What Twelve Years in IT Taught Me
From Lotus Notes Developer to Product: What Twelve Years in IT Taught Me
I started my career writing Lotus Notes applications. Twelve-plus years later I build AI-enabled transition products. That path wasn't a single leap, it was an accumulation, and every stage left me with a lens I still use in product.
Development taught me how systems actually break
Before I managed transitions or built products, I built software, Lotus Notes, then leading a team across .NET and SAP for a US client. Those years gave me something no roadmap can: an understanding of how systems fail in practice, not in theory.
When you've shipped and supported real applications, you stop trusting clean diagrams. You know where the integrations fray, where the edge cases hide, where the demo works and the third user doesn't. That instinct makes me a sharper product manager, because I can challenge the "how" without losing the "why."
Transition management taught me to respect the handover
Moving from development into transition management changed how I think about completeness. A feature being built is not the same as a feature being live, owned, and supported. The handover is where value is realised or lost.
Years of running transitions, planning cutovers, managing risk, leading knowledge transfer, taught me to design for the moment the work changes hands. In product, that translates directly: I care less about the impressive launch and more about whether the thing keeps working once the people who built it have moved on.
Leadership taught me to build through other people
Leading a multi-technology team and then strategic transition programs taught me that the work happens through other people, not around them. The best plan is worthless if the team executing it doesn't understand or believe in it.
That's the same skill product demands. My job isn't to have the best idea, it's to align engineering, delivery, and the business on the same problem, and to make the right way to do the work the easy way. Clarity, for a team under pressure, is a kindness.
Why the accumulation matters
Development taught me how things break. Transition management taught me to respect the handover. Leadership taught me to build through people. Product, for me, is all of those at once, with a roadmap attached.
I didn't pivot into product so much as arrive there carrying everything the previous roles gave me. And in a domain like transition management, technical, operational, and human all at once, every one of those lenses earns its keep.
Aneesh skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Aneesh Yashodharan was part of the April 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 18 other talented participants.