Uday Kumar

Career Counsellor & Mentor · Author of The Resilient IT Professional
Uday Kumar, career counsellor and mentor at ProThink
Why ProThink Exists

Over ~25 years, I have worked with, interviewed, and interacted with 10,000+ IT professionals.

Through my consulting years, senior leaders kept telling me the same thing: most talent does what is asked — but doesn’t try to understand the business. And the ones who did understand the business, and applied it proactively in their deliverables? They were the star performers. Every single time.

Meanwhile, India lives an irony: enormous engineering output on one side, unfilled roles on the other — and unemployment still rising. Education reform is endlessly discussed. But individuals can’t put their careers on hold waiting for it.

With education across Technology, Management, and Process, and a career across every business-critical function, I could see the gap clearly — and I built ProThink to help close it, one professional at a time.

The workshops are a starting point: awareness of what you need to learn, so you can read situations for yourself — to sustain, to grow, to pivot.

This is my ikigai. My contribution to society.
My Journey
Experience across business-critical functions

I started as a developer with an aspiration for general management — and then did something few IT professionals do: I worked my way through the functions that make a technology business run. Software Engineering, IT Services, Program & Project Management, Product Management, Consulting, Presales, Sales, and Marketing — a minimum of two years in each, across startups and enterprises, over ~25 years.

J2EE Developer → Tech Lead → Project Lead → Project Manager → Engineering Manager → Product Manager → Delivery Lead → Business Head → Sales & Marketing Head → VP / Director-level roles

Along the way, I’ve built as well as advised: eight years as the first employee of a startup, growing it to ~₹50 crores. While building it, I advised 300+ enterprises on SDLC and operations improvements — and those interactions taught me both sides of the table: companies and their challenges, and team members and theirs. That perspective — plus a speaker’s seat at industry conferences, including Gartner — is why I call myself a TechnoBiz expert: reading both the technology and the business is what made me not just survive, but grow, through every shift of my career.

Educated Across Three Dimensions

Technology

B.E. (Mechanical) — Andhra University
M.Tech (CST) — Andhra University
PGP AI/ML — Great Learning × Texas McCombs
Generative AI for Microsoft — Great Learning

Management

Executive MBA (GM) — SPJIMR, Mumbai
Product Management — ICPM
B2B Marketing — IIM Ahmedabad

Process

SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC)
Agile Scrum Master
Lean · Six Sigma · TPM · TQM
Atlassian JIRA & JIRA Software
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