Saee Pansare started her career not in software but in a lab, studying food engineering and imagining a future developing flavors and ingredients. What she discovered instead was that she had the instincts of a product manager all along; she just happened to be building physical products. After stints at Kraft Heinz, Amazon, and Whole Foods, she landed at DoorDash where she now leads the DoorDash for Business charter, building group order and large order systems for corporate clients. In this episode of Products That Count, podcast host and Chief AI Product Officer at Boston New Technology Shweta Agrawal sits down with Saee to unpack what food product development taught her about software PM, why she believes domain expertise beats technical background when switching industries, and how she navigated the trust-building challenge that every career changer eventually faces.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:08) Saee’s path from food engineering undergrad to MBA to product management
(4:33) What a food engineer actually does, and why it looks a lot like software development
(6:05) Managing the P&L for cheese powders and marshmallows at Kraft Heinz
(10:28) How Saee ran customer discovery and prototype testing for physical food products
(15:21) How pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID eating habits are completely different, and what that means for food businesses
(18:05) Why time to commercialization pushed her out of food and into software
(23:21) How she applied for PM roles without a technical background, and what strategy worked
(27:00) The hardest part of the transition: building trust with software engineers
(30:36) Job search advice for career switchers: what a resume alone cannot do
(32:07) What the DoorDash for Business charter actually is, and what the day to day looks like
(34:54) DoorDash versus Amazon: how company size shapes the speed of everything
(37:12) Advice for anyone transitioning from physical products into software PM right now
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
