I care deeply about helping and changing people’s lives for the better.
My first product, if one can call it a product, was a hand-drawn map complete with notes, points of interest, and points to avoid, which I created at the age of 12 for my Mother, my first customer, who was traveling to a big city on a business trip by herself. Since I had spent my summer holidays two years in a row in that city, I found myself qualified enough to offer my product to my mother that she wouldn’t get lost in the big city and reach her destination without any problem. Of course, my mother was very proud of me and in return, she rewarded me with a big hug and kisses.
Since then I haven’t looked back. In 1999, the year I arrived in the United States, I launched my first product, an Online Travel Agency complete with a reservation system with brick and mortar store in downtown Livermore. In one and a half years, before I sold that agency, I took that agency from 0 to 1500 customers and generated around $70,000 in revenue per year on average. In 2000, I launched an Online Publication, taking it from the back of a napkin idea to a thriving platform which had around 1600 media contributors, more than 18000 pages of content (i.e. columns, articles, perspectives), and in its heydays, getting it featured on Yahoo! News, Google News and served as a reference for several hundred academic papers and books.
Just recently, I helped a remote tribal community by launching an Online Outlet for them to collect donations for their Tribal Welfare Committee (a not-for-profit) which serves the underprivileged orphans, widows and provides vocational training to the poor. I am glad to report that they have raised for their COVID-19 Medical Supplies campaign and other programs through that outlet at least U$15000 so far.
Following are some of the Product Management activities which I have undertaken as a Product Manager:
- Collaborated with Designers, Engineers, Data Scientists, and User Researchers to Analyze Patterns and Trends, and identify New Opportunities for Growth
- Managed and Defined Detailed Product Requirements, Ensuring Product Satisfied Customers’ needs, Growth Goals and Adoption Targets
- Determined the Right Set of Features to Drive Engagement and Usage for Customers and Key Product Metrics
- Launched New Features into Market that Drove Customer Acquisition and Product Adoption
- Tracked Performance on an Ongoing Basis to Ensure that Customer Satisfaction of Product
- Led the ideation, development, and launch of innovation Products that drove user growth
- Worked with Market and User Research Teams to Better Understand Customer Needs
- Provided Design team feedback and perspective and aimed for cohesive experience across all touchpoints
- Establish and Maintain design principles and patterns to be used across all channels and experiences
- Conducted UX Research including user interviews, usability testing, concept, and prototype testing
- Partnered with Engineering to clarify and planned for sprint releases
- Wrote user stories and use cases for agile ceremonies
- Developed plans to continually drive feature adoption
- Defined and executed the web and mobile product strategy for iOS, android apps, and accompanying web applications
- Led a collaborative Product Team of 8 internal stakeholders and 1 offshore development team releasing multiple B2C products in e-commerce, lifestyle, and logistics
- Created and managed the release timeline for agency products from Minimum Viable Product to final release resulting in a $600k revenue run rate
- Developed Product Requriment Documents for financial, sales, and internal teams to promote cross-departmental consensus on the product vision
- Created and revised product requirements by evaluating customer growth rates, adoption targets, and customer retention by using data analytics and A/B testing.
- Conducted UX/UI hypothesis testing, wireframes and Design Sprints, and relevant customer research to define customer needs or to pivot product features
- Prioritized the feature list by defining urgency in customer demands, product backlog, engineering bugs, and internal stakeholder requests
- Worked cross-functionally with our sales, design, engineering, and marketing teams to craft and launch features that solved customer problems and evaluated product success
- Collaborated with Brand, Product, Editorial, UX, and Marketing teams to ideate on innovative personalization experiences that drive customer satisfaction, retention, and engagement
- Wrote detailed product and technical requirements for implementation and worked closely with the Engineering team to deliver on those requirements
- Actively engaged customers and the larger community of users.
- Ran experimenting and prototyped solutions using Lean startup methodology, leading to validated learnings and valuable, desirable, and feasible product solutions as efficiently as possible.
- Conducted international UX Research study including customer and stakeholder interviews, survey design/deployment, and user testing.
