What we talked about
Kadamb Goswami: In this conversation, Kadamb traces a personal and professional journey shaped by resourcefulness, resilience, and a relentless focus on building things that tangibly help people. Growing up in a small Indian town, he watched his father:an educator:create low-resource systems so students could learn better. That early example of “impact through intent” led Kadamb to build a simple library tool in college and even assemble his own PC, seeding a lifelong bias for practical problem-solving.
Show notes
Kadamb Goswami once proposed an AI-powered financial reconciliation platform at Amazon and was told no, leadership judged that the risk was too high when even a one-percent error rate could affect billions of dollars. Instead of walking away, he rebuilt the vision around trust: running proof-of-concepts, bringing real data back to leadership, and launching with a select group of pilot customers so the team could course-correct in real time. That reimagined initiative became a CXO-level program called Esteem, scaled globally, and resulted in a patent filing.
What we covered
- Kadamb grew up watching his father, a teacher in a small Indian town, build learning systems with almost no resources, that early lesson that real impact is about intent and adaptability, not scale or budget, became the foundation of how he approaches product work twenty years later.
- His move from Microsoft India to Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters was driven by a personal need: his son required specialized medical treatment available in the US. Over ten years at Microsoft, he absorbed what he calls “the art of building the ecosystem,” learning to think about how changes ripple across 700,000 partners and millions of customers.
- At SAP he learned what he describes as customer empathy at enterprise scale, how to take genuinely complex software and make it simpler for people whose jobs depend on it, which is a different discipline from building consumer products.
- He tested those accumulated skills at Amazon, which he describes as a framework-driven company where decisions are made through written documents and leadership principles. The structured rigor forced him to sharpen how he presented ideas and proved their value.
- His best mentors never handed him answers. When he brought them a problem, constraints, cross-functional conflict, leadership concerns, they asked questions that made him uncomfortable in the best way, helping him see his own blind spots and convert growth areas into strengths. He contrasts this with leaders who manage through fear or control, where the result is compliance rather than creativity.
- He is now mentoring high school students on his son’s robotics and debate teams, focused not on grades but on portable skills: how to work with others, how to be accountable, and how to think about learning as something you carry across every domain and continent.
About Kadamb
Kadamb Goswami is a product leader with 20 years of experience across Microsoft, SAP, and Amazon, where he currently leads an AI-powered solution that automates accounting reconciliation at large scale. He is trained at Wharton’s General Management Program and Villanova University, and has worked across SaaS, e-commerce, fintech, and generative AI.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kadambg
- Website: https://www.amazon.com
Episode 72 of the PreVetted Podcast.