Engineer who did an AGMP (IIMA) — worth it?
A year at IIM Ahmedabad's AGMP changed less about what I build and more about how I think. Here's the honest answer.
The question every engineer asks
For most of my career I was an individual contributor — give me a problem, I'll ship the solution. Engineers are trained to optimize the thing in front of them. So when I joined the Accelerated General Management Programme (AGMP) at IIM Ahmedabad, the 2024–2025 batch, the real question wasn't "will this teach me to code better?" It was "will it teach me to think differently?"
It did. And not in the ways I expected.
From IC to management thinking
The biggest shift was learning to zoom out. As an IC, success is local: the feature works, the bug is fixed, the system is fast. Management thinking is about the system around the system — why this problem, for whom, at what cost, with what trade-off against three other things you could have done instead.
IIMA's case method drills this in relentlessly. You don't get clean specs; you get messy situations with missing data and conflicting incentives, and you have to decide anyway. Marketing, finance, operations, strategy, organizational behavior — each case forced me out of the engineer's instinct to optimize one variable and into weighing the whole board. That muscle is exactly what running a company demands.
The network and the connections
The classroom teaches frameworks. The people teach perspective. My cohort was full of operators, founders, and leaders from industries I'd never have crossed paths with as an engineer — manufacturing, finance, healthcare, consumer brands. Every discussion was a free education in how a different world actually works.
That network outlasts the course. The connections I made are people I still call when I'm stuck on something outside my own domain — pricing, hiring, go-to-market, fundraising. For a founder, that on-call brain trust might be the single most valuable thing IIMA hands you.
The memories
And honestly — it was a great year. Late nights arguing over a case, the rhythm of campus, the friendships formed under pressure. The IIMA experience isn't only intellectual; it's the memories of going through something demanding alongside a group of sharp, ambitious people. Those stay with you long after the frameworks blur.
So — worth it?
For an engineer who wants to keep writing code forever, maybe not. For an engineer who wants to build and run things — to move from contributing to a product to owning a business — it was worth every bit. AGMP gave me the language of management, the network to lean on, and the habit of thinking in trade-offs instead of tickets.
I went in an individual contributor. I came out thinking like someone responsible for the whole thing. That's exactly what I needed to build Pidiga.