Riding the wave with K Ramkumar

In this episode, K Ramkumar, known as Ram or Kram - Director Product Mangement, Salesforce, in conversation with Gayatri shares 

• Starting his passion in software in the way of coding Fortran in his alma matter BITS Pilani. 
• Ram talks about starting in the software development working in small organisation in their ecommerce portals before moving into collaboration software
• Within the span of 25 years Ramkumar has travessed the depths of collaboration, communication and security using cloud and data analytics technologies
• Ramkumar describes his journey as continuing to expand in complex areas due to his deep problem solving skills
• Ram talks about taking a plunge in the product management after nearly spending a decade in engineering. He also shared some of his vulnerable moments when he moved from being a team leader of 20 individuals to an individual contributor.
• Product management certification in IIM and ISB has helped but his innate curiosity is what has catapulted to being a product leader today
• Ramkumar advises professionals to try different areas within software from business analysis, program management, scrum mastery, automation, data analytics and product management before assessing the area of specialisation
• Ramkumar shares of the his keen sense of understanding where the customers needs and marry that with technology potential and continuous experiment
• Ramkumar’s key advise to software professionals is to stay curious and continuous learn technologies with a beginners mindset

Ramkumar is an engineering graduate of BITS Pilani, with management education from IIM B, certification from ISB. Ramkumar is the Director of Product Management for Salesforce. He specializes in the field of security. 

Ramkumar started his career in India in Novell, Siemens before moving to the US to join startup boom in ecommerce. 

He leveraged his email/collaboration experience in Cisco and released several notable products for Cisco Systems. His products have won several awards. 

Ramkumar joined the product management in Cisco systems as an experiment. Ramkumar is a recipient of Presidents’ award for Salesforce along with several coveted awards.

Ramkumar can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramkumarkaleeswaran/