Nishant is available for hire
Hire NishantNishant Kumar
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Location
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Toptal Member Since
May 30, 2019
Nishant is a deeply technical person who has worked in travel, gaming, media-tech, and eCommerce sector and has experience in startups as well as managing large products used by millions. His skills include managing revenue, setting up analytics and app infrastructure, managing external agencies, hiring, team management, and business modeling. Nishant practices data-driven decision-making and has expertise in leveraging data to create and deliver yearly product roadmaps.
Project Highlights
3D Room Visualizer to Improve Home Interior Sales Experience
Led the development of a 3D product suite involving three different products to improve sales pitch creation by 36x and increase sales pitch conversion by 50%.
Managed DAU and Engagement for FarmVille 2 at Zynga
Launched a social gaming feature that led to an incremental baseline revenue lift of $1.1+ million per quarter.
Candy-Krack | Live Match 3 Game
Designed and launched a live Match 3 game, Swoo Candy-Krack, from concept to go-to-market with 100,000+ concurrent users. Overall app daily active user base increased from 25,000 to 500,000 within a year.
Expertise
Work Experience
Director of Products
2019 - 2023
Livspace
- Owned end-to-end vision for all sales-focused interior design products on desktop and mobile apps, including 3D designing, customer workflow management, catalog management, customer payment processing, supply onboarding, and payout process.
- Hired and trained high-performing teams comprising product managers, product designers, product marketers, product analysts, and data scientists. Rolled out PM hiring and evaluation framework and onboarding plan for the company.
- Launched a 3D home design visualizer with real-time rendering, photorealistic cloud rendering using ray tracing, and a reusable design library to help designers quickly pitch their designs, reduce company costs, and improve sales funnel conversion.
- Built an AR-based product visualizer on mobile to view 3D products in homeowners' apartments and won the hackathon competition for the project.
- Rolled out CRM and workflow management tools in Singapore, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia to keep track of multiple customer projects in different stages of their lifecycles, including requirement gathering, product discovery, quotation, and fulfillment.
- Launched a payment aggregator product to use different payment gateways to process online and point-of-sale payment methods in different countries. Helped increase sales conversion and reduce commission outflow.
- Rolled out the marketplace product for a supply-side catalog, including a catalog of interior designers within and outside payroll, company franchise, access control, financial validation, commission calculation, and payout processing.
- Launched API documentation for platform products using Backstage and Redocly, including catalog as a service, wallet as a service, order as a service, and invoicing as a service.
- Created Jupyter-based product dashboards using Python and Amazon Athena for product analytics of four product areas.
- Launched a Firebase A/B testing framework for the company to test multiple user experiences with control on exposure to a specific percentage of users.
Lead Product Manager
2018 - 2019
Swoo (Algorythma)
- Led and mentored a self-sufficient product team comprising product managers, data analysts, a data engineer, a UI/UX designer, a game designer, an artist, an animator, and an operations manager.
- Managed the company's product strategy with the product roadmap and backlog management for games and the data analytics workstream.
- Established technology systems for a startup: a push and in-app notification system, Tableau dashboards, a multivariate A/B testing framework, analytics, payments integration, and a central data repository with Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery.
- Designed and launched a live Match 3 game called Swoo Candy-Krack with 100,000+ concurrent users from concept to go-to-market. That involved game balancing and prediction using data analytics and payments to users with PayPal and Paytm.
- Conceptualized and launched Swooperstar, a short video competition to increase user engagement through low-cost user-generated content.
- Created a new DAU source to bring back users when the game shows are about to begin, leading to more than a 5% increase in retention.
- Led the ads monetization roadmap for the app. Set up AdMob, Facebook Audience Network, and other ad sources for banner, interstitial, and incentivized video ads.
- Developed the company's first monetization layer using virtual gifting with multiple currencies and in-app purchases. That involved payment inflow using Google Pay and Apple Pay and payment outflow with PayPal in the MENA region and Paytm in India.
- Established the data-centric culture, defined key metrics for sustainable growth measurement, and conducted weekly product reviews for the organization.
Product Manager
2015 - 2018
Zynga
- Managed engagement (DAU) metrics for Farmville 2 with 4+ million monthly active users. Exceeded DAU projections for H1 2017 by 4% through retention features. Acted as the point of contact with Facebook for Farmville 2.
- Ideated and shipped the first successful large-sized feature from the Zynga India office that gave incremental baseline revenue lift of $1.5 million per quarter.
- Designed and launched three social features for multiplayer competition, community cooperation, and group-level competition, with revenue ranging between $100,000 – $400,000 by D30.
- Shipped out a growth hack feature to increase player retention using the Chrome browser extension. Stemmed the DAU decline caused by Facebook algorithm changes, generating $500,000 in revenue.
- Designed and shipped a mid-size feature that generated $1.2+ million in four iterations. The feature involved a timed community event with milestone rewards and boosted the core loop of the game.
- Managed junior product managers and undertook the DAU and engagement model training of product managers in other Zynga games.
Product Manager
2014 - 2015
MakeMyTrip
- Created yearly P&L projections and a product roadmap to achieve organizational goals. Conducted market sizing and estimation for bus and rail industries and proposed new products to tap the opportunity.
- Designed and launched the rail mobile funnel (microsite and Android web view) that had grown by 110% in the first six months after the launch.
- Designed the rail information services Android app as a measure for the mobile growth-hack strategy for the company.
- Implemented the Agile methodology in bus and rail technology teams to streamline the development process and enhance visibility.
- Designed and managed the implementation of an admin control in the bus business to enable the speedy rollout of offers and reduction in the burn rate.
Product Manager Intern
2013 - 2013
Flipkart
- Developed a framework to assess the increase in orders from the policy change using sales data analysis and web analytics.
- Performed stakeholder analysis and estimated the loss-of-selection.
- Coordinated with five major business functions to assess their individual impact.
- Estimated the potential loss-of-selection and subsequent loss-of-orders due to MRP breach by marketplace sellers.
- Proposed three solutions with a financial impact between INR 15 – 60 Lakh per month based on cost-benefit analysis.
Software Engineer Associate
2010 - 2012
Siemens Digital Industries Software
- Owned and improvised Siemens NX assembly application, a CAD system software for the mechanical design industry.
- Tasked with the product hierarchy navigator and different functionalities.
- Worked on the closing, reopening, and replacing functionalities within the Siemens NX assembly tool.
Assistant Systems Engineer
2008 - 2010
Tata Consultancy Services
- Worked on a visualization application using Siemens NX for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical major.
- Directed improvisations for medical devices based on the voice of customer data received from the field.
- Identified the mean time between failures (MTBF) for surgical instruments.
Project History
3D Room Visualizer to Improve Home Interior Sales Experience
https://blog.livspace.io/post-processing-and-its-performance-impacts-in-opengl-webgl-6e0e1ebed196Led the development of a 3D product suite involving three different products to improve sales pitch creation by 36x and increase sales pitch conversion by 50%.
The 3D design tool suite included the creation of a 3D catalog, a space configurator tool for placing 3D products in a room and generating high-quality 3D renders using cloud rendering technology, and a design library to search old designs used for other customers and speed up the reusability of designs.
Managed DAU and Engagement for FarmVille 2 at Zynga
Launched a social gaming feature that led to an incremental baseline revenue lift of $1.1+ million per quarter.
FarmVille 2 is a Facebook-based social gaming product with an overall install base of more than 200 million users across the world. Nishant has managed the engagement and retention metrics for the game and has launched multiple features to boost retention by 40 basis points and new payer conversion by 109%.
Designed three social features for cooperation and competition with revenue ranging from $100,000 to $400,000 by D30 and overall revenue of over $1.2 million.
Designed three social features for cooperation and competition with revenue ranging from $100,000 to $400,000 by D30 and overall revenue of over $1.2 million.
Candy-Krack | Live Match 3 Game
https://youtu.be/Gnp5AvtQbzcDesigned and launched a live Match 3 game, Swoo Candy-Krack, from concept to go-to-market with 100,000+ concurrent users. Overall app daily active user base increased from 25,000 to 500,000 within a year.
It was a 5 – 20 round Match 3 game where users raced against time to complete the Match 3 puzzle. The game was augmented with a host who keeps users engaged during the gameplay and can tweak the gameplay by adding certain gameplay features.
Payment Collection Using Point of Sale Machines
Led the launch of payment collection using physical cards in 40 cities where the payment was collected in the customer wallet contributing to 6% of overall transactions for the company.
For interior design projects, payment collection happens in multiple tranches and hence needs to be tagged with respective clients. The physical card-based payment was integrated with an internal CRM system to help fund the customer's wallet and increase the chances of conversion. In the absence of this, customers were sent a payment link, and there was a loss of opportunity regarding immediate confirmation of the booking.
Vernacular Android Train Booking Flow
Launched the rail booking flow in hybrid mode that grew by 110% in first six months after launch.
Trains in India have a substantial chunk of non-English speaking users who do not have access to laptops. This mobile workflow was launched to help them make booking through their mobile phones. It was made available in five different Indian vernacular languages.
Monetization for Gaming Startup
Set up AdMob, Facebook Audience Network, and other ad sources for banner, interstitial, and incentivized video ads.
Shipped the first monetization layer using virtual gifting that supported multiple currencies and in-app purchases.
It involved payment inflow using Google Pay and Apple Pay, currency conversion, and payment outflow using PayPal in the MENA region and Paytm.
It involved payment inflow using Google Pay and Apple Pay, currency conversion, and payment outflow using PayPal in the MENA region and Paytm.
Swooperstar Short Video Contest
https://youtu.be/y1aOtFMNdIEConceptualized, designed, and launched this unique short video contest to get user-generated content at cheap cost.
This game was planned to create a sustainable supply of short videos of genres like comedy, horror, dancing, and singing. Short 30-second videos were sourced from users, and a live competition was conducted where viewers voted for the best videos. Most voted videos were rewarded, and viewers were rewarded with in-game currency that they could use for other games on the platform.
Analytics Data Pipeline
Created a growth model for the app using the insights from the data dashboard to grow the app to 500,000 DAU.
Created a platform for gathering click analytics from the app and structuring and storing it in big data. Established key metrics for the app's success and created executive dashboards and weekly review decks to keep track of key metrics.
Travel Recommendation Mobile Application Using ChatGPT
Ideated and conceptualized a mobile-based application to simplify travel planning and travel experience. The PRD was used for investor pitches and is in the development phase now.
The project included an exploration of development methodologies (low code, no code, freelancer, full-time employee), gamification techniques and referral strategy to manage app retention, and marketing strategies to onboard early adopters.
Pneumonia Prediction Using Chest X-ray Images
Built the computer vision model in Python and achieved validation accuracy of 97% and IOU of 75%.
Developed convolutional neural network-based segmentation models for pneumonia detection. The project required processing more than 20GB of X-ray images using Google Colab platform. Using UNET architecture achieved validation accuracy of 97% and IOU of 75%.
Education
2019 - 2020
Postgraduate Program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
University of Texas at Austin, Red McCombs School of Business - Bangalore, India
2012 - 2014
Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA)
S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research - Mumbai, India
2004 - 2008
Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering
National Institute of Technology - Nagpur, India
Certifications
DECEMBER 2014 - MAY 2018
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Scrum Alliance
NOVEMBER 2008 - PRESENT
Sun Certified Java Programmer
Sun Infosystems