Shubham Lad

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

“Professional overthinker, part-time chai philosopher, full-time work in progress.”

Hometown: Nagpur, Maharashtra

Undergraduate School and Major: Mechanical Engineer, Pandit Deendayal Energy University (PDPU), Gandhinagar

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Finastra, Senior Product Owner

Fun Fact About Yourself: I once talked a bank out of panic-fixing a regulatory bug by convincing them to do nothing, on purpose. We let the volume stay manual for a few weeks so the delay itself would push the client to migrate to the version that already solved it. It worked. My badminton partner would call this “playing the long rally.”

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of IIM Bangalore’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? I didn’t want a campus that taught me strategy in theory and left the fintech part to my imagination. I wanted one sitting inside the ecosystem I was trying to build a career in. EPGP’s structure decision sciences and strategy in the core, with blockchain and digital business as electives. It has a cohort split across a decade of different industries, which matched a very specific gap I’d diagnosed in myself. I had the payments depth, not the strategic altitude.

I didn’t want a brand. I wanted a bridge from “I know payments” to “I can lead through where they’re headed.”

What has been your favorite course or extracurricular activity at IIM Bangalore? What has been the most important lesson that you have learned from it? Competition & Strategy by Prof R Srinivasan. I walked in assuming good strategy meant out-executing the competition. Working through the Cournot competition and the cement cartel case flipped that. I realized that during most of my consulting career, I’d been solving the problem I was handed, not questioning whether it was the ‘right’ problem. That’s the same gap my old product manager exposed when he looked past my quick regulatory fix and asked about roadmap fit instead. The course gave that instinct a name and a framework, not just a war story.

My favorite extracurricular was Sectional Wars. I hadn’t played frisbee or kho-kho since school. Suddenly, I was relearning both at 30, alongside people twice as competitive about it as they had any right to be. What made it stick wasn’t the sport. It was the version of the cohort that showed up for it: the icebreakers, the last-minute strategy huddles, the trash talk that somehow made strangers feel like a section. Some of my closest friendships on campus started on that field, not in a classroom, and a few of the PGP students who played alongside us taught me more about staying calm under a scoreline than any case study did. It’s the part of EPGP nobody puts on a resume, and probably the part I’d protect first if I had to relive the year.

What makes Bengaluru such as great place to earn your MBA? Bengaluru isn’t background scenery for this MBA, it’s part of the curriculum. I’m here to build cross-border payment products on blockchain and stablecoins and this city is where the product managers, the fintech founders, and the people actually shipping that stuff eat lunch. Case discussions are useful; a five-minute hallway conversation with someone building on UPI rails or working through DPDP compliance is useful in a different, faster way. For someone coming from delivery, consulting, and product, in that order, Bengaluru compresses the distance between an idea and someone who’s already tried it.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: It was achieving a manager role with EY at just six years of experience, compared to average of 8 years in the Financial Services consulting service line is one of the noticeable career achievement for me.

At EY, I was pulled into a Canadian regulatory reporting project with no formal authority over any of the teams that needed to change. Compliance, operations, and architecture each owned a slice, and every earlier attempt to coordinate them had stalled. I didn’t try to out-rank anyone. I mapped who owned what, ran joint sessions to force alignment, and kept surfacing what “done” actually looked like until people stopped arguing about ownership and started building. We went live early and helped the bank avoid a multi-million-dollar penalty. What I actually took from it: authority is optional if you’re willing to be the person who keeps the picture clear for everyone else.

Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far: It was realizing, somewhere around Managerial Economics, that I’d spent seven years being good at solving problems fast and that speed had been quietly substituting for judgment. The core courses forced me to sit with ambiguity longer than my consulting instincts were comfortable with before reaching for a framework. That’s a harder shift than it sounds for someone whose whole professional identity was built on being the person who moves fast under pressure.

What is your class’ favorite hangout away from school? Why do you gather there? Amul Cafe. It’s where the post-case-discussion arguments actually finish, the ones that get cut short in class because the next session is starting. Half the cohort’s best insights happen there, not in the classroom.

What do you hope to do after graduation? I want to lead product strategy for next-generation cross-border payments, the ones built on stablecoins and blockchain rails, not the ones still running on decades-old correspondent banking plumbing. I’ve spent seven years watching the same contradiction from three different seats: implementation at Infosys, consulting at Deloitte and EY, and product at Finastra. I’ve seen why cross-border payments break. EPGP is where I’m building the strategic judgment to fix it, not just patch it.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into IIM Bangalore? Stop trying to sound impressive and start trying to be specific. My essays only got good once I stopped writing about “leadership” in the abstract and wrote about the exact moment I realized authority and leadership aren’t the same thing. IIM Bangalore isn’t reading for polish, they’re reading for whether you actually know your own story, including the parts where you were wrong.

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