Top 50 Product Leaders To Watch: Upraised Game Changers 2024 [Part II]

A thought leader, capable of churning out innovative ideas, open to realising customer pain points, and equipped with problem-solving skills – all while racing against time.

Hold it! This is not the description of a corporate leader, but the strengths of a great product manager. 

And, there’s no dearth of such professionals in India. They not only embrace this responsibility but also excel at it like true champions. Their efforts, however, remain largely unnoticed despite the massive success of the products they design.  

That was the trigger behind Upraised, a platform to train individuals to become product managers without an MBA degree, to come up with Upraised Game Changers 2024 list, celebrating the product managers who not only solved problems that affected millions of users but also created significant business impact. Product managers from Swiggy, Myntra, Uber, Invideo, INDmoney, Rapido, MPL, and many other leading Indian brands have been picked up through a multi-step process which included an expert-led shortlisting based on their framework evaluation, community engagement, public voting, and a final review.

With this, we bring you the second batch of 25 product leaders, who made the cut by leading innovation, bringing positive disruption, and proving to be the real game-changers in an increasingly bustling startup ecosystem in India. Let’s take a look at the Upraised Game Changers 2024 list. 

Here’s The List Of Upraised Game Changers 2024

1. Aarish Khanna, SDE-1, Swiggy

Making a grocery list and handing it over to the shopkeeper for weekly or monthly supplies is a good old practice in the ubiquitous Indian household. In the process, no matter how much you try, one or two items are sure to fall out of the list. 

When quick commerce came into play and replaced the traditional grocery shop for most urban households, shopping for supplies became a lot easier, but searching for items on the app turned out to be a lot harder than making the list in longhand. 

Swiggy’s Aarish Khanna realised the pain point and got into brainstorming with his team. They developed a feature that allows users to scan their handwritten or printed grocery lists using their phone camera to search for all items at once on Instamart, Swiggy’s quick delivery venture.  

Once the feature went live, it became an instant hit, and Swiggy recorded a considerable improvement in the cart-to-conversion rate. It also helped save time for the user.

2. Naina Bansal, Senior Product Manager, Swiggy 

Naina Bansal worked with Aarish Khanna in the team that developed the feature for Swiggy Instamart that helped the customer scan their handwritten or printed grocery lists using their smartphone camera and cut down the hassle of searching for each item individually on the platform. 

The feature earned massive love and appreciation from Instamart users and gained popularity on social media while also cutting down the delivery time for consumers. 

3. Abhijit Khasnis, CTO, Healthify

Healthify, a digital health and wellness application, was trying to find a solution to deal with the inaccuracies in user-fed data on their calorie intake. The data shared by users for assessing calories in their meals was often based on estimates, while feeding every detail about the meal made the whole process quite tedious.

Abhijit Khasnis turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to devise a solution by deploying an AI-powered image recognition tool. He made it capable of identifying a food item from the image shared by the user, estimating the portions, and calculating the calorie intake for that serving. 

This made meal logging faster, more accurate, and more engaging for Healthify users. The result was a 50% surge in food-tracking activity among the users. 

4. Abhishek Madan, Former VP, Product Management, Paytm

Will there be a parking facility? How much do they charge? Will it be safe for kids? Can we get food there? What sort of food? How about beverages? Alcohol? Such endless thoughts crowd our minds whenever we book tickets for a live event. More often than not, the event detail page (EDP) lacks these details, which can hamper the user’s experience on the booking platform.

Paytm Insider (later acquired by Zomato), wanted to spare the user of such worries. Abhishek Madan decided to develop the EDP as a collection of widgets that could be easily updated from the backend. With this, the organisers could add as many details about the event as possible, along with YouTube videos and PDF files, directly on the details page.

With a Spotify widget, they can also add a handcrafted playlist of the artist, helping the audience discover or rediscover the performers at the event.

5. Aditya Narayanan, Senior Product Manager, Swiggy

When you are hosting a party, it’s easy to get the food through a delivery app like Swiggy. But it’s quite a tough task, and cumbersome too, to ask everyone what they would like to have and place the order without messing up with the quantity or missing out on one or two items. 

Every host hates such an experience. When Aditya Narayanan was tasked to ensure a better user experience, he came up with a new feature for group ordering. This allows the user to choose a restaurant, invite all the guests to share a cart, ask everyone to add items to the cart, and finally process the entire order together. The feature cuts the chaos and makes the food-ordering process smarter.  

After this feature was added to the app, Swiggy’s average order value grew 0.25% and increased user participation by reactivating dormant accounts, with an activation rate zooming 85%. 

6. Akash Yadav, Senior UX Manager, Myntra

Short video contents seem to have set off a storm in social media, driving a billion-plus Indian smartphone users into scrolling. 

As these short videos emerged as a great mobiliser of sales, ecommerce platforms started trying to leverage it by cutting down fragmentation in customer journeys from discovering the product on one app and then opening another one to place an order. 

Myntra decided to build an immersive short-video content platform within its application that would allow the user to discover products and place orders from there itself to stop disruption in the viewing experience. 

Akash Yadav delivered Myntra Minis as a feature designed to mix short-form entertainment with an easy shopping experience. This allows the user to scroll reel-like Minis and order products directly. 

When the feature went live on Myntra, the adoption rate for Minis increased 5%, which means 5% of users were watching mini videos and making shopping decisions.

7. Aman Shah, Product Manager, Uber

Booking a cab was never so easy until apps like Uber came up. But getting the cab has often been a problem when the cabbie doesn’t show up or answer your calls. It leads to unnecessary delays and forces the rider to eventually cancel the booking and also bear the cancellation fee. 

With the frequency of such incidents increased, customers started raising their concern. Uber had to resolve the issue. 

Aman Shah and his team came up with a button on the ride page for situations where the driver shows no movement towards the pickup location. The rider can use this option and get a new ride without any change in fare or cancellation charge. The feature is designed in a way that it does not match the rider with the same driver who initially ignored the ride. 

The feature became popular very soon and Uber was able to improve the experience for millions of users. It also reduced rider cancellations by 2% worldwide.

8. Anbu Dhileepan P, Principal Product Manager, Swiggy

Have you ever wondered why a dragon straight from Game of Thrones was on the way to deliver your food? At times, it’s a Croma truck that delivers the latest iPhone that shows up on the Swiggy tracking page, instead of the rider.   

Swiggy wanted to monetise its order tracking page in a creative and engaging way. Anbu Dhileepan P introduced Map Ads, a feature by which advertisers can design icons that would replace the rider’s icon on the order-tracking page. 

The ads not only secured huge visibility, but also powered multiple viral marketing campaigns for brands like the FIFA World Cup, Game of Thrones and Croma. With Map Ads, Swiggy successfully unlocked a fresh revenue channel while keeping the key customer experience metrics in check.

9. Sudhir Mani, Director Product Management, Swiggy 

Sudhir Mani led the monetisation efforts for the order tracking page of the app, along with Anbu Dhileepan P, in the superimposed partner advertisements.

While the brainchild of Sudhir and Anbu, Map Ads, opened an option for brands to reach out to millions of Swiggy users, for the delivery app, it created a revenue channel without any annoying pop-ups or sidebars. 

For the user, the innovative design ended the monotony of the same icon and also made it somewhat entertaining. 

10. Harshit Madan, Founder, Alle 

“Will it look good on me?” Almost everyone shopping for clothes online gets dogged by such a worry. “It doesn’t appear as good on me as I thought it to be.” The shopper often gets bitten by such feelings after the product is delivered. 

The cause is the lack of visual imaging options and the effect is frequent abandoning of carts and costly returns. 

This is precisely what Harshit Madan wanted to solve. By using artificial intelligence at its core, Alle is trying to make the online shopping experience for its users more guided and reassuring. 

The platform offers personalised styling advice and visual inspiration for the products that users are considering. Shoppers can ask questions in their natural language to Alle, such as, “would this dress suit me?” or “how can I style this top?” and Alle will respond with personalised recommendations, acting as a personal stylist.

Alle’s AI assistant can also offer a curated selection of popular looks, showing how a product can be styled in real life. This feature remained at the core of Alle and made a significant impact on user retention on the app.

11. Kaushik Subramanian, Product Manager, Mobile Premier League

Mobile Premier League (MPL) is an Indian online gaming platform offering dozens of games. The variety of games on the platform sometimes, however, confuses new players who join MPL after interacting with a specific game on ads but do not immediately find it when they visit the website or download the app. This often creates frustration for users trying to find the game they want to play.  

To solve this, Kaushik Subramanian built a mechanism, which ensures that new users can reach the same game on the website and the app that they interacted with in an advertisement. For example, if users engaged with an MPL ad featuring Rummy on Facebook, their touchpoints on the website or the app would highlight Rummy and other related games.  

This feature has led to an improvement of up to 60% in projected paybacks from some of the campaigns where the company used this personalisation.

12. Kaushiki, Product Manager, Zepto 

For the budget-conscious Indians, offline remained the preferred buying option because it allows them to negotiate the prices, especially while buying in bulk. Online platforms typically do not offer this flexibility. 

Quick commerce platform Zepto spotted an opportunity in this. After Kaushiki was tasked to bridge this gap, she came up with the idea of Zepto Super Saver, a dedicated section on the platform that offers discounts on larger orders while retaining all the benefits of quick commerce.

Super Saver soon became a top choice for families and shared households, allowing them to maximise savings by buying in bulk without compromising on the convenience of fast delivery.

13. Siddesh Patil, Senior Product Manager, Zepto 

Siddesh Patil worked with Kaushiki in bringing Zepto Super Saver to the platform. By offering the users a chance to save more on bulk buying, it opened an untapped section of buyers to the quick commerce company. 

These buyers so far preferred the offline channel for the flexibility of negotiating prices.  

For Zepto, the feature translated into an overall improvement in revenue and a 28.7% spike in the net average order value. 

14. Kirkston Dsouza, Product Manager, InVideo 

InVideo is a cloud-based platform that uses AI to generate videos from text prompts. As the platform gained popularity, the founders wondered how users created impressive videos by entering elaborate prompts. However, some users were facing a challenge. It was a blank prompt box that they did not know how to fill.

To address this, the team came up with the idea of Workflows, which offers users specific options and presets to help them create videos in their desired style. When Kirkston Dsouza was assigned the task to implement the idea, he collaborated closely with Sunny, the company’s design head, to launch Workflows with just three options, which were well received by users.

15. Utsab Dasgupta, Senior Product Manager, InVideo 

Ustab Dasgupta worked with Kirkston Dsouza to integrate Workflows into the text-to-video AI platform. Workflows allow users to choose presets based on the purpose for which they are creating videos.  

The feature went live on the platform and resulted in a 1.4 times improvement in the company’s user retention. InVideo plans to roll out the next set of improvements and additions to Workflows in the next few months.

16. Kriti Sharma, Product Manager, Yulu Bikes

Yulu Bikes, which provides low-speed, two-wheeler electric vehicles on rent in cities, was staggered with poor discoverability and low effectiveness of the referral programme. A deeper look into the issue showed that the refer-to-earn option was buried deep down in the menu, rewards were not lucrative enough, and users had no option to track their progress.

That is when Kriti Sharma and her team introduced four features that included nudging the users on the rentals home page, switching to a percentage-based cashback reward system, launching a contact-based reward system, and gamifying the overall referral experience.

The revamp turned out to be successful as the referral channel share grew by three times while reducing the referral cost by over 33%. Thanks to Sharma’s implementation, Yulu Bikes generates over 500 leads a day from the programme and hosts 57% higher traffic on its referral page. 

17. Mayank Misra, VP – Product Management, INDmoney

We hardly get to see a complete picture of our financial assets and liabilities in a single statement. With money scattered across various instruments, tracking everything at once becomes a challenge. This lack of visibility makes us less aware of our net worth, spending capacity, and creditworthiness.

All-in-one money tracking application INDmoney spotted a scope of innovation in this and Mayank Misra took up the task. Misra and his team identified the requirements of the end-users and implemented advanced trackers that could monitor multiple asset classes. 

The team also developed a mechanism to aggregate all the information about a user’s assets and create a single, comprehensible balance sheet and net worth. This helped the company record growth in customer engagement and retention. 

18. Prateek Jain, Principal Product Manager, Swiggy

Besides its own delivery fleet, Swiggy also operates through the logistics networks of the largest food brands in the country. These brands have their in-house tech ecosystems, which are not easily integrated into Swiggy’s application. This often led to a situation where tracking the delivery partner was not possible if a customer ordered food from these brands through Swiggy. 

This created anxiety among customers, especially in case of a delay in delivery.

To deal with this, Swiggy launched a brand integration initiative led by Prateek Jain, who collaborated closely with the product and tech team of food brands. They developed an API suite which enabled real-time data sharing. 

With this, Swiggy’s customers can now track their orders, irrespective of the brands that they order from. The result? There was a steep decline in ticket requests regarding the location of the delivery partners. 

19. Ravish Bhatia, Head Of Products, indiagold 

Gold loans have been operationally intensive as they require the borrower to carry gold to a branch, where safety, regulatory, and compliance processes are involved. Gold loan fintech indiagold felt a more hassle-free and seamless process would help improve customer experience.   

Teams of product managers, strategists, and engineers, led by Ravish Bhatia, worked on simplifying operational tracking, assaying, and approval systems. They also focussed on branchless core banking and integrations with partner banks to create a complex hyperlocal system that allowed indiagold to offer doorstep lending services. A loan manager comes to the customer’s home, assays, and disburses the loan as per the customer’s convenience, making the entire system of gold loan disbursements as simple as ordering food from Zomato or Swiggy.  

The initiative had a direct impact on the company’s topline, leading to a 1.9 times growth in the loan-to-value ratio and a reduction in customer acquisition costs.

20. Saurabh Misal, Senior Product Manager, Rapido  

Rider safety is a top priority for any ride-hailing company. Two-wheeler app Rapido sought to beef up its security mechanisms for concerns, such as customer safety during late-night rides, triggering alerts if a vehicle remains stationary for too long, and detecting deviations from the system-suggested route in real time.  

Saurabh Misal led the development and implementation of safety features that ensure a seamless experience for both riders and captains. The features proactively notify both parties on real-time monitoring, reducing friction. Riders can take control of directing the captain for a preferred route or asking for help so that Rapido could react on time.

There was also a system for training and screening of captains as per defined guidelines. The company said 3-4 incidents were reported everyday where customers said they were able to avert a mishap as they were notified. As a result, Rapido saw a rise in its net promoter score (NPS), which brought in more female riders. 

21. Sivam Jyotishi, Product Manager, MPL 

Online gaming platform Mobile Premier League (MPL) grappled with shrinking customer engagement for some time. The customers were struggling to find the preferred game on the application, select the right price point, and in-app offers that were affecting the company’s topline. 

Sivam Jyotishi and his team developed a solution that used data-driven insights on user activity to create a personalised journey. Every user is offered exactly what they want based on their previous interaction with the platform. 

The company segmented users into cohorts based on experiences that take the users towards desired behaviours. MPL recorded a 3-10% improvement in user retention. 

22. Himanshu Shukla, Product Head, Zomato

You must have faced situations when you were too keen to attend an event, but hesitated to buy the tickets, either because the venue was far off or you were not sure about your schedules. Such situations always left you in a dilemma over whether to commit or to wait, only to realise later that the tickets were sold out. 

Such experiences are common among people who love attending events but face time constraints, and often end up either with unused tickets or none at all.

When Zomato thought of working out a solution that could be a win-win for both the customer as well as the company, Himanshu Shukla pitched the idea of the Buy Now, Sell Later feature. It allows the user to buy the ticket as early as possible and if, for some reason, they decide to drop out, they can sell it on Zomato at a price capped at the organisers’ discretion. While it saves the money for the user, it helps in the overall sales for the event. 

Shukla firmed up his idea to integrate it into the platform before Zomato’s flagship Feeding India Concert. It removed the scope for users to second-guess before booking the tickets. 

23. Ashish Singh, Product Manager, Zomato 

While stationed at a place, nothing can beat the ease with which we can order our food through an app like Zomato. But it’s not so easy when you are travelling by train. You are forced to settle for whatever is available in the pantry or with the vendors. 

Zomato tied up with the IRCTC to resolve this issue. A team led by Ashish Singh created an integration between Zomato and IRCTC e-catering services, allowing customers to order meals while travelling through the application – either while waiting for their train or while on board.  

Available across over 100 cities so far, this feature ensures that the customer can enjoy fresh, high-quality meals of their choice right from the comfort of their train berth.

24. Onkar Ghorpade, Product Manager, Zomato

From sushi to pizza to fish and chips to butter chicken – it often turns out to be a cuisine world tour whenever you invite friends or relatives and try to order food online. You can’t get so many different delicacies in one place. 

Even if there’s some miracle and you find one restaurant that serves it all, the hassle is far from over. The next rounds of struggle involve figuring out the right quantities, managing individual preferences, and tracking the delivery time. 

Zomato has come up with an innovative idea from Onkar Ghorpade to resolve the crisis. He framed a solution in which the host can share a link with all the invitees and ask everyone to add the food of their choice to the cart. Now, a single order can be placed using this common cart without the need to manage all the chaos yourself. 

25. Vijay Bharadwaj, Associate, Product And Growth, Merlin AI

Merlin AI has designed an advanced artificial intelligence tool to improve search results and condense lengthy web pages into digestible notes, while also personalising user interactions. 

To improve the product further, Merlin AI wanted to synchronise personalised information that users can save with either its browser extension or the mobile application to be used by the assistant whenever required. 

Vijay Bharadwaj was tasked with bringing this idea to life. He led the development of the Save to Merlin feature, which allows the user to select and save information that Merlin automatically organises into topics for future use. This helps the user bookmark all summaries generated by Merlin, whether they are Google search results, notes from YouTube videos, blog summaries, or any other web content, including texts, images, and videos.

Users who tried the feature are consistently returning to it, with nearly 250 users saving content daily on Merlin AI. The company has also observed an increase in app downloads, driven by web users adopting the Merlin mobile app to access the save feature.

All these product leaders have set a benchmark for aspiring innovative leaders and inspire them to push the boundaries of innovation. 

Upraised Game Changers 2024 recognised the efforts of these 50 outstanding product managers, rather the unsung heroes, who are instrumental behind world-class products, made in India, made for the world. Read first part of the list here.