The Executive Masters Changed My Career Direction

An Executive Career Design Conversation on How the SDA Bocconi IEMB Built the Commercial Foundation for a Senior Leadership Pivot.

There is a category of career move that looks, from the outside, like a natural progression. Mr. Anand Jha's is not that. Moving from Chief Design Officer in consumer robotics to VP of Product Development, with full P&L ownership, at one of the world's largest bicycle manufacturers required something more intentional than momentum.

It required him to diagnose what he was missing, acquire it systematically, and then make the case for a kind of leadership he had never held before. The Executive MBA at SDA Bocconi was the instrument. This is a conversation about how he used it.

I. The Diagnosis

Most executives at CDO level are not looking for a reason to go back to school. What made you different?

I think the honest answer is that I was willing to name something uncomfortable: I had a ceiling, and I could see it clearly. I was doing the design and innovation work at the highest level I'd ever done it, leading a team, shaping product strategy, building things that hadn't existed before. But every time a conversation moved to the P&L, to margin, to the commercial trade-offs behind a product call, I was effectively stepping aside and letting someone else carry it. I wasn't being pushed out of those conversations. I was removing myself from them because I didn't have the language or the grounding to hold my own.

That's a specific and diagnosable problem. Once I named it clearly, the question wasn't whether to act. It was how.

Why is that ceiling so common among design and product leaders specifically?

Because design careers reward depth, not breadth. You build your reputation by being the best at a particular kind of thinking: aesthetic, functional, user-centred. That depth is genuinely valuable, and it gets you very far. But at some point, moving into general business leadership requires you to hold the whole picture: the strategy, the numbers, the commercial logic, the accountability for outcome rather than output. Design training doesn't build that. And most organisations don't offer a structured path to acquire it on the job. You either get it through exposure or you don't get it at all.

I wasn't getting it through exposure. So I needed to find another way.

II. The Decision Architecture

Mr. Jha, you looked at multiple programmes before choosing the IEMB at SDA Bocconi. Walk us through how you actually made that decision.

I had specific criteria, and I held to them. First, the format had to be executable. I wasn't in a position to step away from a full-time role, so it had to run over weekends. Second, it had to close the right gaps, which for me meant genuine business rigour, particularly on the financial and commercial side. Third, I wanted international exposure, not as a box to tick, but because I was conscious that my professional frame of reference was quite narrow geographically.

I looked at domestic one-year executive formats and a fully online option. Both were workable in format. Neither gave me what I actually needed in terms of academic standing and the quality of the cohort I'd be learning alongside. The SDA Bocconi IEMB cleared all three criteria, and the pedagogy, which is almost entirely case-based and simulation-driven rather than lecture-based, told me the learning was designed to be applied, not stored.

That's an unusually rigorous way to approach a programme selection. Most senior professionals start with rankings.

Rankings are a proxy for the thing you actually want, which is the quality of the experience and what it produces in your career. I wasn't shopping for a credential. I was making a specific investment in a specific outcome: the ability to move from a functional leadership role into general business leadership. The question I kept asking was whether this Executive MBA would actually build that capability in me, or give me a certificate and leave the capability gap more or less intact.

The answer, in SDA Bocconi's case, came down to faculty and format. Many of the faculty are serving board members, not academics who consult occasionally, but people actively governing and running organisations. A case study led by someone who made that exact call last quarter is a fundamentally different learning experience from one led by someone who wrote about it.

III. The Inflection Point

You've described a financial strategy project at IEMB as the moment the programme actually broke something open for you. What happened?

I went into the EMBA thinking I had a working understanding of the P&L. I didn't. I had a designer's approximation of it, enough to follow a conversation, not enough to lead one. Working through that project properly, being responsible for the financial architecture of the decision rather than just observing it, exposed a gap that I hadn't fully understood was as large as it was.

The more important thing is what I did with that. I didn't wait to graduate. I took what I was learning on weekends and applied it in my decisions the following week. Within a few months, I had developed a completely different way of reading a product problem, not just asking "is this good?" but asking what it costs, what it returns, and what the trade-offs are at the margin. That shift is what changed the nature of the conversations I could have and the rooms I could credibly walk into.

That integration of programme and live role is something many executive students aspire to but few manage. What enabled it, Mr. Jha?

I think it requires a particular way of approaching the Executive MBA. You have to refuse to treat it as coursework. Every assignment, every simulation, every case has to be read as a live business problem that you are actually solving, not an academic exercise you are completing for a grade. Once you make that commitment, the integration becomes almost automatic, because the problems you're working through in the classroom are structurally identical to the ones you're navigating at work. The context changes. The thinking is the same.

The cohort accelerated it significantly. My peers came from finance, consulting and manufacturing, disciplines I had almost no professional exposure to as a design person. Working through business problems with people who read them from fundamentally different starting points taught me to hold multiple commercial perspectives simultaneously. That's a capability you cannot build in isolation.

IV. The Architecture of the Move

You're now VP of Product Development at Hero Cycles, one of the world's largest bicycle manufacturers. How did the SDA Bocconi IEMB create the conditions for that move?

It gave me a language I didn't previously have, and language is what gives you access. In business leadership, the currency is commercial fluency: the ability to frame a product decision in terms of cost, margin, return and strategic fit, not just design quality or user experience. Before the EMBA, I could describe a product brilliantly but I couldn't fully own the business case for it. After, I could do both. Being able to argue in both registers simultaneously is what earned me credibility in conversations I had previously been peripheral to.

The Hero Cycles role is the clearest evidence of that. The scope is not comparable to where I was. I own the P&L, not the design of the product, but the commercial outcome of it. That's a different kind of accountability entirely, and it's the accountability I was building toward.

P&L ownership is a phrase that gets used loosely. What does it actually mean in practice at your level, Mr. Jha?

It means that the product doesn't succeed because it's well-designed. It succeeds when it generates a return: when the cost to build it, the price at which it sells, the volume it achieves, and the margin it produces all work together. My job is to hold all of that simultaneously and make decisions that optimise across those variables, not just one of them. Design is one input. It's an important one. But it's no longer the only one I'm responsible for, or the only one I'm judged by.

That's the real transition. The title changed. The accountability structure is what actually changed.

V. What the Move Revealed

Mr. Jha, you now mentor designers and product leaders inside your organisation who are trying to make a similar move. What do you tell them?

I tell them to develop financial fluency before they think they need it, because by the time the gap is visible from the outside, it's already held you back. I also tell them that the move from functional excellence to business leadership is not a natural extension of being very good at your function. It's a deliberate transition that requires you to acquire a different way of reading problems. That acquisition doesn't happen through observation. It requires structured, applied learning and then relentless practice of applying it in live contexts before you feel ready.

The other thing I tell them, and this is perhaps the most important thing, is to be honest about what they don't know. The professionals who make this move successfully are the ones who can sit with the discomfort of a genuine capability gap and work through it methodically, rather than performing confidence they don't yet have.

Looking back at the career you've built, the CDO role, the Executive MBA, the VP position at Hero Cycles, how do you describe the logic of it now?

I'd describe it as a deliberate sequence. I built deep functional credibility in design because that's what earned me the room to be taken seriously. Then I recognised that functional credibility alone had a ceiling, and I made a specific investment to break through it. The SDA Bocconi IEMB produced a commercial language and a business framework I hadn't had. And that combination, deep product expertise plus financial and commercial fluency, is what made me a credible candidate for a role that requires both.

None of it was accidental. The "what next?" question that used to feel unanswerable turned out to be a design brief. I just had to treat it like one.

Mr. Anand Jha is VP of Product Development at Hero Cycles, one of the world's largest bicycle manufacturers. He is an alumnus of the International Executive Master in Business (IEMB) at SDA Bocconi Asia Center, Mumbai.

"I stopped being the best designer in the room and started running the business. The Executive Masters at SDA Bocconi made that possible, but only because I refused to treat it as anything other than a live business problem from day one." Mr. Anand Jha, VP of Product Development, Hero Cycles | IEMB, SDA Bocconi

This feature is part of GOALisB's Executive Career Design series, conversations with senior professionals who have made deliberate, high-stakes career transitions through targeted postgraduate education. GOALisB is ranked among the Top 10 MBA Admissions Consultants globally by Poets & Quants 2026.