Nirma University, 2020 to 2022
Nirma University's MBA programme is structured as a general management first year followed by a specialisation second year. That first year - covering marketing, finance, HR, operations, digital, and analytics simultaneously - was more valuable than it seemed at the time. Case studies across every domain built the habit of reading a business context quickly and asking the right question before reaching for a solution. The breadth was intentional, and in retrospect, essential.
The second year narrowed to a major in Marketing and a minor in Information Management. The combination wasn't accidental - it sat at the intersection of understanding people and understanding systems, which is roughly where product management lives.
Subjects that actually stuck
The first year covered ground in every major business domain. Not all of it was equally relevant, but the practice of thinking across functions - finance, operations, HR, digital, analytics - left a residue that shows up in product work more than any single subject did. Understanding how a CFO reads a product investment, or how an operations team absorbs a new workflow, changes how you write a business case or design a rollout plan.
- Marketing & Brand Management: positioning, consumer perception, and what makes things stick
- Consumer Behavior: why people decide the way they do, not just what they choose
- Business Analytics: turning data into decisions, not just reports
- Product Management: the subject that reoriented everything else
- Digital Marketing: performance, funnels, and the mechanics of acquisition
- Operations & Supply Chain: process thinking and where friction hides
- Finance & Accounting: reading a P&L and understanding what a product decision costs
- Case study methodology: the habit of diagnosing before prescribing
BookMyShow and the first product instinct
The Product Management subject was the inflection point. Not because it taught a formal framework, but because it asked a simple question: how could an existing product be meaningfully better? I picked BookMyShow, and what started as a class exercise became a genuine obsession with the gap between how the product worked and how it could work.
The core insight was that BookMyShow treated the booking as the product, when the actual job being hired was an evening out. The discovery-to-booking flow had real friction, and the ecosystem around the experience - the cinema, the commute, the group coordination - was completely unaddressed.
That exercise was the first time I caught myself thinking about a product not as a user frustrated by it, but as someone responsible for fixing it. That shift is the one that matters.
What hostel life actually teaches
Two years in a hostel is two years of figuring out how to live with yourself and with other people simultaneously. The people around you come from different cities, backgrounds, and ways of seeing things. You don't choose your cohort the way you choose your friends, and that's exactly what makes it useful.
The real learning wasn't in any subject. It was in the conversations at odd hours, the debates over cases, the people who pushed back on your assumptions just by having different ones of their own. You learn to hold your positions more lightly and argue for them more clearly at the same time. That tension is hard to replicate anywhere else.
Hostel life taught me that most of what you think is fixed about yourself is actually just untested. Two years of constant proximity to people unlike you is a fast and uncomfortable way to find that out.
What I wish I had done more of
The honest reflection is that I was more focused on getting through than on extracting from. The MBA had more to offer than I took from it - more people worth knowing deeply, more projects worth pursuing seriously, more moments worth being fully present for instead of just completing.
I wish I had built more things during those two years. Not coursework, but actual things - projects that outlasted the semester, collaborations that continued past graduation, ideas that got tested rather than discussed. The environment was there for it. I just didn't use it that way.
- The cross-functional first year was more valuable than it felt at the time
- Marketing and Information Management together is a natural foundation for product
- Case study training built the instinct to diagnose before prescribing
- Consumer Behavior was quietly the most transferable subject in the programme
- The best learning happened outside scheduled hours
- I would have built more and discussed less