Author's Journey: Shoaib Ahmed and The Product Code
Welcome back to Author’s Journey, the series where I write about authors and how their books came to be. I’m Mangal D Karnad, author of Folded Away Softly and Malli and the Mulki Stories — and this one is different from every other piece I have written in this series.
There will be no interview. Shoaib Ahmed is no longer with us.
But his book is. The Product Code, published by Westland, launched on the 31st of July 2026 to a room full of people who knew him, loved him, and at some time or another needed his help. I was one of them. This is my attempt to introduce him to readers who didn’t get the chance to know him.
How I Knew Him
I first met Shoaib Ahmed in the year 2000, as a customer. The company I was working for used Shoper, the retail software he had built at Vedha Automations. I had no idea then that the person behind that product would become one of the most significant influences of my professional life.
A few years later, I joined his team. My first role in sales, under his watch. Then came ten years together at Tally Solutions, where he led, and I built the communications practice. We were colleagues, then friends, then the kind of friends who show up at each other’s birthdays and other events. He and Nilu came to ours. We were at his 50th birthday which he celebrated uniquely, he gifted everyone that mattered to him and asked for gifts that he wanted probably as a child. His daughters bought him a toy train and he was ecstatic about it! We also attended his daughter’s Haldi ceremony and wedding.
After I left Tally in 2015, he was our advisor to FableSquare. In one conversation, he handed me back my founding purpose in a form I could finally use: the gold rush image. We Fablesquare are the ones who provided the shovels and baskets to the gold diggers. The clarity about what we were actually trying to do for our clients: help them with the tools to grow their business. He had a way of doing that. He listened until he heard what you were really saying, and then gave it back to you more clearly than you had said it.
We also argued. Not small disagreements, massive ones, the kind that need time to settle. What I noticed, every time, was that he could put the argument behind him faster than I could. He did not carry it. He would reconnect as if the friction had clarified something rather than damaged anything. In fact, he used to say that a crisis or a friction is a very good way to build relationships. I have seen very few people who are genuinely like that. The book, when I finally read it, confirmed it was not politeness. It was a philosophy he had held since long before I knew him.
What the Book Is: The Product Code
The Product Code is Shoaib’s memoir. Thirty-five years of building products and businesses in India, told in his own voice, with the honesty of someone who has nothing left to prove and no reason to make himself look better than he was.
It starts with his college days in Bangalore: the 400-metre race he should have won but didn’t, a split-second failure of belief that he spent the rest of his career examining. This experience stayed with him, through building Vedha Automations, the merger with Tally, the years of rebuilding Tally’s partner culture after its most significant crisis. It was his philosophy of life and business.
The book is not a framework with case studies attached. It is his life, told as a life, with the failures given the same importance as the successes. His personal experiences are woven through the professional without apology.
What Surprised Me
I have known Shoaib for more than two decades. I have sat across from him in meeting rooms, in his car, at dinner tables, at partner conferences, at CIO events where he was the one presenting. I thought I knew most of the stories.
Yet, the Gangarams incident was new to me.
Early in his career, before Tally became ubiquitous, Shoaib had walked into Gangarams — the well-known Bangalore bookstore — to sell his accounting software. He found the owner already in love with PFA (Tally), a competitor’s product. Shoaib made every logical argument he had. None of it mattered. The decision had already been made.
It is a small story. It takes a few paragraphs in the book. But it stopped me because it is the clearest illustration I have read of something Shoaib and I had discussed many times — that purchase decisions are emotional before they are rational. We had talked about this in the abstract, in the language of business and marketing. The Gangarams story made it specific, human and a little humbling. He had lived this lesson before he could name it, and he carried it into every sale and every relationship for the next three decades.
That is what the book does repeatedly. It takes ideas that sound large and abstract and shows you the small, specific moment when he first understood it.
The Thread That Runs Through Everything
Shoaib believed in relationships as the actual product of any business, not as a nice thing to say but as the operating principle. I still remember the time when he became emotional after accepting the Vedha merger with Tally – he said it was like a daughter getting married; the parent is happy and sad at the same time.
He also believed, with equal seriousness, in the power of visualisation. The 400-metre race is where the book plants this concept. He describes coming third not because his body gave up but because his mind did not yet accept the possibility of him winning. He spent the rest of his career making sure he did not slow down at the winning moment again. The prayer he and Nilu made at Arafat — for a merger, without debt, on their terms — happened four years before it came true, exactly as they had imagined. He does not frame this as coincidence but as the consequence.
Something he told me in conversation has stayed with me. He said — be kind to yourself. Stop being so critical about yourself. Accept a compliment when it comes. Accept success when it arrives. I have returned to that instruction more times than I can count.
The Question I Wish I Had Asked
Writing a book is a lonely journey. I know this from my own experience — the long stretches of uncertainty if there will be readers, the time when the manuscript feels too personal to show anyone and too incomplete to be useful.
Shoaib wrote The Product Code during a period of his life I wasn’t fully in. I did not ask him what kept him going through the writing itself.
I wish I had. I have my guesses. It is the same visualisation practice that carried him through everything else. The same instinct for relationship that made him want to leave something behind for the people who would read it.
Why You Should Read This Book
Not because you are an entrepreneur, though it will serve you well if you are. Not because you work in technology, sales or product management, though it will speak directly to those experiences.
Because it is an honest account of what it takes to build something that lasts, he built trust and relationships.
At one point, he writes that the power of visualisation and building a narrative of self-belief is the foundation for success. It sounds like a motivational line until you read the evidence he places in the book.
The Product Code by Shoaib Ahmed is published by Westland and available in all bookstores and online on Amazon and Flipkart. Here is the link for easy access: https://www.amazon.in/Product-Code-Shoper-Making-Entrepreneur/dp/9379851898
A Note From Mangal
What stays with me most, reading this book, is not any single incident or insight. It is the realisation that Shoaib remembered every experience vividly, and he wrote about it. Everyone he mentions — from the Gangarams owner who loved Tally, to the partner who came to him before a meeting to say he would not speak if BG was present, to the colleague who confronted him about the certificates.
The book reads like sitting across from him, listening as he speaks.