Mar 2024 – Dec 2024 · 9 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• Worked to solve 3 large complex problems — (1) India out remittances at the speed of UPI (2) Indians investing and holding international currencies (3) Indians investing in alternative asset classes via a fund of funds setup.

Jul 2021 – Mar 2024 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

• Led an amazing team of 34 product managers, designers & researchers. Product portfolio included BNPL, Checkout finance (EMI), Credit Cards, Credit on UPI, Personal Loans upto 10L, SMB loans , Lending as a Service (LAAS) driven by high performance API stack, Insurance (motor & loan protection)

Jun 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 10 mos

• I help startups think through Growth & product strategies. Help with hiring for key positions & fund raising via syndicates Current investments in --> Siply (Micro savings for bharat), KarmaLifeAI (Credit for gig workers), Falcon (Credit card & banking stack), GrowthX (Community based learning for Growth leaders), Vegapay (Credit card stack), Betterhalf (Matchmaking, Astrology, Weddings) and others..

Apr 2020 – Jul 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka

• Building India's biggest 'Buy now - Pay later' product. Target -- enabling more Indians with easy to understand and easy to use credit products than all the banks combined. Launched several innovative products in 2020 & saw a 5x growth in scale & revenue. Some of the 1st in market products we built were -- Credit on UPI, Converting UPI transactions to EMIs, Flexible repayments for small ticket sizes & recently a fully deep integration with merchants with a Grey labelled credit product (dunzo paylater)

May 2018 – Apr 2020 · 1 yr 11 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India · On-site

• Head of product & design team on the consumer side of the platform at Dunzo. Joined when the company was doing 40k orders/month & helped grow it to over 2million orders/month by revamping the entire B2C and merchant platform & user flows in less than a year.
• Had several firsts! Built out the entire marketplace infra & bought in the "merchant" as the 3rd part of the ecosystem to unlock convenience for users and profitability for Dunzo. Built a full fledged cataloging system covering categories as diverse as food, grocery, medicines, pet supplies, speciality brands. Built search experience from grounds up including a multi layered relevance & ranking system. Built out the offers tech stack which fire-powered growth engines. Built out scalable analytics, fraud, demand shaping, segmentation systems which are used from personalization to pricing to partner availability.
• More than anything else i am proud of helping hire and groom a team of 15 Product managers + Product designers at Dunzo. The learnings from building products & experiences which have unlocked hockey stick growth for the company & which have lead to dunzo becoming the most loved consumer services brand in top indian cities; have been solid gold!!

Sep 2017 – Apr 2018 · 7 mos

• My hypothesis with College Connect was that youth in colleges derive identity from being in groups & largely do so under peer pressure. People find it hard to find like-minded others who share similar likes, dislikes & passions. Sometimes speaking about these passions can be ridiculed in a slightly closed society like India.
• College Connect would become the ultimate destination to find your soulmates inside a digital reconstruction of the College World inside an app. The set of features included Notes & assignment sharing, Talent shows, Public & private groups, Disappering messages, Peer to peer mobile sache upgrades, Large file transfers & Multi player LAN games over wifi for those boring classes.
• This pilot of this project was a big sucess which lead to funding of an entire dedicated POD for a year. At a certain point though changes in top level company startegy lead to unplanned shuttering of this initiative.

Feb 2017 – Apr 2018 · 1 yr 2 mos

• My role as the lead for the "expressions" team was - to imagine how human communication (verbal/ non-verbal) in the real world can be transferred to a digital platform & amplified with the aid of superior user experience. Amongst the various projects i have built were -- India specific stickers (festivals, languages), Animated stickers, GIFs, Immersive animations, Text to stickers, etc. In addition I also setup the monetization strategy by enabling Cartoon & Game IP owners, Consumer durables companies and Bollywood Movies to reach out to their users creatively through stickers & engage them to improve top of mind recall for their brands

Aug 2016 – Feb 2017 · 6 mos

• Re-designed the onboarding experience for Hike as part of the 5.0 overhaul which lead to faster social interaction & doubled retention for new users. Built unique India specific experiences like Mother's day sharable e-card which became viral and got tremendous feedback from users

Apr 2016 – Aug 2016 · 4 mos

• Built social game playing features like game challenges, leaderboards within the chatting interface & within games on Hike which improved organic game discovery and improved the company's social engagement metric

Aug 2015 – Mar 2016 · 7 mos

• PM#4 in the elite mobile products incubations team in MS India. My job was to identify how productivity can be improved for the over 60million SMBs in India who don't find value in the MS office suite of products. Conducted secondary & primary market research & identified 3 areas --everyday team communication & management, superior customer service, marketing collaterals creation for targeting. These 3 areas were taken from concept to launch in under 8 months. Android Apps namely Kaizala, Connections, Sprightly were built under the Microsoft Garage Incubations banner
• I moved into a product marketing role owning GTM strategy for the suite of products in this business line. Some of the activities included marketing these products at startup showcase events in different cities in India, planning media tie ups & PR for launch both in India&WW, tieing up with OEMs for pre-install deals & quarterbacking the whole launch to growth phase of these products.

Aug 2014 – Aug 2015 · 1 yr

• I migrated the "Publisher Platform" product & team from Seattle to Hyd office. Improved the platform by designing a complete self-serve onboarding system which led to the publisher base expanding from 700 to 2K in year. Built reporting dashboards for Business Dev & Market PMs in each of the 53 geographies across the world to be able to make strategic calls on contracts, sales funnels and processes.
• In this year I also took up a much larger role as the Program Head for the publisher on-boarding team. I hired & mentored a team of 25 executives in India. This team managed relationships with new publishers, negotiated content deals and provided 24*7 technical support

Dec 2013 – Aug 2015 · 1 yr 8 mos

• I joined as a PM in the content intelligence team at MSN (http://www.msn.com). The most exciting work that i got to do early in my PM career was with machine learning problem statements such as building content recommendations & ADs recommendations system by understanding the semantic context of content on MSN and matching it with usage behaviors.
• Built systems using entity extraction ML for personalised recommendations of MSN services in widgets across MSN web & apps. Built Bing search ads integration & personalisation on article pages recieving over 600K daily hits. Designed features for UGC such as comments, likes, shares and rewards. Built rule driven comment moderation systems which were used by our inhouse trust & safety teams. Built products & setup processes to deliver content for in-app experiences on Xbox (FIFA app) & MSN Sports App (Player pano)

Jun 2013 – Dec 2013 · 6 mos · Hyderabad Area, India

• Had a brief stint at Deloitte.Joined as part of the 1st batch of functional consultants at Deloitte Digital. Was responsible for gathering client requirements, building solution proposals, up-selling various consulting services and project managing the weekly deliverables for key clients. I also volunteered with creating an ecommerce crash course for new joinees which gave them in-depth understanding of business, product and design fundamentals in this space. Over the 6 months in this role, I was reminded how much I loved designing innovative products and decided to explore product management as a full time profession.

Jan 2011 – Mar 2012 · 1 yr 2 mos · Mumbai Area, India

• Vectorz Interactive was a boutique design studio in Mumbai which specialized in building Telecom Expense Management ERP software solutions. I was the account & product manager for one of our biggest clients. Did everything from product strategy planning with CEOs to feature design and project management for our flagship product. Tried growing this business by setting up a US based sales team but faced monetary issues and unfortunately had to exit. Nonetheless an amazing learning journey & my first full fledged product management experience.

Nov 2009 – Dec 2010 · 1 yr 1 mo · Pune Area, India

• Ek Titli was a Pune based startup assisting farm & home owners with design and setup of landscaped organic gardens. We came up with a unique service called “Earth Gardens” where people were taught and assisted to grow their own vegetables in their balconies or terraces. We also organised eco-consulting workshops & CSR events at leading IT companies in Mumbai, Pune & Bangalore.
• As a part of building awareness and experimenting with a line of business through niche content I launched an eco-lifestyle e-zine. We had a monthly readership base of 80k uniques. I led a team of 75+ writers & editors globally located (Bangalore, Pune, Seattle, Hong-Kong, Delaware, Delhi) and contributing to an eclectic global point of view of eco-sensitive living.

Jul 2006 – Oct 2009 · 3 yrs 3 mos · Mumbai Area, India

• I started off contibuting in building a data syndication engine for Yahoo Movies & AOL. The most interesting bit for me was to figure out how to build features to automate data quality checks so that manual workforce (& eventually costs) could be reduced for the company. Over a period of 2 years the improvements that I made saved the client $200k in un-necessary data storage, transportation and personnel costs
• Next, I got a chance to build a video processing engine which automated extraction of "credits" at the start and end of feature films. This product enabled us to rapidly scale data collection & to run this service on the cloud thereby reducing logistics
• Played a key role in the prototypes team for the pre-sales unit of the company. This opened up opportunities to experiment with tech stacks as diverse as PHP, Javascript, HTML, Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight, ASP.NET, MS Linq. Insane fun and great learning!