Harpreet Ahluwalia is chief product officer of Altruist. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, spent three years in product management at Salesforce, and was vice president of product at a Los Angeles software company where he was an early employee. He is known for wanting product managers to hear from advisers themselves.
Proofs of concept, then Salesforce
He told the Product Chats podcast on August 24, 2022, that after Berkeley he worked as a sales engineer at a startup. The job was to take the software to prospective customers, build proofs of concept, and sit through vendor comparisons, including for companies in the United States and in Europe. He said that taught him how to walk into a business and see what the software had to do. His first product management role was at Salesforce. He described a team that brought customers into the work and watched whether people used what had shipped.
Call centers, technicians, and then adviser workflows
On that podcast he said he scaled the product team at the Los Angeles company, and organized it around the people using the software: call-center agents, technicians in the field, and back-office staff such as accountants. Tidemark, writing in 2024 about a session with him, says he was central to the multi-product strategy at ServiceTitan.
By the August 2022 conversation he was describing Altruist as a Los Angeles company whose software independent financial advisers use to run the firm and to manage client money. He said the early months went into interviews with those advisers, and that the costly part of the job was the time spent managing clients. He wanted an adviser to be able to serve more of them. He also said he does not want every requested report built as asked. "We want to make sure that we are taking a stance on what the best practice is," he told Product Chats. Because an advisory firm, in his account, is mostly advisers and administrators, the group at Altruist is organized around workflows: finding prospective clients, opening accounts, moving money or securities in, and then trading, rebalancing, and tax-loss harvesting.