In conversation with our Director of Presales Strategy

Tapan Desai has been with Lifesight since 2018 and is an integral part of our team. We recently had a chat over coffee where we discussed his role as a Director of Presales Strategy, his journey with Lifesight and what he likes to do in his free time.

Tell us a little bit about what you do. 

My current position is Pre-sales Strategy Director along with a bit of Product Management and Solutions engineering. I've moved between quite a few different roles in the last 2 and a half years but been on the product side for the past 4-5 months.

What is a typical day like for you?

A typical day for me involves a mix of client calls and product development calls with the tech team. It's a good juggle between the two, because you get to learn from the market and curate the best things to be added through research into building better products.

How has your work changed since the inception of Lifesight's customer intelligence platform?

Clients being ready to hear you out and do demos via calls is a big boon, because a lot needed you to be face to face due to the industry that we operated in.
Although from a product and tech team collaboration standpoint, it is always better to be co-located in spite of tech allowing you to be housed anytime and anywhere.

Can you tell us about the most interesting products you work with in lifesight?

The customer intelligence platform and the ID resolution and enrichment modules within that have its own challenges and are very interesting to solve. Solving the various use cases for each industry and making the product suitable for all of them also makes it very interesting.

Which teams in Lifesight do you collaborate with often?

The closest collaboration happens with the tech team, followed by business and sales and marketing.

Is it different working with various industries? How so?

Depending on how "tech-mature" the industry is, they have their own expectations of what product suits them the best for their marketing and advertising use case. For example a retail e-commerce industry will already be tech and data centric as opposed to a healthcare industry. With each industry learning to adapt to the digital ecosystem, opportunities arise at different times.

How has your work changed before and after the pandemic?

Collaborating across non collocated teams is one big change that we've had to adapt to. Other than that, not much change in work patterns.

What is the best part of your work?

I've always loved creating things whether it is in tech, or content or music so to do that in building products that are going to be useful to many just makes the entire process from ideation to delivery and iteration really interesting and keeps you on your toes.

Tell us a little about the work culture at Lifesight.

We�ve grown really fast from being slightly smaller in terms of products we've built and people we've had. So to constantly change and adapt really fast is one constant culture I�ve seen at Lifesight. Another thing that I see amongst most of us and would love for it to evolve even more is using people's strengths to question, debate and constantly get better with what we do.

How is the work-life balance?

We try and maintain a work life balance with a decent amount of time available after work hours and over weekends unless there's lots happening during product development and delivery.

What do you do in your free time? Has it changed a lot now with COVID19?

I play music and sports in my free time. When it comes to physical outdoor sports, it has reduced with COVID19. But I would love to get back to it soon.

What's next for you? 

I want to be able to contribute more as product manager and also the pre-sales solutions piece for newer industries and core product functions being developed. I also want to be able to explore newer areas in technology like data science, machine learning and UX.