Geetansh Merani
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Toptal member since April 24, 2020
Geetansh brings nearly a decade of development and agile expertise to projects for successful end-to-end delivery. He is a seasoned product manager who has worked with consumer products, startups, and corporates across eCommerce, telecom, media, and enterprises such as VMware, AirWatch, and Jio. Geetansh has led cross-functional teams with a focus on problem-solving, customer service, and managed products with over 100 million active users.
Project Highlights
Expertise
Work Experience
Product Owner
Toptal Client
- Established and implemented a loyalty program for retailer engagement using Capillary Tech (https://www.capillarytech.com).
- Defined integration with multiple B2B businesses to enable retailer transactions resulting in increased loyalty points.
- Released a campaign in East Africa, resulting in the disbursement of 100,000+ points valued over USD $2 million in a short period of two months.
- Defined the reward redemption store and the redemption process using Zendesk for ticket management and knowledge-base features.
- Designed and implemented cash reward disbursal of points using payment APIs.
- Built a community-based retailer and a customer app to increase retailer engagement, thus increasing retailer investment in the loyalty program.
- Implemented a customer service portal successfully on the retailer app using Zendesk for approval, reward redemption, and issue resolution, thus improving retailer satisfaction.
Product Manager | Analytics Consultant
Optimize App
- Planned and implemented Agile and Scrum ceremonies for the development team.
- Set up Mixpanel and Google Analytics for product analytics with app events and user profiles.
- Created user cohorts and set up communication channels to reach out to app end-users based on event triggers.
- Conducted Agile and Scrum training sessions for the team and trained developers to be certified as scrum masters.
- Set up a Jira-scrum board and projects for the team in the role of Jira administrator.
Product Director
Apertum Online
- Designed and implemented a help desk solution with Chatbot, Zendesk KB, and chat integration to reduce missed customer service requests from 66% to 40% in four weeks.
- Led the development of the SportyBet Fantasy product offering for the African market.
- Managed a team of eight developers and product designers. Acted as Jira administrator and scrum master for the SportyBet help desk and fantasy products.
- Implemented Azure Active Directory for customer service agents and operation agent machines, which allowed agents to work out of any office and any desk on the company's network.
Technology and Platform Owner (JioPhone)
Reliance Jio Infocomm
- Acted as a technical business owner for all JioPhone models, hardware, OS, App Store, apps, and new initiatives.
- Led the development of a micro-finance project. Over 4.5 million JioPhone devices were distributed with five million Jio payment bank accounts opened with one activation scheme using micro-financing with Rs. 10,000 crore loan disbursal each year.
- Led technical integration and deployment for the Rajasthan government, with over five million devices distributed in under two months. Deployed three government apps on JioStore and the go-live of special Order2Activation journey for the user’s part.
- Managed the release cycle and process deployment of more than 50 apps on the JioPhone Jio Store. Reduced the service level agreement from five days to two days to go live.
- Managed the usage growth of Jio apps on JioPhone (currently ~106 million users) with average daily active users of 39 million.
- Increased usage from 1.2 million daily active users to 11 million and monthly 40 million users pan India.
- Handled commercial discussions and the agreement closure for JioPhone apps and services offered. Achieved revenue targets of 30 crore+ for fiscal year 19-20.
- Managed the release and distribution launch of JioPhone 2 and Jio Media Cable.
- Oversaw relationships with third-party applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, Hotstar, ZEE5, and SonyLIV for JioStore on JioPhone.
CTO
BrandTouch & Analytics
- Acted as a technical business owner for BrandTouch, Tryy.in, and all BrandTouch properties.
- Set up the IT infrastructure from scratch, including a hardware architecture, the software development process, and company IT policy.
- Led Tryy.in, set up the POC and developed the website and mobile web. Led the AWS setup along with code development using Laravel and AngularJS.
- Set up the architecture for the CMS, which included an eCommerce module, logistics, feedback, and analytics.
General Manager - Product and Marketing
Essel Utilities Distribution, Co. Ltd.
- Product owned the Essel broadband app, a device that creates the digital services ecosystem. This includes the Android, Android TV, and iOS app.
- Managed integrations across various categories such as app-to-app calling, video and voice, messaging, movies, music, games, live TV, flight and hotel booking, taxi services, healthcare, payments, news, education, dating, shopping, and IoT.
- Collaborated with 24+ alliance partners to integrate the app. These included Google, Amazon, Flipkart, PayU, Oxigen, Hungama Media, PayTM, Pine Labs, BookMyShow, Via.com, Uber, Ola, Spuul, HOOQ, InMobi, and Vserv amongst others.
- Finalized and brought on board an app and website development vendor resulting in over 80% savings in the development budget.
- Assisted in the set-top box hardware and software development. Created a one-of-a-kind TV box to convert any television to a Smart TV. Worked with vendors from China to prototype, test, and finalize the device.
Senior Product Manager
CouponDunia Media
- Managed the application with 2.8+ million downloads, over 500,000 monthly active users, and an app rating of 4.4 on the Android PlayStore.
- Received the highest ranking of three in the lifestyle category for Android. Featured in the shopping category in the iOS App Store.
- Increased monthly active users from 350,000 to 500,000+ in two months by increasing user engagement.
- Led the revamp of the website and app for the introduction of a retail vertical. Redesigned the complete workflow for the offline vertical. Introduced features such as geo-fencing and mCoupon for CouponDunia with increased results in redemption.
- Oversaw design and wrote functional specifications for both Android and iOS apps. Introduced features to increase app engagement and user retention.
- Acted as scrum master for the team, improving resource utilization, reduce product backlog, and ensured the team met product release deadlines.
- Analyzed the data on app usage by customers. Made product enhancements based on the data collected.
- Acted as the engineering manager for the app development team–managed the daily functions of the developers, assigning tasks, and managing timelines.
- Collaborated on the last-minute hotel booking app since its' inception. Managed the business plan and marketing strategy. Involved with the branding agency on marketing strategy and brand development.
Product Manager
VMware AirWatch
- Implemented agile methodology and transitioning from TFS to Jira across all R&D teams at AirWatch for a 500+ strong technology team.
- Implemented multi-tiered gamification for myAirWatch suite of portals (integration with Badgeville) for increasing customer engagement and build a loyalty program.
- Redesigned and implemented a complete support infrastructure for myAirWatch (integration with Zendesk).
- Oversaw the design and wrote functional specifications of products used by more than 6,000 clients. Developers used these functional specifications as a guideline to develop the product.
- Acted as a scrum master for the team. Tasks included improving resource utilization, reducing product backlog, and helping the team meet product release deadlines.
- Product-owned SaaSWatch, an array of internal tools to help the SaaS operations team manage more than 200 environments with more than 850,000 devices.
Project History
SportyDesk - Help Desk
https://sportybet.comSuccessfully designed and implemented a help desk solution with an in-house chatbot, Zendesk KB, and chat integration to reduce missed customer service requests from 66% to 40% in four weeks.
I led a team of eight, which included four back-end developers, two front-end developers, one UI/UX designer, and a product manager.
We designed the product to increase the response rate by building a chatbot integrated with Zendesk Chat and a knowledge-based system (KBS). In the new workflow, when a user clicks the help button, they are redirected to the help page.
Users can chat or browse the knowledge base to resolve the issue on their own. This includes more than 200 articles across various categories. Upon clicking the chat now option, a user interacts with the chatbot, identifies the issue, after which articles are suggested to help them solve the problem. If the issue still persists, users select the transaction they are facing an issue with and are then redirected to a live agent.
Issue resolution time decreased with agents now handling more tickets. My role was to get the feature designed, define APIs, and the back office admin portal with automation, Zendesk integration, load testing, and sprint planning.
Digital Repayment of Loan Using JioPhone
Led development for a micro-finance project where more than 4.5 milliion JioPhone devices distributed and five million Jio payment bank accounts opened in one activation scheme. The micro-finance has Rs. 10,000 crore loan disbursal each year.
My role was to design the solution and get it implemented. The solution included integrating the micro-finance systems with a messaging service to remind the user of the pending repayment and a banking solution for the digital repayment of the loan amount. The messaging solution integrates with webhooks to perform specific actions for a closed group. It allows for one to many and 1-to-1 messaging privileges supporting different media types such as video, images, and rich text.
The repayment webhook integrates with a micro-finance banking system, which triggers a message regarding loan repayment. The customer clicks the Pay Now option on the message, after which the banking app opens, and the user enters their security pin to complete the transaction.
This project led to sales of 4.5 million JioPhone devices and subsequent recharges for a year. I designed and implemented the solution and obtained a confirmed order for the same from the client.
Geo-fencing and mCoupon - CouponDunia
Successfully designed and implemented geo-fencing and mCoupon for CouonDunia Retail vertical offering.
For geo-fencing, we sent the users a real-time notification about offers in a mall as soon as they entered a mall. We mapped all the malls on Google Maps and built a polygon using latitude/longitude coordinates. When the user triggered a geo-fence, the app checked to see if the customer was inside the mall polygon or not and show the notification accordingly.
Education
Master of Science Degree in Information Security
Georgia Institute of Technology - Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Computer Engineering
University of Mumbai - Mumbai, India
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
AWS
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF)
AWS Certifications
Certified Scrum Product Owner
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Firebase Analytics, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Balsamiq, Balsamiq Mockups, Confluence, Jira, Google Analytics, AWS IAM, Trello, GitHub, Visio, Zeplin, Tableau, Hotjar, BrowserStack, Evernote, Office 365, Facebook Ads SDK, Snapchat
Paradigms
Agile, Scrum, Agile Project Management, Rapid Prototyping, Rapid Interactive Prototyping, Requirements Analysis, B2C, Agile Product Management, Gamification
Platforms
Mixpanel, Firebase, Twilio, Shopify, Android TV
Industry Expertise
Sports, Banking & Finance, Marketplaces, Telecom Equipment & Solutions, Education Technology (Edtech)
Other
Mobile Analytics, Mobile UX, Detail-oriented, Sprint Planning, Startups, New Products, Product Design, Technical Project Management, Story Mapping, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), User Flows, User Research, UX Flows, UX Research, Design, Gaming, Mockups, User Experience (UX), Wireframe to Product, Wireframing, Software Architecture, Technical Support, Product Ownership, Product Discovery, Project Management, Amazon, APIs, Business Requirements, Functional Requirements, REST APIs, System Requirements, User Requirements, User Retention, Agile Sprints, Backlog Grooming, Backlog Management, Enterprise SaaS, Enterprise Software, Feature Analysis, Sprints, Requirements & Specifications, User Interface (UI), User Workflows, Agile Coaching, Mentorship & Coaching, Presentations, Teaching, Workshops, Workshop Facilitation, Data Pipelines, Data Visualization, Requirements, QA Testing, UI Design, UX Design, Web, Web Design, Scope of Work (SOW), Android, iOS, Customer Acquisition, Growth, Business Analysis, Data Reporting, Business Modeling, Growth Strategy, Product Growth, Early-stage Startups, Product Consultant, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Subscriptions, Digital Payments, Mobile Payments, B2B, Mobile Apps, Analytics, User Journeys, Customer Service, Customer Engagement, Product Management, Product Roadmaps, Product Planning, Technical Product Management, Digital Product Management, Web Platforms, Product Owner, Data Analytics, Product Strategy, KaiOS, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Chatbots, Helpdesk, Email Marketing, Push Notifications, Partnership Management, Over-the-top Content (OTT), Customer Analysis, Customer Journeys, Customer Satisfaction, Feature Planning, Feature Roadmaps, Feature-driven Development (FDD), Data Analysis, Product Vision, Marketing Technology (MarTech), Customer Support, CRM Systems, Customer Experience Management, Customer Experience, Custom APIs, Contact Centers, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence (BI), Strategy, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon EC2, React Native, Technology Consulting, API Integration, Loan Management, Roadmaps, Feature Prioritization, Segment.io, Mobile Banking, Video Streaming, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Architecture, eCommerce Platforms, Geolocation, Inventory Management, Videos, Data Warehousing, Sales, Cryptocurrency Wallets, Data Warehouse Design, Fintech, Business Solutions, App Store, Monetization, Social Media Platforms, eCommerce, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Team Management, Edtech Design, CRM Design, Product Marketing, Fantasy Sports, Real-Money Gaming, Advertising, Ad Networks, Process Design, Go-to-market Plans, SQL, Software as a Service (SaaS), SaaS, Travel, CleverTap, Localytics, Typeform.io, Ads, Adjust, Loyalty Programs, Loyalty Management, Retail & Wholesale, Apps, Hardware, Solution Design, Website CMS
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