Akarsh Prabhu

About Akarsh Prabhu

Daylight PM, Night-time Debugger. VMs are safe under my watch.” I’m a Product Manager at Microsoft, currently driving growth for Azure Backup for VMs, a $1.4B product within Azure’s $1.8B BCDR business. My focus is on increasing product attach, expanding platform support, and improving customer outcomes through a mix of strategic prioritization, roadmap execution, and experience design.Over the years, I’ve led initiatives across AIOps, cloud observability, and 0→1 product development - including scaling Azure Monitor for SAP from preview to GA and launching a telemetry-based SLI/SLO-driven outage detection system. I thrive on solving hard customer problems, navigating ambiguity, and working across engineering, design, and field teams to deliver meaningful impact.Whether it’s defining capabilities like Cross-subscription backup, improving RPO/RTO for mission-critical workloads, or rethinking the customer experience at scale - I’m driven by the challenge of turning insight into action and systems into products.Outside work, I mentor aspiring PMs, contribute to internal innovation forums, and find joy in travel (for the food), Formula 1 (go Hamilton), and cricket (bleed yellow, obviously 🟡). Open to opportunities that challenge me to drive product vision, 0→1 innovation, and customer-centric growth at scale. PM Mentorship & Testimonials: topmate.io/akarshprabhu#testimonials a••••••@gmail.com

Experience

1. Product Manager 2

   Microsoft

   Jun 2025 — Present · Hyderabad, IN

   Product Manager for Azure Backup for Virtual Machines, a $1.4B ARR product serving 150K+ customers, owning growth and attach as the primary KPI to drive revenue and long-term platform adoption.• Own the end-to-end growth charter for Azure VM Backup, focused on improving VM attach across existing customers and new market segments, with direct accountability for revenue impact and customer retention.• Enabled backup support for Confidential VMs and Trusted Launch VMs, playing a core role in preview and GA rollouts to support key Azure platform launches and sustain 18% YoY backup growth aligned with VM usage.• Driving Linux VM backup attach through customer segmentation, cohort-based analysis, GTM refinement, and definition of long-term product bets to close adoption gaps.• Expanded backup adoption across modern compute and storage SKUs (Preview v2, Ultra Disk, Cross-Zone Restore, Cross-Subscription Backup, CRR), achieving >10% attach within 6 months of GA via tight NPI onboarding and field enablement.• Defining Azure’s default VM resiliency strategy by collaborating across compute, storage, and BCDR teams to introduce a new backup tier, with a long-term goal of 100% persistent VMs protected by default.• Actively engage top enterprise customers (~$15M ARR), Azure MVPs, PMMs, CSS, and field teams; represent the product at Ignite and customer forums to shape roadmap, messaging, and adoption, including feature/SKU support and OS deprecation planning.

Education

• Poornaprajna College, Udupi - 576102

  Statistics

  2011 — 2013

• Sri Jayachamarajendra College Of Engineering

  Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Computer Science

  2013 — 2017

Skills

• Machine Learning
• Reactjs
• .net Framework
• C#
• Presentation Skills
• C
• Java
• Scala
• C++
• Algorithm Design
• Data Analytics
• Asp.net Mvc
• Sql
• Linux
• Data Structures
• .net Core
• R