Anant Dhavale
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Pune, Maharashtra, India
Toptal member since May 8, 2026
Anant is a hands-on technical product leader specializing in value-led product management, AI solution architecture, and Agile best practices across a wide range of frameworks. He helps startups shape scalable products and enterprises modernize platforms, optimize workflows, and turn complex challenges into measurable business outcomes. Anant creates a unique blend of design thinking, Lean, Scrum, and Kanban to aid rapid problem space exploration and product delivery.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- AI Agents
- Agile
- Digital Product Development
- IT Consulting
- Product Development
- Product Management
- Product Owner
- Solution Architecture
Work Experience
Founder and Chief Product Manager
Homer Semantics
- Built enterprise products based on semantic context and governance. Products include an agentic governance runtime solution, LLM governance, a multi-agentic testing pipeline for banks, and semantic intelligence for pharmacopeias.
- Led the design of the company's main landing page. Built products using Claude and Codex, and managed CI/CD through GitHub across deployments on Render, Azure, and Railway.
- Released several Python libraries and packages on PYPI and GitHub repositories toward open-source contribution. Managed end- to- end product development from concept to strategy, backlog, hands-on product development, and deployment.
- Built demonstration videos and created blogs and other knowledge assets, and conducted PLG and marketing outreach through LinkedIn, cold emails, and platforms such as Medium, Dev.to, and Product Hunt.
- Worked as an AI governance expert. Built Cerone for AI agent governance (runtime) and GCore for LLM governance. Both libraries are available on PyPI.
- Published thought leadership on the need for agentic governance on LinkedIn and on Medium.
- Defined and automated a pharma clinical operations workflow with multiple agents and runtime agent governance using n8n. A demonstration of the process is available on YouTube.
- Built FinIntel Finance Control Testing AI Agent. Designed and built the Briskread app as a side project for the App Store.
- Vibe-coded 8+ products, three of which launched as MVPs. One product, Cerone, has been downloaded 12,000 times across PyPI and npm. Developed expertise with Claude Code, Codex, and Google Antigravity, building products such as BPMN Builder and Agent Governance Runtime.
- Worked hands-on with GitHub CI/CD and cloud web service deployments across multiple platforms (Render, Azure, and Google Cloud Run), conducted vibe code reviews, security scans, and prompt creation and reviews, and built multi-agent pipelines using Azure and n8n.
Senior Consultant, Agile Product Manager
xScion
- Led end-to-end development of a BPMN-based workflow management product. Conducted problem space research and defined product vision and strategy.
- Oversaw day-to-day product development with the Scrum team. Conducted product reviews with the team and stakeholders, building feedback loops.
- Led product deployment and go-to-market activities. Worked with released managers and legal and security teams.
- Drove product leadership and strategy. Founded xScion’s digital products practice and partnered with the CTO on enterprise solutions, product specs, and go-to-market strategies.
- Delivered Agile coaching impact. Guided executives and teams through Agile product management, design thinking, and project-to-product transformation.
- Managed selected projects end-to-end and coached the team on delivery methodologies. Also managed reporting and project governance.
- Designed business capabilities and value streams. Designed workflows and business processes using the BPNN 2.0 standard in Bizzdesign.
- Led technical presales consulting work, built solution approaches and methodology and framework specifications, and contributed to a successful presales pipeline with a 50% increase in RFP win rate.
- Conducted "As Is" process and systems analysis, and designed "To Be" solutions and process architectures. Built As Is process models using BizzDesign ( BPMN 2.0).
- Conducted stakeholder hothouses (workshops) for understanding and gathering requirements. Built BRDs and product requirements, managed the product backlog on Jira.
Technical Product Manager, Verizon Business
Tech Mahindra
- Led the development of a large B2B provisioning platform for software-defined network (SDN) products.
- Drove product innovation through best-fit template implementation for reducing a complex ordering journey to a simplified digital experience.
- Executed data-driven delivery and analyzed SDN order data to influence CXO decisions.
- Led strategy and stakeholder alignment. Defined OKRs and demonstrated outcome metrics to executives.
- Led design thinking and led product design by identifying key user personas and defining their customer journeys.
- Published a white paper pertaining to product choices on the TM forum.
- Improved provisioning efficiency by reducing order-to-activation cycle time by up to 50% through workflow automation and streamlined SDN service orchestration.
- Defined as is and to be workflows, identified automation candidates, and defined benefit management frameworks for workflow automations using RPA and other technologies.
- Conducted "As Is" value stream, process, and systems analyses, and designed "To Be" solutions and process architectures. Built "As Is" process models using ARIS (BPMN 2.0).
- Conducted gap analysis and impact analysis using process and systems architecture and documentation. Conducted data analysis for thousands of network inventory and order management records to provide requirements to developers.
Product Manager, Business Consulting
Tech Mahindra
- Worked as a product manager/product owner for large Fortune 500 companies, advising them on product strategy, roadmaps, and end-to-end product development.
- Implemented Scrum, Kanban, and Scaled Agile (SAFe) structures, established Scrum ceremonies, and integrated best practices into product management.
- Advised customers on product vision development, OKR definition, and Agile implementation practices.
- Led the development of major B2B platform products with complex, multi-layered use cases and large-scale deployments.
- Utilized process engineering, process due diligence, and process consulting skills to deliver sustained customer value in large transformation programs.
- Built and maintained project requirements, processes, product documentation, SOPs, playbooks, and high- and low-level workflow documentation.
- Defined workflow automation strategies based on impediments, no value-add activities, improvement opportunities, as well as future business objectives and technological evolution.
- Worked as a business process modeling expert and built close to a hundred high-level process diagrams ( HLPDs) using Visio, and built low-level process documents detailing the process ( LLPDs). Adept at using BPMN 2.0 compliant process modeling tools.
- Conducted stakeholder hothouses (workshops) for understanding and gathering requirements. Built BRDs and product requirements, managed the product backlog on Jira.
SAFe Product Owner, Centurylink
Tech Mahindra
- Worked as a product owner for the Layer 2 Ethernet product within the sales and ordering value stream of an enterprise-wide orchestration platform.
- Worked with business and IT teams to understand technical requirements and defined product backlog.
- Conducted backlog grooming sessions with the team, resolved team queries, and reviewed product increments during sprint reviews.
- Improved service task processing by 30% across the value stream.
Product Owner, AT&T
Tech Mahindra
- Led the Pega (Capio) platform implementation project for AT&T, integrating robotic process automation (RPA).
- Defined backlog of the processes to be implemented and built case management, BRD, and other design artifacts.
- Improved order fall-out rate by 30%, leading to significant cost savings and efficiency gains.
- Identified process and workflow automation candidates, designed business process models using Visio.
Project History
Cerone, an AI Agent Governance Runtime Solution
- 95% — Policy Enforcement Coverage
- 90% — Unauthorized Action Prevention Rate
AI in enteprise is hard to control, hard to audit, and hard to explain. Teams deploying AI agents are not able to answer questions such as what data did agents access, how they drifted from the original agents, and what the scope/access was. This creates major issues in terms of compliance, data security, and enteprise governance.
I started with real agent runtime risks, then separated intent from authority. Additionally, I designed SDK/app surfaces and a back end solutions to enforce identity, validation, delegation, trust, and auditing.
I achieved over 95% runtime policy enforcement coverage across AI agent actions, tool calls, and enterprise workflow executions during tests. I prevented over 90% of unauthorized or policy-violating agent actions.
SDN Order Platform
- 50% — Provisioning Cycle-time Reduction
- 50% — Exception Reduction
SDN orders are complex and it takes specialist order entry teams 2+ hours to key in an order. B2B customers go through several pre-order activities before placing an order, and configuration errors during order entry cause further delay.
I built a self-serve order management platform that allowed users to place their SDN orders in a few simple steps. It worked on a best fit template in the back end that was pre-configured for complex SDN network designs.
I reduced average service provisioning time from manual, multi-day workflows to automated fulfillment cycles, improving order-to-activation speed by 40 – 60%.
Multi-agentic Control Testing Pipeline
- 60% — Control Test Automation Coverage
- 40% — Testing Cycle-time Reduction
Control testing is a manual process in financial services with limited test coverage and no real-time capabilities. Current processes are inconsistent across evidence collection, validation, and reporting.
I built a Microsoft multi-agent-based control testing platform that transformed FINRA rules into structured controls, automated testing, and audit-ready reports with full traceability, from rule to outcome.
I automated 60 – 75% of recurring testing workflows and reduced control testing cycle time by up to 50%. Compliance is transformed from a paper-based, periodic process to an always-on, continual capability.
Certifications
Agile Product Management Validation (5.0)
Scaled Agile
SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager Validation (5.0)
Scaled Agile
Certified SAFe 5 Program Consultant
Scaled Agile
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Scrum Alliance
ITIL Intermediate, Service Operations
Tech Mahindra
ITIL Foundation (2011)
ITIL
Yellow Belt in Lean Six Sigma Methodology
Infosys
Skills
Tools
Jira, Visio, Claude, Camunda BPM, n8n, Figma, Atlassian Suite, Rally, AWS IAM, GitHub
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Design Thinking, Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Data Product Management, Software-defined Networking (SDN), Six Sigma
Platforms
ProductPlan, Azure, Pega
Other
Cloud, Claude Code, SAFe 6, Lean Product Manager, Product Management, Product Owner, Product Development, Business Process Improvement (BPI), Large Language Models (LLMs), Strategy, IT Consulting, Thought Leadership, Process Management, Backlog Management, Feature Prioritization, Backlog Grooming, Digital Product Development, Solution Architecture, AI Agents, Microsoft Foundry, B2B, Digital Product Management, Analytics, Agentic AI, Product Coach, Product Consultant, Business Architecture, Digital Transformation, Workflow Automation, Workflow Design, Agentic Workflow Design, AI Product Strategy, AI Product Management, Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI Security, Product Ownership, Software as a Service (SaaS), Business to Business (B2B), Data Analytics, Technical Product Management, AI Agent Orchestration, Agentic AI Systems, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), User Stories, Requirements, Web Applications, Business Analysis, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Product Roadmaps, Product Strategy, AI Integration, Automation, AI Automation, SaaS, Prototyping, Process Automation, Prompt Engineering, Process Optimization, Business Process Modeling, Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Re-engineering, ARIS Cloud, Bizzdesign, Render Cloud, Product Discovery, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Agile Product Delivery, Customer Journey, Project Management, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Data, Stakeholder Management, Artificial Intelligence Product Manager, Large Language Model Operations (LLMOps), AIOps, AI Design, Feasibility, Tech Stacks, Mapping, Business Intelligence (BI), Documentation, Workflow Diagrams, Process Analysis, Pre-Sales Technical Consulting, Technical Consulting, Data Analysis, Product Operations, System Integration, Roadmaps, Feature Planning, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Feature Roadmaps, Resource Management, AI Adoption, Program Management, Business, Workflows, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, Product-market Fit, Customer Discovery, Team Mentoring, Vibe Coding, Lovable, Content Creation, User Requirements, Product Prototyping, Early-stage Startups, FastAPI, PI Planning, GitHub Actions, Cloud Deployment, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Data Governance, Data Product Manager, Data Pipelines, IT Governance, User Experience (UX), RAG Architecture, RAG Systems, Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG), Wireframing, AI/ML Workloads, Railway, Keras, NumPy, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Named-entity Recognition (NER), User Retention, Monetization Models, Mobile Apps, Claude Cowork, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Machine Learning, Web Platforms, Sales, UX Design, Dashboards, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Conversational AI, Jira Service Management, Community Management, Social Media Management, Base44, Marketing, Growth Marketing, Project Budget Management, Aha!, Python 3, Transformers, Codex, Lean, Process Flows, ITIL 4, Operating & Service Model Improvement, APIs, Platform Design, QA Process
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring