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Nivedha Venkatesh

Product Support Manager at Postman, ex-Zapier

Nivedha Venkatesh is an experienced professional in the SaaS (Software as a Service) industry, specializing in customer support and experience. Here are some key details about her:

Professional Experience

Nivedha currently works as the Product Support Manager for the APAC region at Postman, a popular developer tool company.1 She leads a highly technical support team, managing two regions (APAC & EMEA) for Product Support.1

Prior to joining Postman, Nivedha worked at Zapier for 5 years, where she helped scale the APAC Support team.1 This experience contributed to her expertise in remote work and asynchronous communication.

Skills and Expertise

  • Customer Experience: With over 9 years of experience in SaaS customer-facing roles, Nivedha is well-versed in Support and Customer Experience.1
  • Remote Work: She is a strong advocate for remote work and has shared strategies with various companies to help them adapt to asynchronous work environments.1
  • Leadership: Nivedha focuses on effective leadership and building high-productivity teams, often writing about these topics on her LinkedIn posts.1

Background and Education

Interestingly, Nivedha describes herself as a "self-taught techie".1 She studied Commerce but has successfully transitioned into leading technical support teams in the software industry.12

Interests and Contributions

Nivedha is passionate about:

  • Promoting women in tech
  • Sharing insights on cross-functional collaboration, documentation, and remote leadership
  • Helping early-stage founders build customer-obsessed, diverse teams1

She has also been involved with SaaSBOOMi, an organization focused on the SaaS industry, where she has contributed her expertise in customer experience and team building.5

Nivedha Venkatesh is active on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, where she shares her thoughts on customer experience, documentation, and building successful SaaS products.34

Highlights

Jun 24 · linkedin

Zapier offered me the job after I got the answer wrong to the task I was given during my final interview Read on to see if your interview process is living under a rock 👇🏽

The task was to find the API endpoints that would be used to accomplish a task for an obscure product

I could access to any resource on the web - Google, API docs, Zapier's help docs, literally anything I could get my hands on

I was required to share my screen before I started working on it, something they had prepared me for before the interview

I had no idea what they were looking for and I was obviously nervous as HECK that every move I made was being watched closely!!

They took note of what resources I was using (Google, cause 2017), and what parts of the doc I paused at to read carefully

I got the final answer wrong but I was 🤏🏽 close

But that didn't matter, clearly

What mattered was how quickly someone could navigate to the right resources for a question they had not encountered before


The world of search is going through exponential shifts

And it seems that we have may no longer have good excuses to say “I don’t know” We can say "I don't care to know" and that's obv fine

But for leaders and recruiters who think they’re going to find the best engineer, for example, by asking them to do a live coding assignment with NO access to external resources, I ask: do you know any engineer in the world who has written every single line of code without referring to a source like StackOverflow? 🤨

Ah, but one may say "these are basic concepts any engineer should know"

And I bet we're not so daft to figure out if what they're looking up is too f*ckin basic for the role we're hiring 😏

Forget prompting an LLM - if interview processes today don't include testing how effective someone is at using Google search for their core task, tch, good luck catching up I guess 👋🏽

May 7 · linkedin

Perhaps my least favourite question today is "Are you a tech or a non-tech founder?"

We don't ask "Are you a business or non-business founder?"

Because we expect a founder who codes, to also understand the business side

But we don't expect a business founder to understand tech?

WILD.

During an Antler mock pitching session, I paired myself with a founder who was building a dev tool

At the end of the pitch, the investor asked if I wrote code for the product 🥲

It's frustrating when people come into conversations, boldly schooling me on technical topics assuming that I don't know much about tech

Cause, look at my profile - I've only ever done customer experience roles, so how could I possibly understand anything in tech?

What they don't see is a marketing grad who self-taught coding and actively ditched that career path

A huge part of this journey has been to become comfortable with admitting not knowing something

But what's a good approach to respectfully not assume?

"Before I go further into this, I'd like to understand if you know what X means."

While I don't ever recommend cutting people mid-sentence, if you're on the receiving end of this, this is a great exception to the rule. I usually go with - "I understand enough about this topic, so let's jump straight to your thoughts."

Assumptions can not only be seriously misleading, they can be demeaning too

Related Questions

What are some key strategies Nivedha has implemented for remote work at Postman?
How did Nivedha transition from Commerce to a technical role in SaaS?
What challenges has Nivedha faced as a woman in tech and how has she overcome them?
Can you share examples of Nivedha's leadership style in building high-productivity teams?
What are some best practices in customer experience that Nivedha emphasizes?
Nivedha Venkatesh
Nivedha Venkatesh, photo 1
Nivedha Venkatesh, photo 2
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Location

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India