Paahul Sikand
Product at Zapier. Toronto.
I’m Paahul. Immigrant, new dad, product manager. Navigating all three.
My work sits at the intersection of infra, monetization, and the broader question of where technology is going. Right now that’s Zapier’s Enterprise zone — how large organizations bring automation into their stack as a real operational layer, not a one-off experiment. Before this, Staff PM at Rokt and mParticle on commerce and monetization data systems.
A decade in tech across 10+ cities, in companies small and big. Engineer first, then a stretch in sales, eventually product. Each vantage changes how you read a problem.
I read more than I act. I try to make sense of the world and often arrive at the conclusion that there isn’t much sense to be made, and keep going anyway. Observing patterns across companies, industries, and people is the thing about this work I find most fulfilling, and probably the thing I’d be doing either way.
Systems thinker, in the sense that I’d rather understand why something keeps breaking than fix it for the third time. Makes me slow when I should be fast, occasionally. Mostly worth it.
Now
Working on the Enterprise zone at Zapier. Most of my attention this quarter is on [TODO: the specific bet you’re focused on]. Figuring out the new-dad rhythm; sleep is a variable I used to take for granted. Just got comfortable in the terminal with Claude Code and cmux, which has changed how I prototype: idea to working surface in an afternoon, no brief required. Shipped tripsmith over a weekend. Reading [TODO: book], trying to make sense of where AI is going in the next five years.
Updated 2026-05-26.
How I work
A few things new collaborators usually want to know. I look for the thing underneath the thing — most requests that arrive as “we need feature X” are really questions about a system that isn’t quite working. I’m slow at the start of a project and fast at the end; if we’re three weeks in and I’m still asking “why” instead of “what,” trust the process.
I write decisions down. If we made one in a meeting or in DMs, expect a short writeup after, not to bureaucratize it but so we don’t re-litigate it next week. I default to async; a Slack message with detail beats a 15-minute meeting almost every time. The exception is decisions under disagreement, which are worth a real conversation.
Tell me when I’m wrong. I’d rather adjust than be polite about it.
Things I’ve made
Cadence (2026)— a personal speaking coach. Tap to record a meeting or practice session; the app transcribes in the background and surfaces patterns in your own voice — filler words, unclear sentences, the moments you trail off. Every weekday morning I get a short email with one specific thing to work on. English is my second language; I wanted objective data on whether I’m improving, not feelings. Built on different primitives than my text-in/text-out projects: audio, background pipelines, vector search, a daily cron. Code on GitHub.
tripsmith (2026)— a personal travel planner. You give it a profile of how you like to travel; it returns a tailored plan with flights, stays, day-by-day, and a packing list. Built over a weekend to learn full-stack Next.js and Claude’s structured-output API. Code on GitHub.
Faking News (2008)— a satirical news blog I co-founded in college in India. Grew from a dorm-room experiment into something a lot of people read. Most of the lessons I still use about voice, distribution, and shipping under your own name came from that.
Personal
Travel is the thing I plan hardest in my own life. The trip I keep recommending is [TODO: destination]. I cook [TODO: cuisine]more than anything else, and the Toronto place I’d send anyone to is [TODO: place]. Currently turning over in my head: [TODO: a topic or question].