Headline

Senior Director of Product | AI Transformation, Monetization & Growth

About

I drive high-impact business transformations that require a blend of complex cross-functional coordination, pragmatic systems thinking, and deep technical grounding. I am highly effective at bridging the gap between left-brain mandates (Machine Learning infrastructure, P&L management) and right-brain mandates (editorial content strategy, user experience, and data communication). ▪AI/ML Product Leadership: Led enterprise Machine Learning and Agentic AI frameworks from the ground up to multi-million DAU. Optimized scalable event-driven architectures to drive algorithmic content delivery. ▪B2C Product-Led Growth (PLG): Led product discovery for TOI+ and pivoted TOI app into an algorithmic content and commerce aggregator to scale monetization. ▪B2B Go-to-Market (GTM) & Consultative Sales: Bootstrapped and successfully exited two profitable technology ventures. Gained deep enterprise experience driving multi-million-dollar consultative sales cycles with global teams like Amdocs. ▪Executive Communication: Skilled at translating complex, multi-vector retrieval systems into transparent business narratives for CXO stakeholders. Author of Techno-nomics, Algorithmic Flywheels (TOI Digital), with industry insights published in Harvard's Nieman Lab; active speaker and leader across premier tech communities (INMA, DataMeet).

Location

South Delhi

AI stack

anthropic apis

claude code

claude

elevenlabs

gemini

langchain

Work experience

Senior Director of Product Management (AI, Growth, Monetization) at Times Internet, Dec 2025 - Present · 9 mos, On-site, Navigating macro headwinds: web traffic loss due to LLM, declining display/advertorial yield, and unit-economics pressure on apps. Leading 40+ cross-functional team. Protected revenue and retention metrics through a major positioning pivot of a decade-old app: ▪Churn mitigation by 100% automating notifications (cut quantity by 66% and suppressed high-churn content). ▪Insulated indirect revenue against traffic losses by pivoting the app into an algorithmic content aggregator. Cross-brand adoption grew from 0% to 35% by deploying algorithms like: "You may like", topic clustering, and "Fewer like this". ▪Grew monetizable inventory (thus, ROAS potential and paid acquisition investment case) by converting the app into a subscription and lead-generation commerce aggregator. ▪Scaled user acquisition via performance marketing campaigns on Google UAC and Meta, App Store Optimization (ASO), and organic referral installs through owned channels like web-to-app, print, and social.

Senior Director of Product Management (Machine Learning, Generative AI) at Times Internet, Jun 2022 - Nov 2025 · 3 yrs 6 mos, Remote, Broke a decade-long AI transformation deadlock on algorithmic distribution, navigating techno-commercial and safety risks. Doubled feed CTR and improved retention by setting up and scaling algorithmic distribution on a multi-million DAU app. Managed stakeholder skepticism with transparent dashboards and writing extensively on AI/ML strategy. ▪Hired and led a direct-report team of data scientists and domain-specialists to execute the enterprise AI roadmap. ▪Generated bottom-line savings by sunsetting CleverTap and driving adoption of in-house Customer Data Platform (CDP) with Kafka data pipelines (100M+ daily events) and a ClickHouse warehouse; coverage benchmarked against GA. ▪De-risked capital expenditure by proving ML model performance on decade-old NVIDIA Tesla GPUs before securing H100s. ▪Cost-modeled unit economics of inference to fit a tight, low-ARPU business: Latency optimization down to sub-200ms. ▪Reduced architecture fragility by investing in event-driven architecture, Apache Airflow for orchestration and ML observability. ▪Identified and lobbied to remove UX and ‘DAU hitting paywall’ decisions to remove bias in clickstream so feedback loop closes. ▪Reduced systemic legal and brand risk by designing three production-ready LLM agents using DSPy and vector embeddings, backed by custom evaluation datasets and LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks. ▪Built highly efficient collaborative filtering with Learning to Rank (LTR) models with 30-minute training-and-deployment cycles.

Director of Product Management at Times Internet, Dec 2021 - May 2022 · 6 mos, Remote, Structural trade-off: Reliance on blunt segmentation based ‘DAU-hitting paywall’ strategy traded short-term conversion for churn. Mitigated trade-off by delivering a 107% increase in CTR and achieving 9% CTR recirculation among subscribers using ML.

Associate Director of Product at Times Internet, Dec 2020 - Nov 2021 · 11 mo, Remote

Co-Founder at PROTO, Sep 2018 - Sep 2020 · 2 yrs 1 mo, Hybrid, ▪Identified and capitalized on global market demand to combat platform misinformation post-2016. ▪Bootstrapped a profitable 15-member agency, closing consultative sales: WhatsApp and Gates Foundation. ▪Launched a verification tipline for WhatsApp that achieved global media recognition. ▪Successfully exited equity after macroeconomic shifts due COVID-19.

Co-Founder at pykih, Sep 2013 - Aug 2018 · 5 yrs, Hybrid, ▪Having worked in Big Data at Amdocs, I knew the demand for data communication. The release of D3.js created an opportunity. ▪Bootstrapped a profitable, 18-member agency, delivering complex data products to 90 clients across 7 countries. ▪Consultative sales to clients, including Microsoft, ICICI Lombard, UNDP, FusionCharts, Datawrapper, and NarendraModi.in. ▪Sold off IP, executing a systematic exit at peak cash position as commoditization hit the data visualization market.

Bereavement at Career Break, Mar 2011 - Aug 2013 · 2 yrs 6 mos, Relocated to India to care for an ailing parent. Consulted selectively.

Technical Consultant at Amdocs US, Jun 2006 - Feb 2011 · 4 yrs 9 mos, Greater St. Louis, ▪Gained global exposure across enterprise software and consultative sales through assignments in India, Israel, and the US. ▪Worked on the consultative sales team for AT&T, providing solutions that contributed to securing multi-million USD sales.

Education

Bachelor Of Engineering, Information Technology, University of Mumbai