Member Spotlight: Keerthi Chandra Sekaren, Product Owner at FleetOps

Whether it’s the lively atmosphere of Eyre Square or the serene shores of Galway Bay, Keerthi’s decision to call Galway home is a testament to the city’s ability to inspire, empower, and drive the next wave of innovation.

Meet Keerthi Chandra Sekaren, a product owner at FleetOps. FleetOps build software to enable data-driven performance for truck fleets that centralize data and help set targets on key metrics. As Product Owner, Keethri’s role is to gather requirements on problems that they wish to solve, brainstorm solutions, review designs and translate them into engineering tasks. 

We asked Keerthi about her time at PorterShed and how she found out about FleetOps.

“I’ve been a member of the PorterShed community for a little over 3 years now. When looking for a job after completing my Masters, I cold-emailed companies on the PorterShed members list on their website, which was a great resource for someone not local to Galway. FleetOps happened to be a member company at PorterShed and I’m glad they chose it to be their space since it doubles up as a workplace and a place to meet new people”.  

With over 50 member companies based in PorterShed, there is always something going on, whether it be a new meetup, or event. We asked Keerthi what her favourite thing about being part of the PorterShed community.

“The opportunity to interact with people through events and participate in things you wouldn’t have otherwise known about. The great thing about PorterShed is that there is such a great mix of events happening every week, you just don’t know what is around the corner. And of course, the coffee is also fantastic too – many a friend has been made around the famous coffee machine!”

With our member spotlight interviews, we like to ask members about their hobbies or even a fun fact about themselves and what they do to keep that strong work/life balance!

“I had to rack my brain for this one – A fun fact about me that not a lot of people know about me is that I used to write a lot of poetry in high school. Not very good but I enjoyed it. It stuck with me until I started working. In fact, my college roommate and I wrote a parody of the song Payphone by Maroon 5 which was hilarious but don’t ask me to recite it!”

As we jump into the year, 2024 is shaping up to be full of new events and meetups here in the PorterShed. How time flies! We asked Keerthi what she is looking forward to most in 2024.

“I have some exciting news about the Product Management meetup that I co-organize with a fellow PorterShed member Diarmaid. We have recently joined hands with the iTag Product management forum to host future events. Our most recent meetup was hosted by guest speaker Arik Elberse, who shared his invaluable knowledge and experiences of Product management. Keep an eye out for the next one!”

To end the interview, we asked Keerthi what advice would she offer someone looking to become a product owner…

“Everyone’s path to product management is unique – this is what I learned from the first meetup that we had. My advice would be to play to your strengths and showcase how you plan to bridge any skill gaps if you’d like to get into product management. For example, if you are a software engineer, your strength would be knowing really well how to translate requirements into engineering tasks and what you may want to upskill on would be how to look at communicating solutions from the end user’s perspective”

Connect with Keerthi on Linkedin