Headline

Director / VP Product (AI/ML) | Personalization · Recommendations · Pricing | Owner of the ML stack behind revenue, margin & conversion | 0-to-1 through 200M-user scale | Ex-AJIO · Cricket.com 0→15M

About

I build the AI workflows that generate commerce — deciding what shoppers see, and what they pay. For 16+ years I've led product for consumer apps where machine learning is the business: search, personalization, recommendations, and pricing. I turn data science into the numbers a business actually cares about — revenue, margin, and conversion. Most recently, at AJIO (Reliance Retail), I owned that stack across a 200M-user base: • +3% revenue per user from AJIO's first AI-powered personalization program • +1.8% gross margin, no revenue loss, from a 3-year ML dynamic-pricing program • +1.8% conversion, with failed searches cut by 62%, from a semantic search engine Before that, I was the founding hire at Cricket.com — I built the Product, Design, Data Science, and Editorial unit from scratch and grew the app from 0 to 15M downloads in two years. It became the fastest-growing app on Google Play in its window and the 3rd-largest consumer cricket app in the world, powered by Criclytics, India's only B2C cricket prediction engine. Earlier, I launched gaming products at ESPNCricinfo and worked in product at eBay, Travelocity, and Hungama — and more recently advised startups at Thoughtworks on getting the product strategy right before building. After a planned break to focus on personal priorities — now behind me — I'm returning to full-time product leadership. Open to Director and VP Product roles in AI/ML and platform product. Reach me at kartik.kannan@gmail.com.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

claude

elevenlabs

gemini

grok

lovable

Work experience

Group Product Manager at AJIO.com, Jun 2021 - Dec 2024 · 3 yrs 7 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Ajio.com is an online Fashion marketplace, and its one of the top 2 online fashion retailers in India. It is part of the Reliance Retail group, which is the single largest fashion retail entity in India. Responsible for the following charters, within Ajio. Have a team of Product Managers and Product Analysts reporting to me. Key metrics revolve around conversion, nDCG Scores, Order Value, Revenue Per User. Manage the following charters on Search, Relevancy, Personalisation, Promotions, Pricing, Dynamic Pricing Created a Personalisation Program for Ajio. Increased Revenue per User by 3% for Premium experience for users Built a Semantic Search Classifier that recognises intent in search queries. Conversion improvement by 1.8%. Reduced Zero Search Results by 62% (From 8% to 3%) Built an Assisted Search program that got a 3% uplift in clicks from Recent Searches and 11% click uplift in Auto Suggestions Improved Relevancy Rankings for Top 50 items click share by 3%. Played around with parameters for boosting Launched an Image Search Feature for Ajio that had 4% adoption within a week of taking it live Building a dynamic pricing engine that optimises for Gross Margin

Principal Product Manager at Cricket.com, Jul 2018 - Jun 2021 · 3 yrs, Bengaluru Area, India, First hire on the team. Head of Product and Data Built the team from scratch, leading the unit from 1 to a 20 member team. Responsible for Product | Design | Data Science| Editorial and Vendor relations for the first 10 months. Built Cricket's first trademarked ML product called "Criclytics" which presents stats in a new form. Criclytics helps us maximise on consumer adoption in the second screen experience for the cricket fan's user journey. Mentored a team of 3 Product Managers, 5 Data Scientists, 10 Writers, 2 User Analytics professionals and 2 Designers, and Cricket Operations Back End. Cricket.com was cricket's first ML meets Interaction Design moment for scale (At a Global Level) Some of the areas my work touched at Cricket.com Product Roadmap Creation Product User Journey Mapping Working with Design and Data Science to create interactions Working with Branding/Marketing to communicate Product features| talking points for advertisement script writing Working with Data Science to refine models. Have built new feature sets like "Who is winning", "Death Over Simulator" and "Play Offs Projector" Working with External Vendors and driving Vendor relationships Working with Design on User Research to keep updating our user personas Working with User Analytics Team to record user events that we need to track (Firebase/CleverTap) Working on filling key mid-management and leadership for other units.

Lead Product Manager at Thoughtworks, Aug 2016 - Apr 2018 · 1 yr 9 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area, Key Responsibilities and Deliverables a) Consulting clients of Thoughtworks India, and help them with their product development journey. b) Work with local market demand team, to shape up proposals for Product Management work Achievements a) Consulted clients across the following categories (Peer to Peer Lending, Rural Archive Content Media, Urban Governance, Real Estate Reports Marketplace, Urban App based Transportation), leading to consulting work in the following domains a. Roadmap aligning with Vision b. Product Feature and Roadmap prioritization c. Re-Writing User Stories and using better interaction design to abstract the right problem and solution fit d. Offline to Online Digitisation for Online Reports provider for real estate industry. e. Aligning Key Metrics and Adoption metrics, apart from aligning insight from different functions into product releases.

Senior Product Manager at Disney and ESPN Media Networks, Oct 2013 - Oct 2014 · 1 yr 1 mo, Bangalore, Worked for ESPNCricinfo. The virtual 'home of cricket'. Used to manage the gaming portfolio. Fantasy Cricket, Cric IQ ( Quizzing Game) and Predictor. Used to also help out with Video research, and host shows specific to Fantasy Cricket with cricket writers and fans. Happened to win a Writing/Commentary contest for Super Fans called CricJockey-Season 1 and was offered a position at ESPN.

Product Management Specialist at Other Companies Worked for, 2008 - 2016 · 8 yrs, Brief Details

Education

PGPM, Marketing, Finance, Great Lakes Institute of Management

Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science Engineering, University of Madras