Shikhin (Shaun) Agarwal
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Washington, DC, United States
Toptal member since March 23, 2020
Shaun is a product, GTM, and P&L executive with a "transformative leadership" style. He has delivered over $300 million in revenue for B2B and B2C businesses. As a C-level GTM and product executive, he has worked directly with boards and senior executives at over 400 Fortune 1000 brands across healthcare, retail, financial services, and travel. Shaun has over 15 years of leadership experience, achieving success by influencing buyers and creating new markets through digital innovation and AI.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy
- Go-to-market Plans
- Growth
- Leadership
- Product Management
- Product Vision
- Senior Executive Management
Work Experience
Product, GTM Strategy, and P&L Executive Consultant
StatsLateral, Inc.
- Led AI-first product vision, deploying content personalization APIs and workflows; secured CEO and board buy-ins, fostering cross-functional collaboration; boosted retention by 25%, enabled two partnerships, and drove 50% revenue growth.
- Developed a Gen AI-enabled solution and GTM strategy for a $120+ million PE-funded company, managing channels with detailed planning, incentives, and partnerships. Delivered 40% YoY growth through integrated GTM execution.
- Led data/product strategy for global retail and luxury brands, creating unified data models, dashboards, and AI-powered personalization for 100+ million consumers. Improved insights to support multi-billion-GMV on eCommerce and stores.
- Hired and mentored product, engineering, and GTM teams. Managed the overall product-business P&L and motivated the teams for AI-product R&D/iterations to deliver user value through a differentiated, personalized marketing product.
- Advised the general partner of the venture fund on the product strategy and launched a new mobile consumer product for a healthcare portfolio company.
- Led an EU-based fintech company's chief growth officer (CGO) strategy with cross-functional growth, funnel optimization/personalization, customer data-driven growth (CDP and CRM), and product strategy. Achieved a tenfold increase in two years.
- Refined tech, data, and AI strategies with OKRs/KPIs to create a data-driven decision-making culture in the go-to-market teams at a scale-stage US-based company to support 25% YoY growth at $100 million in revenue.
- Developed new product and GTM strategy to lead cross-functional product, marketing, digital, finance, and CX teams/VPs/SVPs of 150+ people to deliver product-market fit for a $100 million target market in the travel industry.
Vice President of Product
Monetate
- Served as the CPO and executive team member, reported directly to the CEO of a VC-funded, profitable martech SaaS products industry leader; Owned portfolio P&L, product management, data science, UX, product marketing, and GTM strategy.
- Refined the strategy for ad/martech, GDPR, first-party data, customer experience optimization/personalization, and marketing performance/ROI for $40 million SaaS revenue.
- Led the go-to-market strategy, platform solutions, pricing, packaging, and user journey to C-level buyers (CMO and chief data or digital officers) for 50% of the customer portfolio.
- Mentored and led teams of six functional leaders for product management, data science, strategy/partnerships, product marketing, and user experience.
- Balanced the future vision with customer/user engagement in collaboration with engineering, marketing, and customer success across North America and Europe to improve customer retention by 10%.
- Launched personalized "eCommerce product recommendations" with an optimized UX in record time—leading the business plan, pricing, packaging, and go-to-market strategy to address a $100-million opportunity.
- Led GTM strategy with 80+ channel partners across North America and Europe, product partnerships with large tech companies, and data partnerships to support eCommerce transactions of over $500 billion.
Co-founder | Chief Product Officer
Crowdbabble, Inc.
- Led the tech, product and AI strategy, fundraising, and M&A as growth options to build and execute on the growth hypothesis—delivering multiple acquisition offers to the CEO.
- Secured R&D funding from top-rated investors (IRAP, Toronto) and hired and managed a team of data scientists, product managers, and UX for AI/ML-based intelligent product development.
- Launched marketing/predictive analytics targeting heads of media and marketing strategists for new content types like live video, voice apps, internet of things (IoT), AR/VR, social media, and digital.
- Led and mentored teams for go-to-market and key partnership initiatives in North America to find new data and API partners and supported more than 100% ARR growth across 300 global customers.
Senior Vice President of Product
Kinetic Social
- Served as the SVP of the product (CPO role) and executive team member; reported directly to the CEO of a $50-million SaaS company; led product management, strategy, and data science/analytics. Led buy, build, and partner strategy with the CEO.
- Led data-driven customer engagement programs for global luxury brands (Tiffany, Bulgari, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc.), analyzing omni-channel data to optimize store traffic, brand experience, and conversion performance across $200M+ of managed media.
- Hired, led, and mentored leaders in product management, data science, user experience, product marketing, and partner management for over $30 million of product growth and $200 million of media buying.
- Achieved market differentiation as a highly scalable social media demand-side platform, intelligent bidding and optimization, measurement/attribution, and performance marketing (conversion or bottom of the funnel).
- Influenced client partners and project managers at Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Google DoubleClick, AppNexus, and more to drive adtech innovation and support 80% YOY growth.
- Acquired two companies to extend products into marketing analytics and measurement, and built an audience data platform for intent and behavior.
- Managed channel and platform partnerships with Facebook (Meta), Pinterest, Google, Twitter (X), Snap, and other data and API companies to win multi-million dollar sales contracts and deliver marketing success for $500 million.
Director of Product Marketing and Strategy
Primatics Financial
- Reported to the co-founder and chief revenue officer; the company was acquired ($122 million) for its growth in the banking, mortgage, and lending industry.
- Led a global team of ten people to create the product, brand, and market strategy and new CIO/CFO solutions, including identifying new use cases, value propositions, and roadmaps to achieve revenue growth of $10 million.
- Managed the cloud-based Evolv platform (SOA-based, RESTful APIs) through A/B testing and user/market needs analysis and prioritization in an Agile methodology across global cross-functional teams of architects, engineers, and subject-matter experts.
- Managed P&L for two new products (risk, accounting)—leveraging the platform to solve challenges in the financial services industry to win around 10% market share in the total target market of $300 million.
- Led an integrated GTM strategy and implemented a data-driven decision system for the weekly marketing funnel, sales pipeline, channel partners (E&Y, Deloitte), and client success for banking compliance annual business of $50 million.
Product Strategy Leader
Morgan Stanley
- Served as the principal consultant for Morgan Stanley; worked directly with product heads (managing directors and directors) across Morgan Stanley Wealth Management to manage post-merger integration for $1 trillion in assets.
- Reduced advisor/client loss and improved retention by 10% through an effective operating strategy for field and client communication for Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney JV in collaboration with product managers, operations, and sales/advisors.
- Managed a joint venture product integration and nationwide roll out to over 3,000 financial advisors, generated user feedback, and improved product roadmap and prioritization to achieve over 90% user retention.
Strategy Manager (New Solutions)
Cognizant Tech
- Led a new product/solution launch as part of the strategy and innovation group under the leadership of former senior professionals from McKinsey, Booz & Co, and AT Kearney.
- Delivered a new CRM and operations data-analytics strategy, positioning, and market segmentation to receive buy-in from the CFO and SVP of strategy and tap a potential new market of $50 million.
- Led teams of strategy managers, subject-matter experts, and tech architects to refine a new business strategy for market entry into cloud, mobile, and big data.
Product Manager
Yodlee, Inc.
- Directly worked with web analytics, UX, and engineering and reported to the director of products; Yodlee was a web-based consumer and B2B product company with clients such as ING, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and so on (the company was acquired).
- Managed and launched the next-gen of innovative features (dashboard, financial calendar, search) for Yodlee.com using agile, A/B testing, and user research to iterate and grow customer engagement by 10% and revenue by $10 million.
- Supported a B2B SaaS go-to-market strategy for global banks and financial institutions with a consumer-subscribed freemium model and paid premium products for B2B buyers.
Product Manager
Tavant Tech
- Hired as the first product manager in the company. Tavant was a B2B product startup that grew from 40 to 1000 employees in three years and was eventually acquired.
- Defined a new B2B web-based after-sale service product with detailed product specifications (PRDs) and technical designs using the agile methodology and leveraging the proprietary Tavant platform.
- Led mortgage and consumer lending (auto) products for user needs and innovation through storyboarding, research and use case development to contribute $15 million in revenue.
Founder | CEO
CoolCrafters
- Raised $300,000 in seed capital in the post-dot-com era for an internet tech startup that provided eCommerce and internet marketing products for the SMB market.
- Built a business of $180,000 in revenue with 15 people in two years of operations.
- Wore multiple hats but primarily contributed to client success as a full-stack engineering tech lead and product manager.
Project History
Highly Scalable and Intelligent Digital Product
Launched a new differentiated product to influence the client CEO and executive team, secured $2 million in funding for growth.
• Set the product strategy and vision with deep user research on challenges of inefficiency, slow/non-scalable video/digital marketing solutions and in-depth competitive insights, and SWOT analysis for market differentiation.
• Launched a new AI-powered product and leveraged the Internet marketing ecosystem/APIs to build the first-of-its-kind intelligent, automated, and scalable customer acquisition product.
• Integrated the product strategy by establishing business relationships with the right client/partners to access data and clients (large brands) and validated the product-market fit.
• Led product R&D/development and product growth/marketing to build truly differentiated capabilities to establish user value and secure long-term commitment/funding from the client’s executive team.
Growth Strategy for a Fast-growing Consumer Fintech Market Leader
Refined the growth strategy with cross-functional objectives across brand, content, organic & paid, product, and customer relationship; delivered the product vision and strategy for branding, marketing, and advertising for a €20-million investment.
• Refined the growth strategy with their chief growth officer (CGO) to achieve cross-functional objectives of sustainable and profitable growth (lifetime value—LTV maximization), targeting millions of consumers
• Created the product vision, strategy, and roadmap to deliver the growth strategy by leveraging the broad and complex ecosystem of digital tech, web, mobile, and data/AI.
• Delivered C-level decisions on investment and talent requirements, evaluations of different strategic choices (business cases), and long term growth insights for an annual budget of over €10 million.
• Influenced teams on strategy and metrics for brand/content marketing, acquisition, and retention as core pillars of sustainable and profitable growth throughout the customer lifecycle.
$40-million AI-powered Personalization SaaS Platform
Refined the platform strategy for market differentiation and improve customer retention for improved profitability.
As the core AI products lost differentiation, the company needed a new product vision and platform strategy to inspire the teams for the future. I realigned the go-to-market and product marketing strategy for the customer experience personalization platform and six products for value realization across the buyers’ journey.
The new innovations leveraged AI to address new big market changes—GDPR and CCPA. He led first-party/customer data and customer experience platform to improve client profitability and achieve customer retention targets of over 90%.
This required me to balance the future vision with the customer/user engagement in cross-functional collaboration with engineering, marketing, and customer success across North America and Europe.
I leveraged the agile methodology to launch an intelligent personalized “product recommendations” SaaS product with an optimized UX in record time and led the business plan, pricing, packaging, and go-to-market strategy to address a $100-million growth opportunity.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Strategy and Entrepreneurship
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Bachelor of Technology Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
IIT Bombay | Indian Institute of Technology Bombay - Mumbai, India
Certifications
Strategic Selling
Miller Heiman
Pragmatic Marketing
Pragmatic Marketing
Skills
Tools
Jira, Asana, Trello, Atlassian, Balsamiq, Roadmunk, Google Analytics, Board Reporting, QuickBooks Online, ETL, Figma, Claude, Microsoft Power BI, InVision, Sketch, Hotjar, Confluence, Slack, FreeMarker
Paradigms
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Scrum, Agile, Kanban, B2C, Key Performance Metrics, Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Requirements Analysis, Change Management, Data Product Management, User Testing, DevOps, Augmented Reality (AR)
Platforms
Google Ads, Pinterest, Mixpanel, Coda, Blockchain
Industry Expertise
Healthcare, Insurance, Consumer Products, Banking & Finance, Education Technology (Edtech)
Other
Branding, Growth Marketing, Data Analysis, Lean Experiments, A/B Testing, Monetate, Startups, Growth, Growth Strategy, Customer Journey, Mobile Apps, Branded Content, Digital Strategy, Brand Management, Brand Marketing, Software Innovation, New Products, Software as a Service (SaaS), Digital Product Development, Stakeholder Management, Analytics, Business to Consumer (B2C), eCommerce Platforms, Funnel Optimization, Website Optimization, Personalization, Management Consulting, Product Launch, Advertising, Advertising Campaigns, Product Strategy, Product Management, Product Growth, Go-to-market Plans, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Fintech, eCommerce, Direct to Consumer (D2C), Pricing Strategy, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Leadership, Business to Business (B2B), Mobile, Product Owner, Product Conceptualization, Digital, Product Roadmaps, Product Vision, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Marketing Technology (MarTech), Paid Advertising, Advertising Technology (Adtech), SaaS, Product Coach, Remote Team Leadership, Senior Executive Management, Artificial Intelligence Product Manager, Interim CPO, Head of Product, Data Science Product Manager, Business Strategy, Product Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Retail & Wholesale, Digital Marketing, Strategy, Technical Product Management, Video Marketing, Enterprise SaaS, Subscription Pricing, Pricing, Estimation & Planning, Product Operations, Team Leadership, Product Portfolio Manager, Chief Product Officer (CPO), Business Process Improvement (BPI), Performance Analysis, UX Design, UI Design, Consumer-focused Web Development, SaaS Product Marketing, Feature Planning, Social Networks, CTO, CIO, Fundraising, Sales, Customer Success, IT Strategy, Consulting, Digital Transformation, Data Science, Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy, Competitor Analysis & Profiling, Technical Leadership, Cross-departmental Collaboration, Iteration Management, Web & Mobile Applications, Dashboards, Data Reporting, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Discovery Workshops, Project Management, Feature Prioritization, Pricing Models, Digital Product Management, Financial Consultation, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Platform Design, App Growth, YouTube Ads, Product Consultant, Product Ownership, Business Intelligence (BI), Data-driven Dashboards, Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Client Delivery Management, Large-scale Projects, ChatGPT, Agile Sprints, Business Analysis, Finance, Project Tracking, User Journeys, Web App Development, Wireframing, Mockups, Data Strategy, Social Media, Launch Strategy, Digital Advertising, Beta Testing, Lean Startups, Customer Data Platform (CDP), Customer Experience, Product Discovery, User Experience (UX), Workshops, User Interface (UI), App Product Management, Mobile Applications, API Integration, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Content Creation, B2B Partnerships, Sales Effectiveness, Sales & Channel Enablement, New Product Development, Product Design, Market Research, Requirements, Growth Hacking, Market Entry, eCommerce Analysis, eCommerce Management, Analysis, Cost Analysis, TikTok, TikTok Ads, B2B, Data Analytics, Enterprise Analytics, Finance Product Manager, AI Agents, AI Integration, AI Product Management, AI Strategy Development, Automation Tools, OpenAI, Performance Metrics, Product Strategy Consultant, Technical Project Management, Tool Selection, Industry Analysis, Cloud Services, Customer Data, Identity & Access Management (IAM), NoSQL, Solution Architecture, Large Language Models (LLMs), Product Development, Software Development, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Prompt Engineering, Training, Tutoring, Organizational Change Management (OCM), Web Product Management, Subscriptions, Wealth Management, Amazon Sponsored Ads, Amplitude, Looker Studio, SQL, Executive Consulting, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Data Visualization, BI Reports, Looker, Presales, Cloud Platforms, Corporate Strategy, Competitive Analysis, Consumer Insights, Customer Insights, Loyalty Programs, CRM, MarTech Solutions, Marketing Operations, Digital Marketing Strategy, Customer Segmentation, Marketing Analytics, eCommerce Marketing, AI Product Strategy, Healthcare IT, Healthtech, Telehealth, Agentic AI, Agentic AI Systems, Automation, Prototyping, System Architecture, System Integration, Workflow, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Business Development, Product-market Fit, Customer Discovery, Team Mentoring, Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms, Data Products, CPG, AI Adoption, AI Automation, Google Ads API, Marketing Automation, APIs, Marketing, CMT, Market Assessment, CEO, IoT Protocols, Online Payments, Mailing, CI/CD Pipelines, Card Payments, Credit Cards, HIPAA, QuickBase, Heap, Segment, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, FullStory, Clubhouse, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Plectica, CRM Systems, Product Leadership, Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR), Video Streaming, Technology Strategy & Architecture
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