May 2024 – Nov 2024 · 6 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India · Hybrid

• Novo caters to 280K+ SMB customers in US Business Banking and this role is to build a AI led customer
• experience the scale the quality of ~15-18K customer conversations per month. Invested in understanding the US payment rails and global payments for this role.
• ∗ Horizontal pod with impact on CS & Banking Operations team(96+), collaborating with
• compliance, fraud & risk, product marketing, GTM, while working with CX pod(team of 8) for product delivery.
• ∗ Zero to one pod - first part of that was creating high fidelity instrumentation(Customer data,
• multichannel product feature usage data, frontend and backend) to identify what problem to solve. As a part of this, I did deep audits on Case Management system, CCaaS routing, customer lifecycle management per contact, fraud/risk/otp/ high friction and escalation analysis. Built CX first lens to looking at Product COGS, our cost to serve - breaking complex problems into contained simplicity and composable pieces.
• ∗ Built systems and process for efficiently aligning XFN stakeholders, decisioning briefs, incl. testing for all 4 kinds of risks. Designing and executing painted door experiments to test for value risk, ahead of build phase to test usability form factor.
• ∗ Products launched a) In-App CX self serve flows for business updates saving customers 1368+ days MoM as a part of deflection stack b) launched Multi channel CSAT system to deeply listen to voice of customer, reducing the time to action of leading indicators of DSAT and Churn, doubling response rate to 2x c) In-App Identity management & verification for Credit card launch d) Predictive escalation model(BERT transformers) to find leading indicators based on CX attributes and arrest MoM churn.
• ∗ In flight product work - 33% deflection potential leading to $1.09Mn in annual savings - AI led in-app CX (The Hub - vector search, advanced chatGPT prompt engineering and dynamic in-app search for customer support), Autonomous deflection stack and Screen Zero experience.

May 2023 – Apr 2024 · 11 mos · Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

• Blink Health is a US health-tech startup. The core product I work on is a Pharmacy Management System(PMS), which is a vertical product that powers the pharmacy operations - right from script(Rx) ingestion, order/state & refill management, script transfers, dispensing to patient fulfilment.
• Moved on to pursue this 10x opportunity
• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7192484145602650112/

Jun 2022 – Jan 2023 · 7 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• Supermind's core vision was to be the Bloomberg for Crypto and help crypto analysts take prudent, confident bets on digital assets in half the time.
• Our Core product was Search on top of Crypto socials - Telegram, Twitter & Discord. We developed
• the tech to scrape, index, enrich(with advanced data science techniques, Zero shot classifiers, NLP & Social graphs) & serve content from communities. Developed the enterprise offering on core product, with multiple iterations & working closely with prospective customers for product discovery
• Raised ∼ $600K in a bear market as a solo female founder. While still at ∼ 88% unused capital - decided to do a hard reset as the business case was flawed. It is the bravest thing I have done, personally. Taught me about owning up with transparency, risk taking, power of conviction & data to guide high quality decisions. Covered that rewarding journey here
• https://ektagrover.substack.com/p/supermind-the-bitter-taste-of-web3s
• The story of raising as a solo female founder in a bearish market and what it taught me about self discovery
• https://ektagrover.substack.com/p/raising-in-winters-uterus-is-a-feature
• Led a young team of 12 across Product, User centricity, Core engineering, Data science, Product Design, Marketing & Content. Released multiple iterations of beta product, making changes as per market feedback. Strong understanding of Blockchain tech stack, learnt from & met incredibly smart people. Most importantly learnt the nature of creative disruption, how people hire products to solve problems
• Live Product https://app.getsupermind.com/
• Website https://getsupermind.com/
• Live video of the 1st community we did and describes the vision.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKrR-rNdzXg

Nov 2021 – Jun 2022 · 7 mos

• Lead a team of 7 - PPM, SPA, APM’s & interns to support Horizontals tracks. Drove yearly & quarterly
• roadmaps, sprint planning, user interviews(internal), needs assessment, staffing needs, growing people & multiple external POC executions. Covered my work at DevCon 2022 here & building for Bharat, here
• https://ektagrover.substack.com/p/collected-talks
• ∗ Lead horizontal initiatives impacting the productivity of ∼ 100 people Product Org. At Sharechat scale we had 444K BQ tables(complicated data warehouse, tooling, jobs spanning 5+ hours, complex jobs mixed together with pipelines, queues, adhoc & orphaned jobs, complex onboarding, with data lineage & catalogue discovery problems.
• ∗ Drove POC’s & implementation : Atlan for data cataloging, E6X for efficient query engine and Eppo for A/B testing along with benchmarking the products in its resp. categories to drive cost & operational efficiency
• ∗ Feed personalization : worked on improving multiple ML algorithms to impact retention and time spent
• towards DAU & MAU goals - Interest selection(Onboarding experience, together with UX design), Real time P13n, ablative experiments, multiple enhancements & lean POC’s on - Multilingual feed, Day Zero feed/Feed exploration, logging infrastructure enhance Ranker debuggabilty
• ∗ Significantly Improved Feed visualiser(internal tool) to capture three use cases : Debugging feed of any given user, multilingual feed and Day Zero feed(new users). This was to improve the quality of product hypothesis, user centric thinking and find unanticipated issues due to other concurrent experiments across different product feeds (News, Tagfeed, Profile, UX & consumer experience experiments)
• ∗ Drove Dwell time instrumentation as the 10x bet as our feed algorithms had ceased to personalize for image assets based on scarcity of signals(Like, share, Download)

Jun 2021 – Jun 2022 · 1 yr

Apr 2020 – May 2021 · 1 yr 1 mo · Bengaluru, Karnataka

• Would give an arm & a limb to relive this experience, again !!
• Built a 11 person strong remote first team. Learnt that hiring in a startup is a lot is more different without a brand's weight & pull behind it - and then just created a beautiful employee growth experience to keep getting the best we could afford.
• In this process, each of our people became our brand ambassadors
• https://www.shunya.company/blog/my-experience-android-engineer-internship-in-shunya
• Lead product - Intelligent Learning management system. Tech stack - Android, Python, AWS, observability & debugging tools
• Financial cash flow planning, raising pre-seed, hiring, Marketing, Revenue Ops, Customer onboarding & pilots, Legal, Product & Engineering, Prospecting, on-ground Sales & Expo planning(Chennai, March 2021)
• Learnt the art of prospecting and cold calling. Built a strong network of over 200+ school directors in this process, and learnt how & where to look for data. Learnt to slow down - and the art of managing relationships.
• 5 pilots, 106+ inbound leads from customers for second product suite (subjective autograding). Featured in HolonIQ top 100 EdTech in India & SEA. GSV Cup Elite 200 EdTech Startups. Learnt that awards do not matter. PMF speaks the loudest.
• Product life cycle management - iterative customer feedback from pilots - Multiple versions of fully functional product live on Android Playstore
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=shunya.classroom.learning
• Built a strong N/W of Entrepreneurs in this process, Sr. mentors & angels(Enterprise & Edtech). I feel extremely rich because of these experiences & perspectives.

Feb 2019 – Apr 2020 · 1 yr 2 mos

• This was the 3rd deliberate professional disruption I took, because combining problem solving ambiguous and open ended asks - excites me. In that you have the full canvas. In part, because of this, I am so much more rounded and wholes as a professional.
• I worked on initiatives that impact the company over long horizons of time, like setting up China infrastructure(multiple year cash flow, operability, reversibility as the decision vectors ) differently than rest of the world ; orchestrating a FTC(Federal Trade Commission) compliance audit; building, aligning and executing Annual operating plans; understanding the mechanics of revenue leakage - that directly impact our profitability. Tops - the operations across Tech, Product, Business and all facets of communication and managing external stakeholders.
• In Jan 2020 - I also led the company wide global event "InMobi Catalyst" (think, SAP TechEd) .
• Together with a diverse team I recruited - I co-created all aspects of visual design, condensing difficult concepts in a cohesive narrative for a diverse(experience, age, functions & geo) audience, Branding, everything that preceded leading upto the on day content(Pre-buzz) and overall on-day experience.
• It was the best Catalyst that was EVER delivered at InMobi, and together, we all picked up new skills we weren’t aware we were latent in us. Bigger, Better, Bolder, Together.

Jan 2017 – Feb 2019 · 2 yrs 1 mo

• Worked on multiple nuanced Demand side algorithms at 8Bn+ scale of impressions. Self coached to pick up bigger pieces of tech design, Evaluation, building and productionizing at scale.
• Developed & deployed multiple machine learning models for RTB - bid pacing, burst campaigns, inventory pacing, explore vs. exploit etc.
• Improved existing A/B testing infra to support multivariate testing for conclusive experimentation & large scale rollouts impacting revenue
• Deep understanding of mobile ecosystem - DSP, SSP, Ad Networks, Publishers, Anti fraud, Event trackers, Ad Verification partners, Omnichannel attribution, OTT.
• Presented at Niti Aayug
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-more-inclusive-digital-india-our-role-ekta-grover/

Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 · 4 yrs

• Some companies invested in : Ark (Remote work, YC alum, US Market), Nojoto - (Story telling platform Vernacular space, India), Flo mobility (Autonomous driving tech, India) ,Kids wellness (Kinderpass), E6X(Big query & Infra space)
• Thesis & how I work -
• I put in small cheques in Products I understand & can contribute with an operator mindset. Have a bias towards Data Led businesses. If you need dumb money, there are better avenues where that is served with no questions asked. For me it's as much about investing in myself, being hooked into the ecosystem as much as it is about investing in building your mission. Shoot a Linkedin message with how I can help and we will speak over a weekend. I do intense groundwork as if it's my own, so expect that I will know as much about your industry, if we happen to chat. I also spend ~2 hours / week with the founders - shoots up around some strategic events(fundraising, long term roadmap planning/critique)
• Would like to anchor our 1st conversation around the following below. If you write your 1st note with this clarity, you already have my attention :)
• 1/ User problem that you are solving / current unmet needs
• 2/ How are you solving for it in 10X better manner than the current alternatives
• 3/ Any inputs on market validation of the problem - is it a vitamin or a pain killer ?
• 4/ Distribution plan - how will users discover your product & why will they continue to use it and share it to other people + traction if any
• 5/ Where can I help , besides angel investing (There has to be something in it for me, besides the lame money, which I write off the moment I "Invest" in you) - think hard about this.
• About one of these entrepreneur's impressions of the value I have added to our working relationship
• https://bit.ly/3OtPPkT

Sep 2016 – Jan 2017 · 4 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

• BloomReach accelerates the path to purchase for the world largest retail & non-retail Businesses - from acquisition through the onsite experience.
• In this role, my focus was on influencing proprietary Search ranking signals in core product, commoditizing analysis and shaping decisions that impact bottomline A/B tests lift - the role being a cross of Data Engineer, Data Scientist and Product design, working with cross-functional teams in Search Quality, Personalization, Customer Success, Integration across Bangalore & MTV office.
• Influencing proprietary Search ranking signals in core e-commerce search, commoditizing analysis and shaping decisions that impact bottom line Business metrics for some of the largest retail merchants
• Shaped product readiness for the largest US general merchandizer $24B company for their B2C & B2B channels
• Owning Customer success from product perspective & driving analysis that shaped multiple product features, directly impacting on going value conversations with Merchants
• Developed inhouse frameworks for hypothesis testing of proprietary signals, helping Engg team iterate independently with confidence on bottomline metrics & reducing the turn around time by ∼3x
• Technology Stack : Solr/Solrcloud, Cassandra, Redshift, AWS stack, Python, Tableau, Wireframing (Balsamic)
• Core competencies : Building data products & removing the product design blind spots through data

Oct 2014 – Aug 2016 · 1 yr 10 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

Feb 2014 – Sep 2014 · 7 mos · Bangalore

• Near.co is a location based Mobile marketing company, that helps advertisers reach& target users on mobile, by fetching, analyzing & pricing your comprehensive digital footprint, all in 6 milliseconds, or less.
• My role primarily is around designing data products for Near's real time bidding system(RTB), doing so at Scale & increase the bottom line(Performance) for the clients across Asia-Pacific.
• Built an App ranking System from scratch - the system basically updates the snapshot across multiple dimensions for each of the unique app ids in the system every hour, to deliver a self aligning machine learning system at scale. Delivered incremental lift upwards of 188%
• Dynamic bidding system to price the quality of inventory - right time, right place, right Inventory - Delivered incremental lift upwards of 639% . Also developed an end-to-end information system to extend the metadata for Mobile handsets from the "user-agent" - which is a primary signal for engagement behaviour
• In-app Behaviour & Hyper targeting within location based mobile apps - Algorithmically determining the best time to intervene across each app, to increase the probability of click post an impression is delivered on the mobile application
• Profiling Power users at scale - building an engagement profile data for repeat users based on Intensity, frequency & recency and user-weights
• Built a lean A/B testing, Simulation & Reporting framework from scratch and integrated it with the platform's API's from the bidder - enabling the attribution of new models in as little as 1 minute
• Hiring - Building a rockstar team by putting together a collaborative Problem solving framework I learnt from Daniel Turkelang (Linkedin) was also profiled for our strategy http://linkd.in/UUuDIU
• Technology Stack: Hadoop/Hive, Spark, MongoDb, Redis,PySpark & Python

Nov 2012 – Nov 2012 · 0 mo · New York City, United States

• Selected as a delegate to participate in the conference series "Charting the Course: Navigating the 21st Century Economy".
• Also won the travel grant (fully sponsored by Scorpio Tankers Inc. ) to NY city on the basis of my application and work on Alternative Business Models .

Oct 2012 – Feb 2014 · 1 yr 4 mos · Bangalore

• Worked across the life cycle of 4 different Businesses(Broadband & Telecommunication service providers, Retail) to predict and monetize the intent of the consumers on the web
• Internal project around HR attrition modelling to feed in as inputs for recruitment for [24]7 operations employees
• Developed an Opportunity Sizing framework(R & Excel) to support CxO level decisioning and bridge pre-sales analysis to support the [24]7 Operations Business
• Developed an end-to-end framework for real time aggregation, decisioning & visualization for [24]7's innovation event(IDEON, 2013)- Selenium for simulating crawls and generating synthetic data, Python for aggregation, modelling & visualization
• Code at : https://github.com/ekta1007/Generating-synthetic-weblogs-with-Selenium
• https://github.com/ekta1007/Performance-aggregation-platform---learning-in-near-real-time

Aug 2012 – Aug 2012 · 0 mo · Taipei, Taiwan

• Delegate at the HPAIR 2012 Asia Conference at Taipei . Panel : The Intersection of Business, Finance, and Government in Asian Economies

Jun 2012 – Mar 2013 · 9 mos · Cologne, Germany

• Selected as one of the 34 International Dialogue Ambassadors for the 16th World Business Dialogue. Representing Germany for the 16th Dialogue.
• Responsible for recruitment and evangelizing the Dialogue as a concept and building brand.

Mar 2012 – Mar 2012 · 0 mo · Cologne, Germany

• The "World Business Dialogue" is the world's largest student-run business convention. Here, Industry leaders from economy, science and politics enter a discussion about economically and socially relevant, future-oriented topics with 300 international students and just as many executives
• Presented an Investment pitch comparing various digital monetizing tools, presented to CEO, Deal United GmbH
• Presented Business plan to a Social media crisis management company - focus on restructuring the Business case, use of Social media listening tools for corporate crisis & brand management, presented to CEO Managerfragen.org

Jan 2012 – Jan 2023 · 11 yrs

• Over the past years, I have mentored a lot of people. At some point in my companies, I was mentoring ~11+ people at any given time. Over the years I have defined a framework that helps me access the value of my time to the person I am mentoring from the different outcomes it would get because I invested my time/talent/energy in them.
• 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟏 ++
• Growing people is my passion, but unfortunately because of my time constraints, I only invest in people I know through a warm connect(and strong endorsing) / people who I see will move to a very different orbit thorough my inputs - whose work I can gauge.
• If warm connect - we are sorted as you bring your social capital to the mix.
• If cold reaching, you will have to convince me on the 2nd one, through your work. As a function of this, I will send you a short problem statement - to gauge, where you are - and and in our 1st 1:1 Zoom conversation - you will present the thinking on this. This will help me understand where you are in terms of rigour and self motivation given the open nature of the risk that I may not choose to give you the time at all.
• > If we zing, I will mentor you using this problem statement, which will also grow you.
• > If we don't think of it like an case study interview - you will learn how strong levelheaded leaders think & evaluate people.
• I am NOT easy to work with and I expect a lot from people I have built. Incl. the narrative, user centricity and product sense. I also expect a lot of self discipline and the ability to push yourself when given these inputs and the amount of time I will be investing in you.
• 𝐈 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮,, and usually this reflect one of the active projects I am working on and where you could help (and grow in the process, with me). Let me know if you are keen and I will share with you. 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐞 𝐚 𝟏:𝟏 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞, 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐜𝐤.

Mar 2011 – Jun 2011 · 3 mos · Frankfurt, Germany

• Implemented the OECD tax codes for France & analyzed patterns in income and social security for French Households
• Analyzed marginal tax rates for macro trends across fertility rates and developed public policy recom- mendations for domestic consumer market growth

Sep 2010 – Aug 2012 · 1 yr 11 mos · Frankfurt, Germany

• Received full tuition waiver, based on the strength of application.
• Master Thesis :
• How we Think we Think, is not how we really Think : Design and Implementation of an experimental study to find ambiguity aversion under uncertainty (Experimental Finance, modeling in Ztree & Stata)
• Designed & implemented a cross-sectional experiment(27 subjects) to quantify a subject’s behavior under uncertainty. The setup included elements from Game Theory & auctions, with variable incentive schemes to instrument control methods
• Analyzed the micro-panel data and developed probabilistic models with differing confidence measures and attribution schemes
• http://www.slideshare.net/ekta1007/master-thesis-how-we-think-we-think-is-not-how-we-really-think

Mar 2008 – Jul 2010 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Bangalore ,India

• Led a cross-functional diverse team of 4 across India, Bulgaria and Germany - responsible for quality management in SAP Netweaver delivery pipeline
• Negotiated & developed KPI's for crucial deliverables that impacted 500+ stakeholders on organizational level
• Tracked the project metrics between the Key account and the engineering management teams, helping mitigate risk systematically - direct reporting to Delivery Management
• Designed an automated tool to help the cross-functional Management narrow down self-performance based on qualitative/quantitative performance and facilitate transparent resource optimization

Jul 2007 – Mar 2008 · 8 mos · Bangalore ,India

• Performed Functional, UI and Scalability testing of VMware Virtual Center
• Analyzed & highlighted cross-product failures(with VMware ESX) leading to lesser turnaround time over delivery cycles
• Test design, implementation and execution of test cases. Developed new scenarios for the product
• usage, writing/modifying test cases for the same
• Debugging and closure - traced the regression issues over the release cycles to meet scope & coverage KPI's