TPH Spotlight: Gerisha Nadaraju
On adapting, iterating, and knowing your why - even when the path is anything but straight.
There are some people we meet in this community who you can immediately sense the depth behind. The kind of person who has clearly done the internal work, has been shaped by things most people in our industry never had to navigate, and still shows up with warmth, generosity, and an almost relentless commitment to lifting others as they go.
Gerisha Nadaraju is one of those people to me.
I have known Gerisha for a while now through the product ops community. I was a guest on her first podcast years ago when she was out here building community before most people even knew product ops was a thing worth building community around. We kicked this conversation off with a health check on each other to see of the other was feeling the pull in so many directions in our space. Yes. It set the tone for the whole conversation - she’s real, thoughtful, and not interested in performing a version of herself that is tidier than the truth.
She is currently the Senior Director of Product Operations at Bentley Systems, a large infrastructure engineering software company. She is also the founder and host of the Product Ops Podcast and co-founder of The Other Half Podcast for women in tech.
Education and Professional Highlights
Current role: Senior Director of Product Operations, Bentley Systems
Founder and Host: Product Ops Podcast (POP)
Co-Founder: The Other Half Podcast - for women in tech
Originally from: Durban, South Africa - the city most people skip over between Johannesburg and Cape Town, and which Gerisha will tell you has a story worth knowing
Education: Oxford University, MBA (social impact and entrepreneurship). Qualified Chartered Accountant, South Africa
Career arc: Accounting and investment banking in South Africa, Oxford MBA, fintech ops at TrueLayer, product ops at Dojo, Senior Director of Product Ops at Bentley Systems.
Where She Came From
Gerisha grew up in Durban during apartheid. She says it matter-of-factly, the way someone does when a fact is simply true and the weight of it needs no dramatizing. She is third or fourth generation South African, of Indian heritage, and for the first years of her life she lived in an Indian-only area and attended an Indian-only school. Because that was where she could go.
Then apartheid ended. Her family moved to a more affluent area. She enrolled in a mixed primary school around age eight or nine and had her first experience of being in a classroom with people of different races and backgrounds.
And then, on an academic scholarship, she found herself at one of Durban’s most elite private girls’ high schools which was a 150-year-old institution that was an entirely different world from where she had started.
She vulnerably shared that she cried every day of her first year there.
“I think what it taught me is being able to adapt to different environments. Being somebody who is maybe ‘other’ or different, and then coming into something where you don’t quite fit in - and then adapting. I found myself thriving there eventually.”
That word, adapting, kept coming back throughout our conversation. It is not a passive skill for Gerisha. It is something she actively learned to do, repeatedly, from a very young age, in circumstances that gave her no choice but to figure it out. And when you hear the rest of her story, you understand exactly how that shapes a person who is now one of the most respected voices in an emerging field that itself requires constant adaptation.
The Person Who Shaped Her
Before I asked, I already had a feeling I knew who she was going to name. The answer was her dad. Her father was a high school dropout who became an electrician, then became entrepreneurial, then started his own electrical company at the age of fifty. To do it, he sold his car. Downgraded to a van with no air conditioning, no power steering. And took out a second mortgage on a house that had already been paid off.
“He set himself back in order to go forward.
He did it because he believed in what was possible on the other side of the discomfort.”
He held onto optimism when other people would have held onto the certainty of what they had. His company was, by any measure, a success. He built something real from an idea he backed with everything he had.
He passed away four years ago from cancer.
“Seeing him do that at a later stage in life has made me more comfortable being entrepreneurial, taking risks, and thinking about what it would be like to pursue my own ideas. He would always choose to look on the bright side. Like, what if it actually works out?”
I hear that question differently when I know where it came from.
How Product Found Her
Gerisha did not set out for product. She set out for investment banking and McKinsey. She studied finance and accounting at university, interviewed at JPMorgan, and was on the path that looked like the right one from where she was standing. Then someone suggested she become a Chartered Accountant first - a well-regarded route in South Africa - and she decided to keep the door open rather than close it prematurely.
So she qualified as a CA. She worked for large corporates in investment banking. She did the thing. And then she reached a point where she was not fulfilled. She wanted to make an impact. She applied to Oxford on something of a leap, got in, came to the UK, and discovered fintech at exactly the moment fintech was discovering itself.
She joined TrueLayer as the tenth employee. They were the first open banking startup in the UK, building the infrastructure other fintechs would eventually run on. She came in as the first operations hire, had no idea what open banking was at the time, and spent her early days figuring it out as fast as she could. “I realized I could just get things done. Somebody gives you a problem you’ve never seen before and you’ve just got to figure out how to do it.”
That quality - the ability to move through ambiguity without waiting for a map - is something I hear from almost everyone who ends up excelling in product operations. It is not the same as being unstructured. It is the opposite. It is what allows you to build the structure when none exists.
The pivot to product ops happened organically. TrueLayer was scaling and the product teams needed operational support. The CEO gave Gerisha and two colleagues a brief that was essentially: go figure out what is going on over there and help them move faster. The team they formed was called Catalyst.
What they built - streamlining processes, establishing systems of record, supporting user testing, improving ways of working - was product operations. But many of us know that the naming came later. The deliberate positioning of it as its own function, distinct from admin work and worthy of a dedicated team and a mandate, came from Gerisha pitching it, shaping it, and advocating for it until it stuck. “I ended up in this quite randomly. But when it came to actually saying this is product operations as a team and I would like to hire for it - I shaped that.”
Product Is a Way of Life
I asked Gerisha whether the way she thinks about problems at work has ever shown up in her personal life in surprising ways. She talked about experimentation and iteration, and then she got specific.
She used to be a perfectionist. Classic analysis paralysis - cycling through planning and refining and never quite launching. Product changed that. The practice of shipping imperfect things, getting real feedback, and iterating from there became a philosophy she applied to her creative work, her podcasts, her life.
“Done is better than perfect. You have to start in order to even have something. It can’t live in your head forever.”
The Product Ops Podcast is a living example of this. The name was a placeholder. She meant to change it. She never did, because it did not matter as much as just starting. She booked her first guest before she was ready. She shipped. And now she is four seasons in, and the show has become one of the most respected resources in the product ops community.
When I asked whether she has ever found herself doing user research on the people she loves, she laughed and got honest. Like many of us, her five and a half years of therapy came into it. She has learned, through that work, to look past the surface of what people say toward what they actually mean - to find the root cause beneath the stated problem. “What is the reason why you said that? What’s actually going on underneath? I think maybe that is a little bit of product management - really trying to understand and validate the problems that people are putting forward.”
Empathy as methodology. Curiosity as a way of being. This is the through line.
On AI — And the Honest Answer
One of the things we absolutely agree on is that no two product organizations are the same. Not in structure, not in maturity, not in how they make decisions or what they actually value. Two companies can be in the same industry, serving similar customers, and have product teams that operate in completely different ways. It is just the reality of how organizations evolve.
So when I asked Gerisha about AI - not just her personal experience with it, but her take on how companies across different stages and industries are actually navigating this moment - her answer was one of the most grounded I have heard.
Not every company is moving at the same speed. Not every team is shipping AI-powered workflows or running internal hackathons on Lovable. Most organizations - across most industries - are somewhere on a very wide spectrum, and the gap between the teams leaning in hard and the teams still figuring out where to start is real and significant.
The question she keeps coming back to is not how do we get everyone to move faster. It is something more nuanced than that.“How do we connect the bright spots with the people who aren’t moving the needle on it yet? How do we start finding some level of consistency?”
That is a different kind of problem than adoption. It is a change management problem, a culture problem, and honestly a leadership problem, and it is one that most of the AI conversation in our space completely ignores. The discourse tends to reward the people already moving fast and leaves everyone else feeling quietly behind. But the real opportunity, especially in large and complex organizations, is in the bridge work. Finding what is working. Understanding why. And creating the conditions for it to spread intentionally rather than unevenly.
Her principle for all of it: garbage in, garbage out. AI amplifies whatever you bring to it. The teams making real progress are not just using better tools - they are bringing sharper thinking, clearer problems, and more intentional inputs. That is where the actual work lives, and that does not change regardless of how fast or slow your organization is moving.“That’s where you need some people to help you get there. The analytics you want, what you want to track, how you’re actually going to bring this to life. That’s where the gaps show up.”
What Product Managers Should Actually Be Measuring
Wherever she’s worked, Gerisha has been focused on getting her PMs to care about adoption, not just shipping. The product being out the door is not a success. Success is whether users are engaging with it, coming back to it, getting value from it over time.
Short term metrics matter like growth, revenue and ARR. But the longer term signals like retention, sustained usage patterns, evidence that what you built is actually working - those are what separate teams that ship from teams that build.
She made a related observation that I found important: Across the industry, she is seeing product managers get caught up in delivering AI features specifically - responding to executive pressure to show AI output - without fully measuring the outcomes of those features. Feature factory, just with a new label. The antidote is the same as it has always been: be rigorous about what you are trying to change, not just what you are trying to build.
What the Space Needs Right Now
When I asked about undervalued skills, Gerisha said something I have not heard framed quite this way before.
Taste and judgment.
Not frameworks. Not tools. Not certifications. Your own unique perspective on what is good. “There is so much information out there. AI is going to give you this output. But the real skill is knowing what is good. What should we go with? That comes from your own judgment - a deeply human and personal skill.”
PREACH.
In a world where anyone can generate a product strategy deck in twelve minutes, the thing that will not be replaceable is your ability to look at the output and know whether it is actually right. Whether it reflects something true about your users, your market, your moment. That comes from experience, curiosity, taste. It cannot be prompted.
Invest in your own point of view. That is the skill that ages well.
The Person Who Changed Everything
Gerisha’s answer here was immediate and specific. Her name is Heather James, and she used to work for the Product-Led Alliance.
In early 2021, Heather reached out to Gerisha - cold, off the back of a Medium article Gerisha had written about moving from business operations to product operations - and asked if she would speak at the very first Product Operations Summit. The first one ever.
At that point, Gerisha had her head down inside her company, not plugged into the community, not thinking about what she might have to offer more broadly. Heather saw something in that article and decided to bring it to a bigger room.
What followed was an outpouring of LinkedIn messages, connections, and conversations that eventually became the Product Ops Podcast. One opportunity, offered by one person who paid attention, snowballed into speaking engagements, community building, and a platform that has since reached thousands of people across the industry. “It also kind of solidified me in this product operations niche and being comfortable sharing. And Heather was just such a wonderful person. She was such an advocate.”
Just takes one person to see you. And one person willing to be seen.
What She Wants to Leave Behind
She has a Post-it on her wall that reminds her: use your own experience and expertise to create engaging content that inspires, connects, or empowers other people.
“If it resonates with somebody in a way that practically helps them, or inspires them, or leaves them feeling a bit more connected to the subject matter - that is my biggest goal.”
She has heard from listeners who told her they got the job in product ops because they listened to the podcast before their interview. That is the impact she is building toward. Quietly, consistently, season after season and validated - we all see it.
It is not loud. But it lasts.
Before We Go: Two Things Worth Taking With You
I asked Gerisha what she would tell herself at the beginning, back in South Africa, back in accounting, before any of this was visible.
Know your why.
Have a personal north star that lives outside of any company you happen to be working for. Their mission matters. But so does yours. Knowing what drives you, what you are building toward, what you actually care about- that is what keeps you grounded through reorgs and uncertainty and the particular dizziness that comes with being in product.
Remember your individual agency.
Even inside a structure you did not design, you still have choices. You can decide how you work. You can choose how you show up. You can still act on your values even when the environment feels like it is not asking for them.
“I’ve sometimes forgotten that in companies. But it’s always true.”
Gerisha Nadaraju is the Senior Director of Product Operations at Bentley Systems. She is the founder and host of the Product Ops Podcast and co-founder of The Other Half Podcast for women in tech. You can find her on LinkedIn and listen to Product Ops Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. If you have ever wanted to understand what product operations actually looks like in practice, start there.
And to Gerisha: thank you for this. Thank you for how much you give to this community, and for being so honest about where you are right now. The people who keep showing up while they are in the middle of figuring things out are the ones worth learning from.