Meet the Team: Yash Babu
Tell us a little bit about yourself, background, and role. How did you land here?
My background is in engineering, and I completed my Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. After IIT, I pursued my MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, which opened the door to my role as a Strategy Consultant at Accenture.
While working at Accenture, I became increasingly interested in technology and product work. I realized that to pursue the career I truly wanted, I needed deeper technical and data expertise. That led me to move to the U.S. in 2023 to pursue my Master’s in Business Analytics at UCLA, where I immersed myself in data and discovered how much I enjoyed product management.
After graduating, I landed my first Product Manager role and went on to intern as a Product Manager at Snowflake. Shortly after, Kushal, our CEO and co-founder, gave me the opportunity to join Trestle—and I’ve been here for about eight months.
What does your daily routine look like?
I have more of a “biweekly” routine because my work is planned around 15-day sprints. The focus of my daily work tends to revolve around conversations with data vendors, sales folks, and execs. I talk to data vendors about what their data looks like, assessing how relevant it is for our needs and context. I’ll chat with sales people about the kind of pain points they’ve been hearing from customers. I’m also consistently in conversations with Kushal to make high-level product decisions – how do we improve latency? Accuracy? Understandability? All working towards the goal of making improvements to help our users best utilize our APIs.
Another chunk of my daily routine is data analytics. I look at a lot of customer usage data to help assess possible improvements. The highlight of my day, however, is definitely my evening engineering calls, where I get to connect to the data team in India. What I do day-to-day is entirely variable and structured around what I’m trying to accomplish within a particular sprint.
What excites you most about Trestle?
So many things excite me about Trestle! I would say there are two main things that make the Trestle experience amazing – the ability to work on real-life problems and being able to see the impact almost immediately. Because of how our team is structured, I can quickly get on a sales call, understand customer pain points, create a proof of concept (POC), do some data analysis, and get that improvement into the next sprint. Then, once that’s live, I can actually see the impact quickly, and course correct to improve ourselves. The speed at which we can optimize our Developer Portal and experiment with changes is fascinating to me.
And I can’t forget the people! It’s so easy to connect with everyone here; there’s no judgement. All the people at Trestle really believe every idea is valuable and worth considering, which I believe is key for a healthy work culture.
What Trestle value do you relate to the most?
The Trestle value I relate to most is “Figure It Out.” Problems are going to arise. There are so many different challenges that come our way as Product Managers–in vendor management, security and privacy, data-related policies, customer considerations, engineering challenges, the list goes on.
A “Figure It Out” attitude is so important. We never back down from these obstacles or say “we can’t do it”. We acknowledge there’s a challenge, so we work to understand it, and we figure it out together. That’s monumental for what you face in a startup environment.
What’s one thing that helps you do your best work?
What helps me is the attitude that you either do something well, or you learn from it. There is no “lose”. Every day I’m learning more about the industry. My conversations with Kushal and the rest of the team, who are such experts in the identity data space, help foster my growth. It also helps that I can have these conversations over the desk–our office setup helps me learn quickly and overall become a better professional.
What’s a topic you could give a 5-minute impromptu talk about?
I could definitely give a 5-minute Ted Talk on how to use our Developer Portal and take someone from just knowing about it to actually being able to utilize it. I can help answer anything from “How do I use this API” to “How do I write a script?”.
I could also give a 5-minute Ted Talk on video gaming, specifically RPGs. One way I destress after work is hopping on my PS5. My favorites games include God of War and Witcher III, and I recently just finished Ghost of Yotei. That’s certainly something I could talk about for 5 minutes straight.
