What we talked about
Shira Krishnan charts her path from hands-on engineer to product leader at Fivetran, the global leader in data movement. Shira explains why she traded pull requests for product briefs, how she rewired her mindset from “how do we build it?” to “why does it matter?”, and the frameworks she now uses to make hard trade-offs between reliability, speed, and business impact. We dig into the nuts and bolts of “just-works” data pipelines, the chaos of changing SaaS APIs, and what it really takes to serve AI/ML, analytics, and operational workloads at enterprise scale. Shira also shares candid lessons from early PM missteps, the mentors who helped her navigate the transition, and how she keeps her technical edge sharp without living in the codebase. If you’re an engineer eyeing product, or a PM wrestling with deep technical products, this episode is your roadmap:plus a peek at how AI is reshaping both product work and software engineering careers.
Show notes
Shira Krishnan declined a PhD offer from Georgia Tech, wrote her father a two-page essay justifying the decision, and took a job at Cisco instead, a choice that set off a career arc that eventually led her to found a marketplace startup, join an e-commerce platform that got acquired by Infosys, and land in product leadership at Fivetran. The thread running through all of it is the same question she kept asking as an engineer: not how to build something, but why anyone would buy it over something else.
What we covered
- The moment that unlocked her interest in product management came while celebrating a successful Cisco release. She asked her PM whether the feature she had worked on was actually moving the needle for customers or just checking a compliance box on an RFP. When she couldn’t get a satisfying answer quickly, she realized a PM would have known from the start, and that gap in business context became the pull that eventually drew her out of engineering.
- At Cisco, she joined a data center team that went from pre-revenue to one billion dollars in revenue during her time there. Watching a product grow from nothing to that scale, with what she describes as a lot of really smart people solving hard problems, gave her a close-up view of innovation, but also highlighted how much of the why behind product decisions stayed invisible to engineers.
- She founded Event Yoda, a marketplace for team building events, which she ran for about three years. The experience of talking directly to customers, understanding their problems, and translating those problems into buildable solutions reinforced that product-customer interaction was where she wanted to operate, not just in the code.
- Her framework for balancing technical debt against new features is context-dependent and business-first: if reliability is at 99.9% and a new feature would accelerate expansion revenue, you build the feature. If a core function is broken, she uses the ATM cash dispensing example, you fix it immediately, regardless of priority queues.
- She was a judge at a hackathon where a 10-year-old won first place by building a prototype for an AI-powered personalized learning tool for schools, solving a problem the kid actually experienced in his own classroom. The other participants were all working professionals, and none of them beat his problem statement, feature prioritization, or demo quality.
- Her advice for engineers considering a move into product: start asking why behind everything you build, be curious about jobs outside your own, finance, design, sales, and use that curiosity to identify a real problem you could pitch to leadership. That pitch becomes your case for the transition, and it’s more convincing than any resume update.
About Shira
Shira Krishnan is a product manager at Fivetran, the global data movement company, where she focuses on pricing infrastructure for consumption-based pricing, a role she describes as both deeply technical and highly customer-facing. She holds a graduate degree in computer engineering from Georgia Tech and previously founded a marketplace startup and held a PM role at Scaba prior to its acquisition by Infosys.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shirakris
- Website: https://www.fivetran.com
Episode 56 of the PreVetted Podcast.