Headline

Product Leader – Ads & Monetization | Revenue-Critical Platforms at Scale | Flipkart, Ex-Founder, Ex-Paytm

About

I am a seasoned product leader with 14+ years of product management experience building and scaling revenue-critical platforms in complex, high-scale environments. My work has primarily focused on ads and monetization systems, where I have owned the input side of revenue by building durable, self-serve platforms that balance business outcomes, advertiser value, and long-term scalability. At Flipkart, I have led product charters spanning advertiser onboarding, campaign creation, targeting, recommendations, billing, and reporting, contributing to multi-year growth of the ads business. I specialize in operating at the intersection of product strategy, systems thinking, and execution—making deliberate product bets in ambiguous environments rather than optimizing for short-term delivery pressure. I am most effective when working on problems that require strong judgment: deciding what not to build, investing in platforms over features, and creating clarity for teams in areas where strategy, data, and engineering meet. I have led and developed product managers, partnered closely with senior business and engineering leaders, and represented my areas independently in leadership forums. Earlier in my career, I co-founded and scaled a profitable D2C business as COO/CTO, which shaped my operator mindset and comfort with P&L trade-offs, constraints, and execution at scale. I am open to senior product leadership roles where I can own large problem spaces, build high-leverage platforms, and work in environments that value thoughtful strategy over constant firefighting.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

antigravity

claude code

claude

notebooklm

openai

ChatGPT

Work experience

Group Product Manager at Flipkart, Oct 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 11 mos, On-site, Leading the product charter for Flipkart’s Ads Demand Platform, which powers advertiser onboarding, campaign creation, targeting, recommendations, billing, and reporting for Flipkart Ads. I own end-to-end product strategy and execution for a revenue-critical platform used by ~100K advertisers to create ~2M campaigns annually, and work closely with engineering, data science, sales, and business leadership. Over the last several years, I have been part of the leadership team that scaled the Ads business ~10×, primarily by building durable, self-serve systems that improve advertiser adoption, effectiveness, and trust. My focus has been on investing in platforms rather than features, and on making deliberate product bets that scale across advertisers, formats, and use cases. I have led multiple strategic initiatives including the AI-fication of the ads demand platform, ML-driven ad recommendations, expansion of targeting capabilities across keyword, product, audience, and contextual signals, and the rollout of real-time reporting to enable faster optimization and decision-making for advertisers. I have also driven product-led improvements in billing and collections, including internalizing a critical billing system from a third-party vendor to improve control, reliability, and reduce DSO. In this role, I lead and develop a team of product managers (currently 4, with up to 10 at peak), have hired 6 PMs, and owned performance reviews, promotions, and exits. I represent the Ads Demand charter independently in senior leadership forums and am known for strong system-level understanding of ads platforms and staying ahead of evolving trends in the advertising ecosystem.

Senior Product Manager at Flipkart, Aug 2020 - Sep 2023 · 3 yrs 2 mos, Hybrid, As a Senior Product Manager in Flipkart Ads, I focused on building and scaling 0→1 monetization capabilities that laid the foundation for Flipkart’s display and brand advertising business. I worked in a highly ambiguous environment, partnering closely with engineering, design, sales, and operations to move the ads ecosystem from manual, managed execution to scalable, self-serve systems. I led the launch of multiple new ad formats including video ads, brand stores, and immersive display experiences, and played a key role in enabling non-endemic advertising on Flipkart, opening the platform to a broader set of advertisers beyond marketplace sellers. These initiatives expanded Flipkart Ads beyond simple branding use cases and unlocked new monetization (lead gen) opportunities. A core part of my work involved building the first versions of the self-serve display ads platform, integrating audience targeting and measurement capabilities to give advertisers greater control, transparency, and scale. I also owned ads accounting and billing workflows, including SOX-compliant systems, and partnered with finance and operations teams to strengthen operational rigor as the business scaled. This role sharpened my ability to build products from first principles, operate with incomplete information, and translate business intent into scalable product systems—many of which were later expanded and platformized as part of the Ads Demand charter.

COO, CTO and Co-founder at nurserylive, Oct 2016 - Aug 2020 · 3 yrs 11 mos, Pune, Maharashtra, India, Co-founded and scaled Nurserylive, a D2C e-commerce platform for garden and lifestyle products, taking the business from early-stage inception to ~₹25Cr in annual revenue. I owned product, technology, and operations end-to-end, with direct accountability for execution, scale, and business outcomes. I built the core order, inventory, and fulfillment platforms from scratch, designing systems that balanced perishability constraints, demand variability, and logistics complexity. These platforms enabled faster fulfillment, improved availability, and better unit economics as the business scaled across geographies. As COO, I led and scaled cross-functional teams of ~80 people across technology, operations, warehousing, and customer experience. I redesigned warehouse layouts and fulfillment processes, and implemented demand forecasting and intelligent order routing systems that materially improved throughput, margins, and time-to-ship. As CTO, I made early architectural decisions that allowed the business to scale without constant rewrites, prioritizing simplicity, reliability, and operational visibility over short-term speed. This role deeply shaped my approach to product leadership—building systems with clear ownership, making hard trade-offs, and focusing on long-term scalability over local optimization. I also led fundraising efforts and raised external capital to support growth and expansion.

Founder / Product Builder at Acumenture | Tappkaro, Aug 2013 - Mar 2020 · 6 yrs 8 mos, Bathinda, Punjab | Gurgaon, Haryana, Founded and built multiple 0→1 products solving real-world problems across enterprise sales enablement, education, mobility, and hardware-integrated platforms. These ventures achieved early commercial traction with paying customers and institutional adoption, generating steady revenue through enterprise contracts and early monetization models, but needed more capital to scale further. At Acumenture, was a solo founder working directly with enterprise and institutional clients. Built a tablet-based sales platform for Ashok Leyland to reduce field-sales training time and improve frontline productivity. Collaborated with senior stakeholders and consultants from BCG. Also designed and deployed RFID+WebCam-based access management systems for sensitive, widespread areas, enabling centralized identity verification, real-time monitoring, & auditability across multiple entry and exit points. In parallel, worked with founders from London Business School to build SunEos, initially an NFC-based attendance system that evolved into a closed-loop NFC payments platform successfully used at live events. Independently built a school management & student lifecycle platform for schools, solving admissions, transfer, and differential fee computation use cases. The platform was used by 12 schools, covering ~30k students. Subsequently founded TappKaro, assembling & leading a small cross-functional team to build an NFC-enabled, location-aware platform deployed inside auto-rickshaws in Gurgaon. The solution enabled passenger identification for safety use cases and served contextual content and ads. Ola Play was launched later on similar lines and SoS buttons were made mandatory. Across these ventures, repeatedly entered unfamiliar problem spaces and independently acquired the technical, product, and operational expertise required to deliver production-grade systems, developing deep comfort with ambiguity, systems thinking across hardware and software, and founder-level ownership.

Product Manager at Paytm, May 2011 - Jan 2013 · 1 yr 9 mos, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, Joined Paytm as an early product team member during its formative growth phase and worked on core consumer payment experiences. Owned product development for recharges and bill payments across web and mobile, and contributed to building foundational systems that supported scale and regulatory requirements. Played a key role in the launch of the Paytm Wallet, including preparation for RBI approvals and participation in the platform’s early audits. Also conceptualized QR-code–based payments, which later became a core pillar of Paytm’s offline payments strategy. This experience provided early exposure to building consumer-scale platforms under regulatory constraints, and shaped my understanding of reliability, compliance, and system-level thinking in high-growth environments.

Programming Analyst at Infosys, Aug 2005 - Apr 2009 · 3 yrs 9 mos, Pune, Maharashtra, India, Started my career at Infosys, working on enterprise software systems in the Automotives & Aerospace division - a large-scale , process-driven delivery environment. Gained early exposure to building reliable systems, collaborating across distributed teams, and operating within structured engineering and quality frameworks. Led a team of 6 software engineers to successfully deliver products for automotive giants such as Daimler Chrysler and Honda cars. This experience laid a strong foundation in systems thinking and execution discipline, which later informed my transition into product management and platform leadership roles.

Education

Master of Business Administration - MBA, Business strategy, Finance and Operations, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta

Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Information Technology, Army Institute of Technology (AIT), Pune