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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

October - 2007 - issue > Woman Achiever

An Alpha Woman

Jaya Smitha Menon
Monday, October 1, 2007
Jaya Smitha Menon
Stuti Shukla explodes the notion that marketing, creating business strategy, and product planning are the domain of men. Stuti is the Group Manager for the Emerging Market Incubations Group at Microsoft India Development Center, Hyderabad. She leads the new product planning team for the emerging market. In her career spanning 13 years, Stuti has built a career that is firmly rooted in her marketing skills with experience in business strategy and market planning. “I always wanted to have a career doing market strategy and I really enjoy this job,” says Stuti. She has in-depth understanding of product, audience, and channel marketing with critical market drivers across customer segments and geographies worldwide.

“People have to pursue a career in an area which they are passionate about,” says Stuti. She loves working on things from scratch and has also chosen roles that are entrepreneurial in nature. “Work is an important part of my life. So doing things I am passionate about is very important to me,” she explains. Her passion and perseverance has won her laurels in the forms of awards and recognition at Microsoft. The first achievement came her way when Stuti and her team took to the task of driving the adoption of Microsoft’s .NET platform among Fortune 500 Customers in the U.S. It was a diligently crafted out strategy with flawless execution that drove significant penetration of the platform among customers and won Stuti, Microsoft’s Best Practices Award in 2002. She was invited to a luncheon with none other than Bill Gates. “It was a very special moment for me,” explains Stuti excitedly.

Stuti was also instrumental in developing Microsoft’s engagement model for small Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and operationalizing the plan. It was no trivial task to gain intelligence on the thousands of small ISVs worldwide, figure out a compelling value proposition for them to build on Microsoft platform, and get these ISVs to churn out new applications on the latest versions of Microsoft technologies on an on-going basis.

Often in IT companies it is difficult to successfully coordinate between engineering and marketing. As part of leading the business planning for Windows Server, one of the core Microsoft products, Stuti and her team worked in partnership with the engineering and leadership team to determine the core market segments which the next generation windows server should target. This collaborative effort and its outcome brought her the award for Excellence in Engineering and Marketing collaboration in 2006 which was presented by Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft.

The idea of being able to make a big and real impact on the lives of millions of people in India through technology is very motivating for Stuti. In Microsoft she explores this mission by figuring out new technology products and models that are economically sustainable and can be turned into feasible businesses for Microsoft. “The challenge of figuring that out keeps me going,” explains Stuti.


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