Headline

0-to-1 category discovery · Found 5 categories — now ₹50 Cr+/month | Engagement & Retention | ex-Tata Motors

About

I find categories before the market does. At Porter, I've discovered five new vehicle categories the company hadn't mapped — pairing demand signals from deep user research with supply feasibility I can read from years inside commercial vehicles — and turned them into ₹50 Cr+ in combined monthly GMV. I'm a product manager with 9 years in marketplace and logistics, and my work lives where most PMs don't go: the seam between supply and demand. Uncovering latent user needs is half the job; knowing whether the supply side — vehicles, drivers, unit economics — can actually deliver is the other half. Most PMs only see the first half. I see both, and that's the difference. A few things I’ve helped build and shipped at Porter: - Five 0-to-1 categories — Mini 3W scaled ₹1.2 Cr → ₹25 Cr/month in 8 months; Outstation, a shelved category, revived ₹5 Cr → ₹14 Cr/month in 6 months. - The PMF-validation playbook the product org now runs its discovery on. - 2,000+ driver interviews across 25+ studies — user research at a depth that's rare at this level. Right now I'm deep in the supply side using data and ML — lifting driver-partner utilization, predicting and reducing new-partner churn, and rebuilding the fairness of our automated suspension engine. Same instinct as the category work: find the real problem, size it, then build. My fluency comes from the initial five years at Tata Motors, where I went from Associate Product Manager to Senior Product Manager – Strategy on a fast-track path through sales, product development, planning, product-line finance, and new ventures. It's why I can hold the whole picture at once — read a P&L, sit with a customer, and judge whether supply can deliver, often in the same week. Along the way I owned the end-to-end development of Tata Ace Gasoline, from customer research to launch; it grew to 35%+ of Tata's small-commercial-vehicle mix. Always happy to talk about marketplace, logistics, or anywhere supply-demand dynamics and 0-to-1 bets matter. 📩 itisvinaysharma@gmail.com

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude

gemini

notebooklm

notion

claudecode

Work experience

Product at Porter, Sep 2026 - Present · 1 mo, Bangalore

Lead Product Researcher at Porter, Apr 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 7 mos, Leading end-to-end category discovery for Porter's on-demand logistics (intra and inter-city) — from identifying to launching, scaling, and sustaining healthy supply, driven by data, ML, and user insights. • Discovering driver-partner utilisation via an opportunity-solution tree; scoping ML to fix a 52%-accuracy suspension engine (MVP in design) and 40% new-partner 3-month churn. • Discovered & launched Porter's first two unmapped vehicle categories (9ft Pickup, E-Loader EV) by pairing latent-demand signals from user research with commercial-vehicle supply-feasibility analysis. • Codified the white space mapping into Porter's PMF-validation playbook, now the org-wide discovery standard (since extended by the team to 17ft and 19ft). • Discovered Mini 3W and 14ft Pickup off that playbook: Mini 3W scaled ₹1.2 Cr → ₹25 Cr/month in 8 months (Porter's fastest category ramp); 9ft and 14ft each crossed ₹10+ Cr/month within 6 months. • Revived Outstation, a shelved inter-city category, by re-diagnosing its PMF gap and reworking pricing and serviceability — ₹5 Cr → ₹14 Cr/month in 6 months. • Ran 2,000+ driver interviews across 25+ studies to size latent demand before build; lead a 4-person research team. Combined, these launches contribute ₹50 Cr+ in monthly GMV.

Senior Manager, Strategic Initiatives at Porter, Jan 2023 - May 2024 · 1 yr 5 mos, Built Porter's supply-side growth engine — a new OEM-driven driver-acquisition channel from scratch — and ran the category research that seeded Porter's Trucks expansion. • Built Porter's OEM partnership channel from zero — 5 OEM tie-ups with API integrations and joint GTM — driving 300+ driver onboardings/month across 15 cities at ₹0 CAC. • Lifted dedicated driver-partner share by 5pp and secured OEM launch-plan and vehicle-sales data now feeding Porter's onboarding-funnel and market-share planning. • Ran data-driven research on existing category offerings and recommended a strategic recategorization — identifying ~30% whitespace in market coverage that seeded Porter's new-category roadmap.

Senior Product Manager - Strategy at Tata Motors, Oct 2021 - Oct 2022 · 1 yr 1 mo, Pune Division, Maharashtra, India, Fast-tracked onto Tata's New Ventures track — handpicked to own 0-to-1 product bets beyond the core vehicle business. • Developed a D2C platform helping 2000+ drivers become self-employed truck owners by leading a 11-person cross-functional team, authored 50+ PRDs, shipped the MVP app, and 10+ institutional MoUs. • Shaped Tata's new-generation small commercial EV concept — turning customer, cost, and use-case insight into an early product definition for a category Tata hadn't yet entered. • Selected onto the strategic-initiatives track by VP & ED leadership (2021) — the group tasked with product bets outside the core portfolio.

Senior Manager - Product Line Finance, CBO’s Office at Tata Motors, Aug 2021 - Oct 2021 · 3 mos, Pune Division, Maharashtra, India, Owned the commercial lens on the product portfolio — ran monthly profitability analysis across the live lineup, and identified levers to make Small Commercial Vehicle business EBITDA positive.

Product Manager - Planning & Configuration at Tata Motors, May 2020 - Aug 2021 · 1 yr 4 mos, Pune Division, Maharashtra, India, Owned portfolio and platform strategy for Tata's Small Commercial Vehicle line (<2T). • Defined a 5-year product roadmap with 7 Product launches unlocking 15% incremental market coverage and cutting time-to-market 18% via a modularity / platform-architecture approach. • Ran market-research studies to map the customer needs hierarchy, paired it with competitive benchmarking and global-OEM architecture tear-downs to identify white spaces and Product attributes. • Drove cross-functional decisions on portfolio plans and architecture options, owning deliverables from kickoff through product-concept freeze.

Research & Framework Design at Development Environergy Services Limited, May 2016 - Jun 2016 · 2 mos, New Delhi Area, India, Solid Waste segregation and Waste to Energy • Built a framework for electricity generation from Municipal solid waste by converting it to a Refused derived fuel (RDF) using different segregation techniques. • Conducted a Flue gas flow analysis in boiler (using Solidworks fluent software) for designing the boiler pipes in order to optimize the boiler performance used in thermal power plant.

Research & 3D Modeling at Himachal Road Transport Corporation (HRTC), May 2015 - Jun 2015 · 2 mos, Himachal Pradesh, India, Interned at an Automobile Workshop to develop a deeper understanding of after-sales service. I studied Cummins V6 Engine (used in 24 seater Tata Buses) part by part and designed a model of same in Solidworks design software to improve my design skills.

Education

Bachelor’s Degree, Mechanical Engineering, Dr B R Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar

Higher Secondary Education, Non Medical, kendriya vidyalaya