Product Manager Technical

GAYATRI PUWAR MAHENDROO

510-***-**** ******@*****.*** https://www.linkedin.com/in/gpuwar https://www.medium.com/@gpuwar1 Strategic Product Leader with 20+ years of strong GTM, technical product experience driving innovation, and product expansion strategies through data-driven application experiences and platform innovations driving it end-to-end. Proven track record in scaling digital platforms, and application experiences, driving partnerships, and developer programs for the ecosystem implementing cross-platform growth strategies while optimizing customer journeys through advanced analytics to drive bottom-up adoption. Expert in building collaboration applied AI /ML, and data platform experiences across B2B and B2C, with experience in both MNCs and startups/scale-ups. Track record of building and growing small growth teams and using analytics and experimentation to scale products to achieve user acquisition, retention, and revenue goals. EXPERIENCE

Fractional Product Manager, Marketing and messaging Wevise.org (Part-time, EdTech non-profit) San Francisco, CA March 2024 – Now

Wevise.org is a nonprofit organization in stealth mode, that helps people find mentorship and career opportunities in the tech industry.

• Formed an 18-month vision and roadmap, to align with the community requirements to build platform notifications, chat, and calling features for the mentor and mentee education web platform, driving product roadmap, and execution with the agile delivery teams.

• Paired with CTO and UX research to understand members' priorities, selected and mapped it to a Cloud vendor (GetStream.io) to shortlist, and built joint UI/UX to deliver MVP in the beta in Q4, 2024 to community members and a non-profit organization. Director of Product, Platform Data Integrations and Tech Partnerships Passport Labs, Inc (B2B and B2G Fintech) San Francisco, CA January 2023 – October 2023

Passport is a series D B2B startup and is the industry’s leading mobile technology solution specializing in business applications and payments for the public and private sectors. Passport’s product lines – parking payments, transit payments, enforcement, and permit management to serve communities. Passport’s mission is to reduce operational complexity and deliver intelligent data to improve decision-making for its customers. Developed and executed a vision, product strategy, and roadmap for a Payments, Data, and IoT /Mobility platform, and APIs and developer portal and integrations, aimed at creating a B2G apps & integrations marketplace and smart analytic solutions for growth and new revenue. B2C Application & Integration Growth:

• Launched Text2Park, leading it from concept to launch, and GTM and more channels with 3 certified application partners.

• Led a new payment wallet solution with Parkopedia (Auto OEM) and launched in selected cities, and APIs in developer portal.

• Led integration with 10+ parking meters and operators to get data in via sessions /events APIs in real time.

• Launched Event APIs, Survey APIs, and Full Parking Integration Guides including modular payment cookbooks on the Developer Portal. B2B Data & Analytics Platform:

• Scaled certified apps and platforms across 150 cities integrated contributing to $10M in increased transaction revenue. Created comprehensive parking payments and revenue dashboards on the B2B Platform for cities including integration and app partners

• Conducted customer discovery and user experience (UX) research with customers to lead initiatives to launch innovation data solutions in collaboration with partners such as Esri, Cleverciti, and TurnStone, including Machine learning and sensor-based 'parking occupancy models' with integrated software and hardware solutions leading from concept to execution with selected pilot cities.

• Launched "Data Lab" to reduce time-to-market for new feature adoption by 40%, piloting new analytic and data offerings.

• Created enabling content and demos for customers, support, and sales teams, implementing readiness process and partner program. Principal Product Manager, Ecosystem Growth & App Integrations Egnyte, Inc (B2B Collaboration Platform) Mountain View, CA January 2020 – December 2022

Egnyte is a series E B2B SaaS startup that provides software for enterprise-secure content collaboration, and file sharing. Additionally, it provides cloud-based content intelligence, governance, e-signature, and workflow tools through a unified intelligent content platform, empowering more than 22,000 enterprise customers globally to manage their IT operations across cloud and on-premises. Owned product strategy, roadmap, and execution of a $250M ARR enterprise integration portfolio for Pre-IPO B2B SaaS Platform during its 5X growth, for both IT and technical audiences, as well as for the end users across all surfaces leading a team of 20 across 3 Agile squads. Native Application and Integration Experiences:

• Partnered with Microsoft, Google, DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and Salesforce to launch and manage 40+ native integrations, improving workflows, IT security, and app productivity by 20%. Analyzed the competitive landscape to inform near-term differentiation and build a long-term competitive advantage for Egnyte’s Integrations with customers to drive end-to-end experiences on all surfaces.

• Defined, and led 0-1 "Desktop Co-authoring" offline to online integration with MS Teams, O365 applications, and cloud storage including comprehensive MDM and enterprise security solutions and onboarding for IT administrators across Desktops, also Egnyte’s Web, Desktop, and Mobile Users, to support “Anywhere, any device” strategy, leading X/N teams, and execution with 7+ agile teams.

• Designed APIs and secure file-sharing no-code UI models for developers /partners reducing partner integration time by 50%

• Implemented secure communication workflows and governance solutions meeting GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA requirements. Growth Strategy & Analytics:

• Created regression models correlating integration usage with churn rates and creating a retention-based product roadmap.

• Implemented growth analytics framework first in the company and adopted Pendo.io, improving activation and adoption by 20%.

• Created personalized onboarding flows for integrations for trial enterprise users, optimizing a 0.5% improvement in the CR rates.

• Analyzed user data and feedback to identify pain points and opportunities for product improvement in key platform areas, in OAUTH, and gaps in user journey and documentation for key workflows and native integrations, including improving better telemetry. As a result, drove a 25 – 40% decrease in support tickets for owned applications, owning quality metrics and driving better retention.

• Developed Tableau dashboards for tracking integration usage, ARR growth, and adoption metrics and trained X/N partners. Head of Product & Strategy, Messaging Platform and Apps ApexChat, Inc (B2B2C Contact-Center) San Ramon, CA Feb 2019 – August 2019

ApexChat is a private company, that specializes in customer engagement and lead management within the advertising conversion sector. It provides 24/7 Live Chat software, with live contact center agents to SMB companies to generate more web leads. This company has more than 35000 customers in various fields, including healthcare, automotive, law, real estate, and other verticals, and is rebranded as Blazeo. Built and led a cross-functional team, including 2 product owners, UI, and analytics contractors to manage product development, and design, with an offshore engineering team for the customers as the first fractional product-hire working with the co-founders to define a new SaaS Platform strategy. Owned end-to-end product development for contact center agent web platform, business apps, and AI. Activation /Channels:

• Launched SMS and mobile optimized lead widgets, drove analytic and A/B experiments to personalize agent avatar, and led AI bot to engage web and mobile visitors to drive top-of-the-funnel improvements, leading to a 40% increase in beta customer leads in 6 months while improving activation rates, retention, and lead quality infusing AI-driven agent operations.

• Implemented agile methodologies to streamline the product development process, reducing time to market by 30% Tech Partnership /vendor management:

• Built a strategic AI partnership with Lumin.ai to launch NLP-driven "Agent Assist" tools for agents, streamlining workflows for offshore contact center agents when integrated into the contact center agents' web platform.

• Worked on NLP-driven SMS chatbot experience, including integration with the Twilio in back end to drive appointment scheduling. Innovation and Mobile Apps:

• Researched issues with the churn and quality with the newly formed beta groups of customers, strategy, and pillars of growth.

• Pivoted to work on the self-service SaaS model where SMB businesses can self-serve their chats in the field, Defined, designed, and launched 0-1 Android and iOS cross-functional business messaging apps to ~20 SMB customers.

• Led advanced feature-set to drive to new SaaS agent-based pricing business model, in addition to the cost-per-lead model leading to 52% YoY customer growth, reducing churn and platform model to compete with LiveChat, Drift, and other offerings. Sr. Technical Product Program Manager, AI/ML Enterprise Data Platform Apex Systems (Consultant) San Francisco, CA October 2017 – October 2018 (CLIENT: Wells Fargo Innovation Lab) Directed a $10M enterprise program for a newly established innovation lab for the Wells Fargo Bank as a lead technical product program manager, managing two different initiatives to drive pilots while building an open AI /ML Data Platform across different banking use cases. Conversational Agent Platform and Application:

• Designed, and delivered a Conversational UX and EVA (Enterprise Virtual Agent) pilot for customers and agents building a robust knowledge base and orchestration layer to enhance agent productivity, improving first-time resolution rates by 35%.

• Designed conversational UX with the industry SMEs for the unstructured data ingestion for the legal bereavement matters, and to assist agents with the different profiles/and expertise to personalize chatbot experience with the hand-over capabilities on the web app. AI /ML Open Data Platform and Fraud Ops Application:

• Partnered with key platform stakeholders to define the product roadmap and requirements, data ingestion and data warehouse initiatives, technical scope, and program timelines across data engineering, data science, and application engineering groups serving the model as an API, including managing budget, scope, vendors, and resources from PMO side, including risks and compliance.

• Defined, and delivered the first pilot use case to the Payment Fraud agent team to help them prioritize high-priority cases. This pilot beat the baseline model by 20% to address payment fraud in near real-time and reduce the risk portfolio by $2-4M for the bank. Product Manager (acting lead), AI (Conversations as a Platform) Microsoft, Inc (B2B2C Messaging and AI) Palo Alto, CA September 2015 – September 2016

Cross-Platform Application and Consumer Engagement:

• Conduced User research, defined requirements, and roadmap, also responsive interaction /visual design patterns with the UX, and executed Skype's AI BOT Framework and Conversational UX on Skype’s existing app’s surfaces working on BOT Profile, in-app Discovery, user engagement features, and Adaptive cards (low-code UI modals) across channels, for the 0-1 launch.

• Led scrum of scrum teams consisting of 6 different global teams and ship rooms to orchestrate complex platform launch 0-1 within 4 months for Microsoft’s /build launch for the developer /partners and, consumer launch subsequently in 2 months reaching 0.5M MAUs. Ecosystem & Community Growth:

• Developed and launched 7+ initial bots working internally with Studio Engineering Squad, Cortana, and Bing internal teams to bootstrap "In-App Directory" and BING Chatbot marketplace, while driving end-to-end development, design, and beta launches.

• Managed tech partner and developer engagements, and documentation, including conversational UX principles, driving developer education at hackathons, ending up with 15,000 sign-ups with the second launch. Optimized developer onboarding workflows, analytics, and editorial processes, doubling the number of 3rd party qualified bots listed in Skype’s and Bing’s directory. Product Manager (acting lead), Skype’s Mobile - International Growth Team Microsoft, Inc (Skype B2C) Palo Alto, CA Developed and executed technology roadmaps, and business cases for the new integrated use cases, and owned Skype’s mobile experience on device and OS devices for the International Growth Product team. Worked with over 20 global OS and device partners and global app stores, owning and improving calling metrics by 30%, and YoY 15M+ incremental MAUs, and 4.4 ratings of apps in the Appstore. Mobile Growth & Engagement:

• Drove 15M+ incremental mobile MAUs through optimized activation strategies with OS and OEMs for Skype Mobile.

• Designed contextual mobile notifications including a 0-1 cloud framework, improving user activation by 40% with A/B experiments.

• Created Picture-in-Picture and HD Calling features for Skype mobile optimized on Galaxy devices in beta, and scaled to 100M users.

• Defined and launched the 0-1 integrated Skype Dialer MOD featuring cross-platform video, unified contacts, and messaging.

• Identified and executed OS-level optimizations for mobile platforms like Samsung, Lenovo, and Amazon in tech partnership. User Experience & Data:

• Developed mobile engagement analytics tracking user behavior patterns, and detailed integration and partner rev-share analytics.

• Designed mobile-optimized onboarding widgets on the home screen, including smart badges reducing friction in the user journey Senior Portfolio Product Manager /SW Engr, Mobile Platform & Applications Google, Inc (Motorola Mobility) Sunnyvale, CA March 2001 – October 2012 (VARIOUS ROLES)

Mobile Platform and Applications /New Devices and Product Innovation:

• Led comprehensive Android Core Services portfolio across mobile and wearable devices, encompassing: Mobile Device Management

(MDM) and enterprise security features with Redband, Blur OS platform development with Knox-like enterprise security capabilities for Mobile /NFC payments and other Enterprise and Security features and APIs to app developers via Moto Developer program.

• Led native browser, media (flash), email, app, and messaging platform development, including unified user experiences.

• Developed integrated hardware/software solutions across diverse mobile and wearable portfolios, across the board saving $10M in royalties and IP, addressing economies of scale and adoption of platform solutions across the portfolio of mass-market devices.

• Managed product lines spanning 20+ device types and 1000+ SKUs, and interface with Google and Carriers for the launch and GTM. EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS

• Retention + Engagement Tracks in Product-led Growth Leadership Reforge, CA, 2021

• Masters, Project /Program Management (PMP equivalent) George Washington University, IL, 2008

• M.B.A, International Management Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, IL. 2007

• M.S., Computer Information Technology Florida Institute of Technology, FL, 2000

• Certifications: Green Belt Six Sigma, Dale Carnegie, AI /ML NLP advanced coursework and in Agile Scrum Practices TECHNOLOGIES & TOOLS

• Analytics: Pendo.io, Mixpanel, Tableau, Looker, Big Query, and Google Analytics

• Web and Mobile Development: Android, iOS, RTOS, Node JS, React Native as well as Microsoft’s Xamarin Framework

• Integration: REST APIs, Graph QL, Real-time Sync, OAUTH, and API integration patterns.

• Cloud Platforms: Salesforce Platform, AWS, Azure Cloud and apps (multiple), Google Cloud and Firebase

• Applied AI /ML: MS Bing’s BOT Framework for Agents, LUIS (Language understanding models), IBM Watson, H20.ai, etc.

• UX & other PM tools: Usertesting.com, Dovetail, Figma, Balsamiq, Miro. JIRA, Atlassian tools, Smart Sheets, Product Board.

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