Pratyush Bharati

Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

“Frontline team leader with 4.5 years of experience driving product development, organizational restructuring, and risk management.”

Hometown: Nashik, Maharashtra

Fun Fact About Yourself: Throughout my life, I have let my curiosity run wild and explored a variety of seemingly disjoint hobbies like baking sourdough, brewing specialty coffee, composing music, and audio engineering.

Undergraduate School and Major: B.E. in Electronics and Instrumentation, BITS, Pilani Aug 2016 – Sep 2020

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Starlite Electrodrives Private Limited – Product Manager

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of IIM Ahmedabad’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you?  The One-Year PGPX Program gave me the flexibility to choose the point of time in my career where it made the most sense to go for an MBA. As I was nearing the end of my 4th year at my first company, Micron Technology, I wanted to prepare myself for my next role as a leader in my family business (Starlite Electrodrives Pvt. Ltd.) back in my hometown. This new role would demand a more diverse skill set and a variety of competencies beyond the scope of the technical leadership role I held previously. I perceive the PGPX program as a hard-earned shortcut to greatly augment my strengths and exhaustively uncover any weaknesses. At the same time, I will be in a conducive environment with ample opportunities to turn liabilities into assets.

What has been your favorite course or extracurricular activity at IIM Ahmedabad? What has been the most important lesson that you have learned from it? Since I wouldn’t be sitting for placements during my MBA, I sought advice on how best to use this precious time. My microeconomics professor gave me a perspective that stuck: this is a rare environment where experimentation is not just allowed but encouraged. It gave me the push to take on challenges I’d never considered before.

One of the biggest leaps I made was getting involved in The Red Brick Summit (TRBS), Asia’s largest management symposium with over 60,000 participants. I chose a role I had no prior experience in event design and management. Until then, I’d only ever supported events in auxiliary roles like stage or live sound management. This time, I was at the center of it all, designing the entire fest, setting the theme, curating each event, managing speakers and workshops, and ensuring the entire experience was cohesive and engaging.

It was intense, unfamiliar, and completely new territory for me, but it was also one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had. I couldn’t have taken on something this ambitious anywhere else. IIM Ahmedabad gave me the platform to try something radically different. My key takeaway from this was learning that I should spend time thoroughly understanding what an opportunity means to me, the obvious aspects may not be the most relevant, and looking deeper may reveal new avenues to benefit from it.

What makes Ahmedabad such a great place to earn an MBA? At IIM Ahmedabad, one of the most striking aspects of the classroom is the radical and honest approach that the faculty take to their teaching pedagogy. In my very first HR lecture, the professor made a statement that took me by surprise: “An interview is where two liars lie to each other for 30 minutes.” These weren’t throwaway lines. They reflected a deeper, thought-provoking approach that challenges conventional thinking.

What makes IIMA unique is this culture of being fearlessly candid and saying the things most already know but do not acknowledge. Faculty have full autonomy over their courses. They don’t just follow a syllabus, they craft it based on what students truly need to understand to navigate today’s complex business world, creating a classroom environment that’s deeply engaging and relevant.

It’s this freedom to teach with conviction and to foster independent thought that makes IIMA stand out. Students are exposed to cutting-edge industry philosophies and methodologies, not as frameworks, but as naturally flawed tools to question, apply, and grow. It’s a space where curiosity thrives, and where learning is not just academic, it’s transformational.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: In 2023, Micron made history in the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) market segment, when we launched our record-breaking HBM3e platform. Our team was ~50% under-staffed and comprised exclusively of new college graduates & contractors with under a year of relevant work experience on average. Despite this, we had owned and successfully delivered over 90% of the Pre-silicon Digital Verification deliverables. Off the back of this feat, our team was granted full ownership of the next-gen HBM4 Product Verification Ramp. Now, the new problem statement was how to scale up to more than double our headcount in just 4-5 months while also having a sustainable supervisory span of control.

We initially struggled to hire experienced engineers for the HBM4 project, as in India the vast majority specialized in only one of the 3 essential skill-sets: custom circuit analysis, testbench development, and full-chip integration testing. As we anticipated inability to adequately train new hires once the project had started in full swing, I took the radical decision to modify our team structure to suit the Indian talent pool. I split up the job description and set up a 3-pronged team format, with specialized groups for feature verification, infrastructure development, and design quality assurance. To demonstrate the operational benefits of this structure to upper management, I also drafted an 18-month roadmap outlining how verification tasks could be intuitively pipelined amongst the three specialized lanes, and how this would enable the possibility of executing multiple projects in parallel.

After securing their buy-in, I then set my target on the next major challenge in this transformation – hiring and training managers for the three teams. I quickly realised that my established training methods would not work for them, as their role was to guide rather than directly contribute. Hence, I shifted the focus of the trainings from developing engineering know-how, to instead focus on productively engaging with their respective teams. By shadowing me during team meetings and having regular 1-1 reviews, they were able to fully grasp the team dynamics and our decision-making processes.

By mid-2024, my team had grown to a headcount of 38, with three leaders heading teams of ~12 each. The remarkable scalability of this structure set a global precedent for hiring and growth across Micron Verification teams, becoming the first major upgrade to the verification role in 12 years.

Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far: In our Strategy class, we were assigned a case on the teeth-whitening industry featuring a fierce rivalry between Colgate and P&G. Our professor staged a live simulation and assigned small teams of three students to each company Colgate, P&G, and Unilever (ours) to act as the CEOs and define strategies. As the underdog with no current presence in the teeth-whitening segment, we were asked to think like a scrappy startup aiming to break into a newly- created market. With just minutes to strategize, most teams gravitated toward conventional tactics such as advertising, pricing, and regulatory/legal action. We took a wildly different path.

Leveraging the insight that P&G’s patent wasn’t global, we proposed entering a geography with weaker IP enforcement laws and using their exact technology to rapidly reverse engineer a similar product. We would offer our product at minimal margins, bundled with toothpaste that customers are familiar with, turning a legal grey area into a first-mover advantage. Our aim was to build a customer base and create awareness for this new product before any litigation or retaliation could catch up.

The room was stunned. Our solution stood out for its audacity, pragmatism, and asymmetric thinking, blending legal insight, marketing flair, and startup-style agility. The professor, playing the invisible hand of the market, dropped his role to acknowledge the sheer boldness of our approach. This wasn’t just about a dental product, it was a live case in disruption, and we came to play.

What is your class’s favorite hangout away from school? Why do you gather there? Since all the PGPX dorms are arranged in a neat row, there is a garden located between them that we jokingly refer to as the “Bermuda Triangle of PGPX” because it almost always has someone from our batch present. All passersby must stop, say hi, and join in on some of the most memorable, engaging, and unhinged conversations of their day, regardless of who was there first. From debates regarding a spicy new topic discussed in the day’s classes to highly risqué gossip, that stop never ceases to surprise and entertain.

What do you hope to do after graduation? After completing my MBA, I’ll be tackling a General Management role in Starlite Electrodrives Pvt. Ltd, a prominent electronic goods OEM founded and led by my family. I aim to be at the forefront of the company’s technological evolution, establishing a robust Product Development pipeline and scalable growth strategies for our manufacturing operations. In the long term, I hope to accumulate the skills needed to take the helm at our family business and scale it into an international, multi-sector, group of companies. I aspire to drive up our annual revenue from the current INR1.2B, to beyond the coveted INR100B mark.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into IIM Ahmedabad? “The wand chooses the wizard.” Never have I seen this rather memorable quote be more apt. Seeing the diversity of people in our batch, I can say with utmost confidence that there are no two people with the same story of how they got here. Each and every PGPX student here has had significant contributions in their domains, and I believe the most important part of the application process is being able to tell that story in a way that embellishes what makes one stand out from the pack. My advice to a potential candidate would be to focus on getting a decent GMAT score and spend sufficient time polishing your resume/CV. Crucially, while you’re polishing your CV, make sure you dig into your past decisions to determine what drove you to do That Thing, in That Way, at That Time. IIMA’s streamlined selection process will do the rest.

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