Working in Netherlands My Dutch Driving License Journey – From Failing Once to Finally Passing Ankit Tomar, August 22, 2025August 19, 2025 If you’ve ever gone through the Dutch driving exam, you know it’s not easy. I learned that the hard way. I failed my first attempt, and honestly, it shook me. I needed the license not just for convenience, but also for my travel plans within Europe. Failing again meant more… Continue Reading
Product Management 🤝 Designing for Trust in AI Products Ankit Tomar, August 20, 2025August 18, 2025 Because Smart Doesn’t Matter If No One Trusts It Let’s be real — AI is powerful, but often mysterious. And when people don’t understand how something works, they hesitate to trust it.That’s especially true with AI-powered products. As a product leader, I’ve learned that the biggest challenge with AI isn’t… Continue Reading
Product Management 🚦 How I Handle Stakeholder Pushback When the Data Isn’t Ready Ankit Tomar, August 18, 2025August 18, 2025 If you’ve ever worked in product, you know this line: Sound familiar? Yeah, I’ve been there too. The truth is — this happens all the time in AI and SaaS product development. As you grow into product leadership, dealing with pushback becomes part of the job. And usually, it’s not… Continue Reading
Product Management 🚀 The AI Product Leader’s Playbook: My 5 Core Operating Principles Ankit Tomar, July 9, 2025July 7, 2025 “Anyone can ship a demo. Real leaders build what lasts.” After 13+ years building AI-powered and data-driven products across pricing, SaaS, healthcare, and telecom, I’ve come to rely on a few operating principles that never go out of style. These aren’t just bullet points from a playbook — they’ve helped… Continue Reading
GenAI SLMs: The Future Beyond Large Language Models Ankit Tomar, July 8, 2025July 4, 2025 Why Specialized, Smaller Models Will Power the Next Generation of AI The AI space is moving fast — and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have taken the industry by storm. You can now chat with a system that speaks your language, answers your questions, and even… Continue Reading
Product Management 🤯 Why Most AI Roadmaps Fail — And What I Do Differently Ankit Tomar, July 7, 2025July 6, 2025 (A Real-World Take from the Product Trenches) “The moment AI enters the roadmap, it hijacks the whole conversation. And that’s where things start breaking.” 👀 A Real Story A while back, I joined a large telco to lead their AI product strategy. The goal? Build a recommendation engine to help… Continue Reading
Product Management 🤖 Product Leader vs. AI Product Leader: What Changes When You Manage Intelligence Ankit Tomar, July 6, 2025July 3, 2025 “Managing software is one thing. Managing intelligence? That’s a whole different game.” The rise of AI has redefined what it means to be a product leader. Once considered a support function, data is now the core product — powering critical decisions, automation, and personalized experiences. And with that, the role… Continue Reading
Product Management 🧨 The 7 Deadly Mistakes of AI Product Leader Ankit Tomar, July 5, 2025July 6, 2025 Hard Lessons in Building AI Products That Scale (Not Just Dazzle) “Most AI products don’t fail due to the algorithm — they fail because the product didn’t matter.” In my 13+ years of building enterprise-grade SaaS and AI solutions, I’ve seen that product leadership isn’t just about ideas and roadmaps… Continue Reading
Product Management How to Build AI Products That Ship — Not Just Demos Ankit Tomar, July 4, 2025July 3, 2025 As they say – “Ideas are cheap. Shipping real products is what matters.” How many times have we heard this? “We’ve built so many AI backed prototypes… but few made real impact.” In this blog, I’ll share learnings from 10+ years of building and scaling enterprise-grade SaaS and AI products… Continue Reading
Machine Learning 🐈⬛ How CatBoost Handles Categorical Features, Ordered Boosting & Ordered Target Statistics 🚀 Ankit Tomar, July 3, 2025July 3, 2025 CatBoost isn’t just “another gradient boosting library.”Its real magic lies in how it natively handles categorical variables, avoids target leakage, and reduces prediction shift — three major pain points in traditional boosting. Let’s break this down step by step. 🧩 Problem: Categorical variables in tree models Most boosting libraries (like… Continue Reading