What we talked about
Shreya Hegde: Senior Product Manager–Technical at Amazon, traces her path from software engineering in India to healthcare startups and finally Big Tech:showing how her craft evolved from “shipping more features” to designing resilient systems that deliver real outcomes. She explains the spark that drew her to product: realizing that technology quietly shapes how people live and work. Early on, she measured success by launches and deadlines; over time, she pivoted to validating the problem first, using deep customer empathy, “day-in-the-life” research, and treating constraints as design inputs rather than blockers.
Show notes
Shreya Hegde’s mental model for why technology matters comes from childhood comic books: magical mirrors that let you see people on the other side of the world. She grew up, realized that was just a screen with a camera, and went looking for ways to get the engineering right. That thread, from wonder to rigorous systems thinking, traces her entire career: software engineer at CGI in India, PM at two healthcare startups that were both acquired, and now Senior Product Manager–Technical at Amazon, where she learned that the hardest shift is from executing fast to influencing without any authority at all.
What we covered
- The career arc from CGI (Canadian ERP company, India) → Medasset (healthcare startup, acquired) → nthrive (B2B revenue cycle for hospitals, acquired) → Amazon, and how each jump added a layer of complexity, compliance rigor, and scale that the previous role couldn’t have taught
- Launching the Price Transparency product at nthrive in response to the No Surprise Act: every hospital and clinic in the country had to be compliant by January 2020, they started building in 2018–2019, and the lesson that stuck was that in regulated environments compliance cannot be a final checklist, it has to be a design input from day one
- The mindset shift moving from startup to big tech: execution speed matters at Amazon, but influence without authority matters equally, alignment, narrative clarity, and earned trust become the actual delivery mechanism
- What being an SPM Technical looks like day-to-day: deep problem framing, sitting inside engineering and design reviews to understand one-way versus two-way door trade-offs, translating between operators, engineers, leaders, and customers so the system built is the system actually needed
- Metrics philosophy, North Star metrics tied to business outcome and customer impact, with leading indicators below them, but never metrics alone: product sense and customer anecdotes belong in the same analysis (as Jeff Bezos reportedly put it, when data and anecdotes conflict, go with the anecdotes)
- How she translates ambiguous business goals into roadmaps: anchor on customer truth first, then decompose the ambiguity into testable bets, roadmaps should express intent, outcome, and learning, not false certainty about what will ship
- What she would tell her younger self before her first PM role: don’t rush to prove value, build judgment first, listen longer, observe for longer, and let instincts sharpen before drawing conclusions
About Shreya Hegde
Shreya Hegde is a Senior Product Manager–Technical at Amazon with a background in B2B healthcare products and a track record leading launches across the full revenue cycle. She is a Product School speaker and a leading circle mentor focused on helping PMs make the transition from feature execution to systems-level thinking.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shreya-hegde-25029016
- Website: https://www.amazon.com
Episode 95 of the PreVetted Podcast.