Product Manager Data Science

Vidya S. Gunasekaran

Los Angeles, CA ***** 607-***-**** *****.***********@*****.***

Data Science Leader Former VP Hedge Fund Manager Vision Centric Product Manager

Entertainment Product Manager and Former VP Hedge Fund with advanced technical knowledge and international experience in finance, academic research, and media. Demonstrated leadership in partnering with senior teams on business transformations, improving operational efficiencies and driving innovative solutions for increased quality, branding and stakeholder value. Provide valuable insights via marketing analytics, advanced data science methods and creating a culture of trust, personal development and excellence. Create statistical models to improve product performance, team motivation and optimize processes using data-driven, action-oriented solutions to challenging business problems. Build robust, high functioning global teams, while leading multiple projects, producing computational solutions, and delivering end-to-end products for business and clients.

Areas of Expertise

Customer Experience Global Design Product Management Systematic Research Talent Development Machine and Deep Learning AI Principles and Ethics Hedge Fund Macro Investments Regression Modeling Leadership Training Performance Evaluation Workflow Design Optimization P&L Attribution OKR Alignment

Notable Accomplishments

Developed weekly business performance reviews into actionable business themes that allowed the department to align tactical and strategic projects with financial objectives.

Partnered to create an innovative business solution to mutually benefit two competing business models (streaming content to increase subscriber base, and theatrical release), by discovering an optimal release window based on the content type via an algorithm designed by my team, followed by the explaining the business rationale for all stakeholders to understand and participate in the roll-out.

Increased fund, pricing and PNL efficiencies by incentivizing and acquiring inhouse tech talent to assist in transitioning from excel sheets into “live” dashboards with projected prices, providing risk and compliance teams with the ability to see intraday PNL.

Proactively investigated trading fund costs resulting in reducing costs by $30M over two (2) years.

Produced over $3Bn in active returns for clients and managed multi-asset portfolios valued at over $60Bn in 2019.

Known as a disruptive leader; with a passion for excellence and learning to meet organizational vision, mission, values and goals; Transparent, collaborative and builds teams through trust and empathy; Possess a “take charge” problem-solving approach, while, capitalizing on quantitative and qualitative data-driven innovation and creativity.

Professional Experience

Warner Bros Discovery, Culver City, CA December 2021 - Present

Growth Product Manager, May 2024 - Present

Lead growth product team’s weekly assessment of Max (DTC streaming service) strategy and performance. Determine appropriate metrics and allocate resources to maintain alignment of DTC’s business performance vs forecasts.

Subject Matter Expert on Max’s weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual performance who communicates insights to cross-functional stakeholders. Identified key insights to marketing and engineering which increased global organic search traffic to dotcom by 13%, reduced global voluntary churn by 0.5 ppts, and buyflow conversion by 0.2 ppts in 2024.

Publish and deliver actionable and timely ad-hoc data models to inform decision making for unpaid acquisition channels, Buyflow 2.0, and save offer campaigns to retain customers. Data Models included:

Look alike customer acquisition clusters, A B plan fit optimization to increase buyflow conversion rates, ARIMA forecasting of prospective traffic to Max website and app mobile stores, STE timeseries decomposition to understand seasonality, trends, and idiosyncrasies in customers unsubscribing from Max.

Senior Data Scientist, December 2021 - May 2024

Used data science and advanced analytics to help the Production Operations and Finance teams create, market, and distribute content for theaters, streaming and TV to optimize the assets in WBD’s 100-year catalog and ensure product departments (TV, movie, streaming) continue to improve functional efficiencies.

Helped write a critical, post pandemic plan and created an algorithm to suggest the number of days a movie should be in theaters and when to transition to streaming to maximize wide theatrical release (project: “windowing content”), provided studio executives a simple formula to negotiate with Hollywood (directors, producers, movie owners, actors).

Vidya S. Gunasekaran *****.***********@*****.*** Page Two

Warner Bros. Discovery, Cont.

Collaborated with a cross-functional team to design, develop, and launch an innovative and enhanced technical tool called Celebrity Tracker, to automate and collect data on our roster of talent, allowing us to use data science to distill the data into patterns and trends, thus, tracking talent across multiple product assets (movies, TV, unscripted programming, animation, news).

Conducted market research and analysis to understand trends and opportunities in the content licensing space, i.e., identifying what movie content should stay, what should we make, and what should we borrow from other studios, thus, informing product development of best marketing strategies for upcoming new MAX streaming platform brand (formerly, HBO Max).

Coached and mentored junior entry level data science team members to expand problem-solving skills and ability to think strategically, i.e., how to present or what math formula to try, in order to augment and accelerate next-level growth opportunity and career promotion.

BlackRock, New York, NY February 2008 - September 2020

Vice President - Portfolio Manager (PM), Multi-Asset Strategies Group

Developed strategic plan for research and investment technology to generate active returns, while mitigating operational risk and trading cost.

Functioned as the lead portfolio construction PM of day-to-day trading of $28Bn publicly traded assets subscribed to the global tactical asset allocation strategy.

Generated over $3Bn in active client returns and managed multi-asset portfolios valued at $60Bn in 2019.

Drove scale across the business by liaising with investment teams and used investment guidelines, propriety risk budgeting process, and market friction analytics to build optimal client portfolios across the U.K., Italy, Japan, and the U.S.

Reduced trading costs by $30M over two (2) years by proactively investigating trading costs as PM for client funds ensuring greater ROI.

Increased fund, pricing and PNL efficiencies by incentivizing and acquiring inhouse tech talent to assist in transitioning from excel sheets into “live” dashboards with projected prices, providing risk and compliance teams with the ability to see intraday PNL.

Built a team culture post-merger that resulted in higher morale, collaboration, and inter-departmental communication empowering a risk-budget approach, rather than capital, ultimately reducing turnover.

Championed launch of more than five successful global hedge funds located in Japan, US, and UK over three years.

Transformed a purely domestic business, internationally by actively visiting and training global employees. Implemented an ergonomically designed global workflow protocol for how to escalate trading related concerns.

Additional role: Associate - Portfolio Analytics Group, New York, NY, Paris, France, and London, UK

Additional Experience

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Statistics Head Teaching Assistant - Applied Economics and Management Department (AEM)

Technical Skills Software

NLP Machine Learning GIS Statistics Tutor Aladdin SQL Python Tableau R R Shiny

Education

Master of Arts (MA) in Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences (Applied Statistics)

Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York, NY

Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Economics, Concentration in Pre-Med

Cornell University, School of Arts and Sciences, Ithaca, New York, NY

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