Jan 2023 – Nov 2024 · 1 yr 10 mos · Boston, Massachusetts, United States · Remote

• Product Lead for Chegg's AI Homework Help product, increasing subscriber engagement by 40%
• Spearheaded the 0 to 1 launch of Chegg's AI-powered Homework Help product, leading a 50+ person cross-functional team of data scientists, engineers, learning experience designers, and user researchers
• Collaborated with vendors like Scale.ai and Galileo to establish Chegg's AI tooling and content quality standards
• Introduced Structured Answers, substantially improving search engine CTR, expert quality, and paving the way for Chegg's AI integration
• Product lead on Chegg Study products with a quarterly revenue of $205MM, focusing on engagement, quality, and user satisfaction. Led rapid experimentation that resulted in 2.3MM additional questions in student engagement in 2023
• Co-founded and chaired Chegg's Employee Resource Group for remote and hybrid employees - VirtualERG

May 2021 – Dec 2022 · 1 yr 7 mos · Boston, Massachusetts, United States · Remote

Jan 2019 – Jul 2020 · 1 yr 6 mos · Chennai Area, India

• Built STEP's Product Management vertical and team from 0 to 1.
• Tested and launched a self-serve tool (STEP Coach) for students to set up a coaching session on STEP which increased B2C sales and dramatically increased completion rates among B2B users.
• Led multiple cross-functionally collaborative projects. With Marketing to develop the go-to-market (GTM) strategy, including pricing and packaging of STEP Coach; With Content to pivot into Live help from creating more content; With sales team to consistently learn from user research run by the Product development team.
• With one ML engineer built STEP’s first AI based Practice Chatbot on Google’s Tensorflow within a couple of sprints which would assess the customer’s reading, speaking, writing and listening skills.
• Played the interim CTO and rolled out several processes to bridge the gap between Product and engineering to create a unified roadmap.
• Created processes for the team to drive the product life-cycle of all digital products from identifying requirements, development, launching, growing adoption, user feedback collection and measuring learning impact.
• Conducted primary and secondary research to identify customer needs and market gaps. Coached Design team to run these sessions.

May 2018 – Jun 2019 · 1 yr 1 mo · Bengaluru Area, India · Hybrid

• Worked with a team of 4 to set up a rubric select quality startups for edLABS, an accelerator my GMC and a process to continue building a pipeline of startups to groom.
• Set up a User Research Lab that supports entrepreneurs building educational products and services that was either online, offline or blended. This novel lab let the entrepreneurs test out their hypotheses via User testing, Interviews, and other such User research methods to have research-backed results to pitch while giving back to the educator community. The idea was to help build more tools for the EdTech community in India to build evidence-based products.
• Mentored EdTech startup services and products that were selected as part of edLABS

Nov 2013 – Jan 2019 · 5 yrs 2 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

• As the CEO-founder at YoungCurent, I set the vision and direction for the Product.
Built a team consiting of a CMO, engineers, designer, data scientist and editorial consultants who were spread across the globe. YoungCurrent’s unique publishing model made it possible for us to release 5-6 articles per each reading level every day with an editorial team of 1.
• Launched a Spanish version that was set up as an experimental version to support both Spanish reading as well as bilinguals(ES and EN).
• A few achievements: YoungCurrent was incubated as part of Generation 10 of StartUp Chile in Santiago, Chile
• YoungCurrent was selected to be a part of Google Launchpad and was incubated by 10k Startups of NASSCOM.

Jul 2012 – Jul 2013 · 1 yr · Bengaluru Area, India

• Set the product roadmap for the EdTech product. Brought the missing piece of pedagogical perspective in a predominantly tech-first Education company. Worked closely with engineering, design, content and the management groups in order to get buy in for product prioritizations that were student-first.
• Designed, built and maintained Product features and Processes based on user data
• Developed long-term product road-maps in working with key internal stakeholders
• Shifted with ease between tactical and strategic initiatives to ensure quality output from team members.
• Also, managed a team Program Managers that executed the VidyaNext after-school program for both for-profit and non-profit wings where-in we continuously measured the outcomes and formed our pedagogies based entirely on data. Mentored a team on running observational studies, Trial/Experiment design, Data collection (Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed methods). Made the interim Director of Product and was absorbed into the board and the Thought Leadership group.

Apr 2012 – Jun 2012 · 2 mos · Bangalore, India

• Product Owner of VidWiki. Went from Identify to Launch to Iterate on an intensive timeline. Process included:
• Explored the styles of video presentations in Online Learning to understand the optimal style of presentation both for learning and revising.(Bloom's Taxonomy)
• Outlined hypotheses and designed the research environment on Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Wrote the specs and designed the wire-frames and - Worked with an engineer to build VidWiki.
• Went from hypotheses to V1 launch of VidWiki - a tool that allowed users to edit/overwrite video content, thereby enhancing the learning experience as well as automated translation across languages.
• Published research findings at ACM SIGCHI

Feb 2011 – Jun 2011 · 4 mos · Cambridge, MA

• Worked alongside Media Labs’ Doctoral candidates in the Scratch Team [Lifelong Kindergarten Group} to explore the role of Computational Thinking in Creating.
• Designed and conducted Interviews with young Scratch users as well as their parents.
• Based on user data categorised the various personas that make the Scratch community
• Coded the interviews to understand concepts, practices, and perspectives that young people develop through computational design activities.

Sep 2010 – May 2011 · 8 mos · Cambridge, MA

• Created structure/resources for the future management of digital assets.
• Developed and modified e-lectures, videos, and other multimedia to suit the changing needs of the students.
• Used the "Teaching for Understanding" framework to build the curriculum for the student of Ed.M., Arts in Education program to learn how to make career choices.

Feb 2009 – Jul 2010 · 1 yr 5 mos

• Set up the Best Practices team at Google India and hired for the team internally. Worked with Senior Management across Indian offices in applying Six Sigma methodologies to identify and correct the inefficiencies.
• Certified with Green Belt in Six Sigma. Won a 'Gold Award,' nominated by the Director of Online Sales for creating a global Intranet for the Sales team to communicate best practices and break silos across teams.

Oct 2006 – Mar 2007 · 5 mos

• Trained on the backend of AdWords and obtained technical expertise
• on the various advanced features of the product. Helped CSRs troubleshoot complex customer issues.

Apr 2005 – Jan 2007 · 1 yr 9 mos

• Policy Specialist:
• As a policy specialist I was expected to mentor teams and individuals on the finer elements of AdWords policies. The role required me to have an understanding of the underlying principles of Google as a company. This knowledge helped me internalize the logic behind AdWords policies and helped me in applying them better.
• This role also triggered the interest to find out about various internet laws and how they differ across the globe depending on their cultural, regional and political contexts. This exposure would later help me understand the regional differences in the user-generated content on YouTube.
• Sales Technical Operations Specialist:
• As I grew more and more interested in the AdWords product and its technicalities, I got absorbed into the technical operations team of AdWords whose integral requirement was an end-to-end understanding of the product. As part of ramp-up for the role I was introduced to the back-end and to the intricacies of trouble-shooting issues with the product.
• Other responsibilities
• Was a founding team member on the AdWords Ideas Council.
• Served as an interviewer for Google to hire smart, highly capable and talented work-force.
• Took on various other initiatives to bring teams members in getting to know each other better.

Feb 2007 – Jan 2009 · 1 yr 11 mos

• Product Specialist:
• My responsibilities included helping support teams understand complex product features to be able to better help users via email and over forums.
• I had the opportunity to work closely with the Product management team of YouTube San Bruno and understand the technicalities involved in product planning and wrote PRDs based on data collected via customer and user support channels.
• Editorial Team:
• As the Editor for the YouTube India blog I was to identify the trends in Indian users on YouTube and blog about them with supporting videos. The role required for me to engage and start a conversation with the Indian users of YouTube through the blog.
• Online Help Specialist :
• My responsibilities included providing the users with a better Help Center experience by making it more interactive, easy to browse and to design it for user-to-user help. These initiatives needed understanding of HTML, Javascript and photo editing softwares such as Photoshop and SnagIt which I mastered on my own with minimum formal training.
• Other Projects handled:
• Following are the projects/activities I took care of outside of my responsibilities mentioned above:
• Global Intranet page for YouTube to get the communication between various global teams such as Dublin, San Bruno, Tokyo, Mexico and Argentina going.
• Initiated and helped automate YouTube's email support.
• Served as YouTube India's spokesperson on the advertising opportunities available to Indian advertising agencies
• Set up the YouTube channel for the Government of India to promote their tourism department 'Incredible India.' YouTube.com/india

Jan 2003 – Jan 2005 · 2 yrs

• Wrote and produced shows at Yuvavani - a youth program on All India Radio.