Akshat Agrawal
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Toptal member since July 8, 2022
Akshat is a product manager with nine years of experience and an expert at scaling products and product teams to maturity. He has worked with some of the top names in the tech industry and built products used by millions of users. Akshat's experience with Agile helped him build, run, and profitably sell an edtech company and taught him the importance of budgeting, validating a hypothesis with data, building an MVP, testing the product-market fit early, and iterating accordingly.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- A/B Testing
- Agile Product Management
- Cross-functional Team Leadership
- Data-driven Decision-making
- Product Growth
- Product Leadership
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
- User Research
Work Experience
Head of Product
StrategyConnect
- Created a fully functioning team of two front-end and two back-end developers, a product designer, and a QA engineer within the budget of $5,000 per month.
- Scaled the product team from two outsourced vendors to six in-house full-time contributors, bringing down the development budget by 35%.
- Made a fully functional, revenue-generating product from scratch in 12 months.
- Implemented Agile product development practices to break down the epics into manageable stories by having smaller sprints with more frequent releases and updates, resulting in the development culture's impact and outcome's efficacy.
- Developed a prioritization framework that considered user needs and business goals to ensure the development team's alignment and bring value to the business by better serving the customer.
- Established an environment of learning, trust, and open communication in a young team to help them achieve their potential and have a shared understanding of problem statements and development goals.
- Ideated on the user needs and business goals to lay down the foundations of features, the look-and-feel of the MVP, and differentiate between the must-haves and good-to-haves.
- Built a reporting structure to bring transparency to the progress of development goals, gather quick and early feedback, and align the development initiatives with business requirements.
Senior Product Manager
American Technology Consulting
- Helped the company save an estimated $200,000 in development costs on building a product that would not have met their revenue expectations.
- Collaborated on adding an estimated incremental annual revenue of $300,000 from the existing product line by adding new features using third-party API solutions.
- Built a product team and culture for Agile practices, data-based decision making, rigorous hypothesis testing, and open communication to set up successful execution of future product initiatives.
Senior Product Manager
Snapdeal
- Increased daily incremental orders up to 2,500 via the Share and Earn program.
- Contributed to the gamification experiment, which led to a 30% increase in average user's session length, engagement lift by 2%, and conversion lift as high as 6%.
- Reduced app uninstallations by 23% during the COVID-19 lockdown and saved $300,000 in the app reinstall campaign.
- Built a video-led shopping strategy and enabled the shopping experience by creating the point-and-click and buy-the-look type of TikTok-style short-form entertainment videos.
- Devised content partnerships for a movie library inspired by Amazon Prime to be offered as part of the loyalty program.
- Executed the go-to-market strategy for growth initiatives, including digital marketing on TikTok, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Google Search, blogger networks, PR promotions, and third-party mobile operating system campaign partnerships like MIUI.
- Introduced Octalysis framework-based behavioral experiments deploying gamification elements in eCommerce to impact incremental conversion, like one-minute daily deals, phonebooks, social nudging, leaderboards, quizzes, and spin the wheel.
- Led the loyalty and subscriptions programs, tested various parameters for adoption and revenue optimization, and handled brand partnerships.
- Pushed for influencer- and reseller-led social commerce programs as part of the Share and Earn initiative.
Senior Product Manager
FIITJEE
- Identified key product improvements by setting up surveys, user interviews, and analyzing the user behavior data.
- Helped hire, mentor, and build a high-performance cross-functional team to create content, marketing, and communication strategy, design and develop pods, analyze data, revamp the content and UI, and introduce the gamified experience.
- Built a culture of learning, openness, data-based decision making, and hypothesis testing while aligning with business goals and user needs.
- Managed the product P&L, built a frugal and effective marketing and sales strategy, and formulated processes to quickly gather feedback and optimize the user experience on the platform.
- Increased the count of monthly active users on MyPAT, the e-learning product we built, from 5,000 to 100,000, impacting adoption and retention and increasing the engagement and session length by 36%.
- Pushed the revenue of MyPAT by ₹1,500 million in two years.
- Received an industry award for the best technology product in the education domain.
Founder and Chief Product Officer
Alpha Beta Classes
- Raised equity investments of ₹4 million from private investors.
- Built a cross-functional team of 12 to handle product design, development, and marketing.
- Developed a product from scratch and grew the annual revenue to ₹6.5 million in two years.
- Created content and marketing partnerships to scale up product offerings and revenue, which led to selling the company to a competitor and earning all stakeholders a significant return on investment.
Project Manager
Vikram Solar
- Executed installation projects worth $5 million in revenue.
- Initiated 18 new vendor contracts, creating exclusive and dedicated partnerships to build trust, obtain better terms, and reduce costs.
- Implemented a practice for just-in-time inventory management to decrease overhead costs by 12%.
- Oversaw the installation of a 75kW solar project with 242 photovoltaic modules to produce an annual energy yield of 100,000 units and save 93.1 metric tons of CO2 emissions every year at the DENSO manufacturing facility at Manesar, India.
- Prepared the project budget and effectively managed engineering challenges to ensure the commission of one of the largest institutional solar installations in India—a 400kW plant for Anmol biscuits in Bhubaneswar.
Project History
One Minute Daily Deals
Led the project that resulted in a 2.5% lift in control group conversion, 1.2% lift in the frequency of visits, and 0.8% lift in average session length.
The project aimed to solve the users’ pain point of discovering platform deals in a way that gamified the experience, resulting in higher engagement and helping improve conversion.
We set up a test-group experiment for 5% of the user base who were presented with a treasure chest on their homepages, revealing three heavily discounted deals on the platform’s best-selling products. But there was a catch—the users could see only one of the deals at a time and had a maximum of 60 seconds to decide whether to buy the product or lose the deal. If they chose to skip to the next deal, the previous one would expire. The experiment was designed to push the impulse buying behavior.
The game proved so effective that many users visited the platform daily to check for deals. The hypothesis was that if we push the engagement by having repeated visits and prolonged session activity, the conversion would be higher, even if the deal discovery was not easier.
The test results validated the hypothesis, and we gradually scaled the experiment to 90% of the audience to test the secondary variables for revenue optimization.
B2B SAAS Product for Strategy Consulting Companies to Manage Their Project Workflows
Built the product team and the product from scratch in 12 months within an allocated monthly budget of $5,000 into a fully functional offering, serving three corporate clients and earning $2,000 a month in revenue.
The strategy consulting industry was, even before COVID-19, in need of project management solutions for teams split between different locations. The project progress required different types of reporting for stakeholders, including utilization rate and the billing for the consulting company, clarity on deliverables for consultants, and tangible outcomes for the client.
The software allowed the strategy consulting company to manage a project throughout its lifecycle—from generating leads to closing the scope. It included managing client billing and matching the right consultants to the project based on the capability set. The hours were logged by having consultants raise bills, track the project progress, generate reports and tangible outcomes for the client, get the client feedback, and manage the new information.
The project required conducting user interviews with boutique strategy consulting companies that may target product users to better understand their needs. A lean product development team was put together and gathered feedback on feature usability after each sprint release.
MyPat – Online Learning and Testing Platform
http://www.mypat.inRevamped the content of the e-learning platform and UI to make it more user-friendly and introduced gamification-led UX design to increase adoption, engagement, and revenue.
Surveys and interviews identified poor content and UI as two major pain points. The goal was to improve engagement, including session frequency, length, and goal completions per session. A higher engagement would push the learning outcome, the demand for the product, and its revenue.
To solve the issue, we improved content tagging for relevance. The test results showed that AI-based content presentation and learning suggestions highlighted customized and gamified learning experiences to create a more engaging UI. Introducing points, leader boards, badges, reward unlocks, and levels turn lessons into missions. We also developed a test analysis and recommendation engine to help users understand their lacuna and recognize the topics and concepts they need to practice on.
My contribution led to monthly active users rising from 5,000 to 100,000 and a revenue increase of ₹1,500 million.
Education
Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA)
University of Oklahoma - Norman, OK, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi - Delhi, India
Certifications
Artificial Intelligence Foundations for Product Managers
Google Analytics Essential Training
Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | via Coursera
Design Thinking for Innovation
University of Virginia | via Coursera
Metrics for Product Managers
Skills
Tools
Jira, Slack, Zoom, Confluence, Google Analytics
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Design Thinking, Gamification, Agile, Agile UX, Agile Workflow, Agile Software Development
Other
Agile Practices, User Experience (UX), User Research, Product Strategy, Product Management, IT Product Management, Product Growth, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Product Roadmaps, Team Leadership, Agile Leadership, Product Leadership, Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy, Agile Sprints, Sprint Planning, Product Development, Lean Product Development, Team Building, IT Services, IT Strategy, Data Communication, Social Communication, SaaS Product Management, Business to Consumer (B2C), B2B Product Management, SaaS Product Marketing, Market Research & Analysis, Minimum Marketable Product (MMP), Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Agile CRM, Agile Product Delivery, Agile Coaching, Customer Research, Market Research, Stakeholder Management, Stakeholder Engagement, Lean Product Management, Data Analysis, User Interviews, Pricing Strategy, Profit & Loss (P&L), UX Leadership, Culture Management, Product Planning, Product Thinking, Cross-functional Collaboration, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Competition Research, Cross-departmental Collaboration, Sprint Retrospectives, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), User Feedback, Product Design, Product Ownership, Presentation Design, Product Owner, Scrum Product Owner, Data-driven Decision-making, Data-informed Decisions, Demand Generation, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Product Engineering, Software QA, Agile Delivery, Product Marketing, A/B Testing, Scrum Master, Growth Hacking, Growth Marketing Product Manager, UX Design, Mobile UX, Mobile UX Design, User Behavior, Growth Marketing, Lean Product Manager, Viral Marketing, Web Platforms, Marketing Strategy, Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Social Commerce, eCommerce, Influencer Marketing, Communication Strategy, Intuitive UX Design, Product Benchmarking, Community Growth, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Feature Prioritization, Prioritization Frameworks, B2B Partnerships, Strategic Partnerships, Sprints, Revenue Optimization, Revenue Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Client Relationship Management, Vendor Management, Cost Management, Project Management & Delivery, Quality Management, Quality Control (QC), Financial Reporting, Business Development, Partnerships, Performance Analysis, Statistical Data Analysis, Innovation, Management, Growth Strategy, Startup Growth Strategy Development, Communication, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence Product Manager, Feature Planning, Early-stage Startups, Lean Startups, User Needs, UserVoice, User Flows, User Personas, Business Cases, Business, New Product Development, Educational Platform Design, Education Product Manager, Product Analytics, Metrics, Analysis, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)
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