Here, I track my Product Manager journey. I started in fintech by creating an internal-facing product for corporate treasuries, bankers and investment managers. I’ve also explored a bit to understand what it’s like to be a PM in a few other contexts- viz. a consumer-facing marketplace, a free-to-play gaming app, and a seed-stage SaaS product.

Finicast - Creating Data Pipelines Project Sep 2022 - Present

Finicast is a business planning platform that enables fast time-to-value and easy-to-maintain planning workflows at a fraction of cost. This is made possible by a new-kind of database system that was created in response to limitations of in-memory databases- the preferred choice of most other enterprise planning products in the market. While in-memory databases offer low latency for high-performance, it results in prohibitive costs pretty quickly as the business grows and models become more complex.

Given the early-stage of the startup, I get to wear a lot of different hats. I own the pre-modelling experience and overall the roadmap for creating data pipelines. As part of our fast time-to-value proposition, I led a product feature that made it easy for analysts to start building on top of their existing spreadsheet models inside Finicast with just a few cicks! This is helping customers unlock value from Day-01 by making it possible to automate some of their workflows. Apart from this, I also helped improve software's QA processes and created customer onboarding experiences using Intercom.


Niantic - Product Strategy ProjectDec 2021- Feb 2022

This opportunity came about in Nov 2021 as a web3 consulting project. It coincided with a time when the interest in blockchain gaming was at its peak due to Axie Infinity going mainstream. Facebook had changed its name to Meta, over $1.5 billion had been raised by various funds focused on investing in blockchain games and companies were wondering if there's money to be made in blockchain gaming or if this is just a passing fad.

The project was mainly targeted to address that question- explore what's the opportunity and identify how it can be relevant for Niantic's vision. Given my background in finance, economics and product management, and having done projects related to gaming and crypto, I had some insights to offer. If interested, I've captured some of my related thoughts in these two posts: NFTs and Blockchain Gaming.


Amazon Explore - Growth Project (Artifact) May 2021 - Aug 2021

Over the summer of 2021, I interned at AWS as Sr. Product Manager - Technical at AWS-Grand Challenge- the in-house lab at Amazon to work on moonshot projects. One such project was Amazon Explore - a marketplace for virtual tours and online experiences. Explore was launched in the middle of the pandemic with an aim to unlock the potential of Amazon beyond online retail to online experiences and offline retail.

I worked on a growth project at Explore. I was given the charter to identify the right growth rate so that the team could make an informed resourcing request to leadership during the semi-annual planning exercise (OP1 & OP2). Subsequently, the charter was expanded to also include how we plan to achieve recommended the growth rates. It was a great learning experience for me personally. I studied how network effects can be created in a marketplace and applied those learnings in the context of Explore. I also got curious about ways to drive user behavior, which ultimately led me to pursue a project related to gamification after coming to Berkeley. If interested, you can read more about some of my reflections on the Explore experience here.


NBx - A Digital Transformation Project June 2018 - Apr 2020

While managing sale of company's debt investments, I observed that the pricing process followed by the bankers in the private debt space was a bit outdated. It was heuristics mainly becuase of the manual effort involved in tracking the multitude of information sources while pricing debt securities. Conventional products like Bloomberg terminals, Reuters, etc. did not have adequate coverage for securities with low credit ratings- the market of our interest. In private markets this data is hard to come by and one needs to understand the underlying businesses to identify the right benchmarks. I, therefore, conceived the idea of a web application that would automate data aggregation and processing to provide pricing information to bankers at the click of a button.

This first-of-its kind product became the go-to source of pricing information in the company and we recovered the cost of creating this product in Year-01. Not only did it create an information advantage for our company, but also enabled new innovation. By making it possible to track the availability of credit securities due for maturity, NBx helped us create a differentiated offering (9% INR return for 3-6 month holding period) that became the flagship fund of our company (NA Money Market Alpha Fund- Pg 15, Annual Report). If interested, you can read more about the use cases enabled by NBx here.