Manoj Sarma

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I'm always interested in chatting about product challenges, opportunities and the product management discipline.

• Here's my Resume.

Blog

I plan to occasionally blog about work, product management, technology and other stuff. Just starting in 2024 !

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About Me

I'm a product leader in tech by profession, with a curious bent of mind, and authenticity as a core value. Based in the Seattle, WA area since 2005 and an immigrant to the US. Husband and Dad. I'm fortunate enough to have had a decent career in technology and inspired/mentored/led many folks along the way.I was born and brought up in the beautiful state of Kerala (a.k.a God's Own Country), India. I was a studious kid through high school and regularly topped my class in academics. I went on to do my Bachelors in Computer Science & Engineering at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum and then flew to the US to pursue a Masters in Computer Science at Texas A&M.After grad school, I joined AlphaSimplex (quant hedge fund) as a Developer in Cambridge, MA. I then spent 7 years at Amazon as an Engineer and Engineering Manager, relocating to the beautiful Pacific Northwest. At Amazon, I worked in 3 different groups - Website Operational Excellence, Builder Tools, and AWS EC2 (building and scaling the Elastic Load Balancing service) and learned a ton about high scale, availability, reliability, performance and of course, working backwards. I also filed for and obtained 4 US Patents along the way.In 2012, having felt the itch to be closer to the business and customer experience, I made the switch to Product Management, and have been in that space ever since. As a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Azure, I had the opportunity to lead some amazing projects and deliver significant wins for our customers. Working at the intersection of Customers, Business and Engineering was a great experience and I took on more scope and responsibilities (building out Azure CDN, Azure FrontDoor, Azure DNS). In 2018 I took the opportunity to move to Microsoft India Development Center and built out a product team that drove major wins for Azure and customers.I left Microsoft in 2018 as the Head of Product for the India Azure Networking division to pursue a PM role at Meta/FB in their Cold Storage division. In 2022, I got the itch to work in a startup/scaleup environment, and decided to join Pantheon Platform as the Senior Director of Product and am currently in that role.I have had the good fortune of being part of world-class product and engineering organizations at Amazon/AWS, Microsoft and Meta for most of my career. Except for a brief period at Meta and Amazon (where I was working on B2C oriented features), my focus has been on B2B Enterprise customer segment and delivering delightful products and features at scale to enterprise customers in the realms of Cloud Networking Services and WebOps SaaS.My long term goal is to exit my career in tech as a CPO or Sr VP of Product for one or more product lines that deliver large scale impact and solves some fundamental problems for customers at scale. I have also had dreams of founding my own company but have not committed myself to it, yet. Regardless, I do plan on giving back to the community and society in some way, whether it be coaching, mentoring, or guiding others to achieve success in the areas I feel qualified to give back.

Career Highlights