Swathi Manoravi, Product Manager in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
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Swathi Manoravi

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Toptal Member Since
September 22, 2020

Swathi is experienced in building products in the Automotive, Analytics, B2B, SaaS, and IoT industries. She has collaborated with, trained, and led global cross-functional teams in all her previous roles. Swathi is a Scrum-certified product owner and has led teams to build and launch products from scratch by setting the product vision and roadmap. She is also good at developing a new market entry strategy and has an MBA from Stanford and a CS degree from Anna University.

Project Highlights

Chatbot that Answers Customer Questions
Convinced leadership, defined vision, and received $1 million in funding for a chatbot that saves costs for the customer service team and improves customer satisfaction.
Improved UX and Key KPI of a New Offering
Analyzed and enhanced an offering in a SaaS product and improved key KPIs from 30% to 85%.

Expertise

Work Experience

Senior Product Owner

2020 - PRESENT
Toyota Connected India Pvt. Ltd.
  • Built a SaaS product from scratch to analyze contact center performance and customer insights for Toyota teams.
  • Proposed a product feature, market analysis, POC, cost, and roadmap. Convinced leadership and other stakeholders; received funding to develop the feature.
  • Conducted user studies with over 8,000 Toyota and Lexus owners to prioritize new features and improve the experience of the existing features.
  • Owned product backlog for two teams. Prioritized and led cross-functional teams to implement new features.
  • Helped define the scope of work for a team of 18 members for a year.
  • Conducted sessions to brainstorm new ideas in the automobile industry with the team. Prioritized ideas depending on their business case and conducted feasibility studies for the top ideas.

Senior Product Manager

2021 - 2021
Oracle
  • Oversaw product data management and purchase orders for Unity Product (Oracle's Customer Data Platform).
  • Researched and analyzed Oracle and third-party integrations to help easily bring data into the platform.
  • Led a team of seven members to build data management features for three months.

Product Manager

2019 - 2020
Facilio Inc.
  • Led the integration of third-party software into the SaaS product by aligning stakeholders and defining use cases.
  • Strategized and presented the business case to enter our IoT solution into a new market.
  • Identified key product metrics for the startup and set up a process to measure overall product usage metrics and customer feedback regularly; devised actionable plans to improve product adoption.
  • Handled alpha customer and early-adopter relationship to deploy and test MVP of new features.
  • Collaborated with sales and marketing to help present product offerings and value propositions to prospective clients.

Investment Intern

2018 - 2018
Accel
  • Created investment thesis for two industries by analyzing companies in the industry and identifying gaps. This helped the team to understand what type of companies to invest in.
  • Sourced and analyzed seven companies for investment in the robotic process automation sector.
  • Analyzed a company for investment in the HRTech space. Researched the potential success of the product, team, market, and GTM plan.

Software Engineer

2014 - 2017
Cisco Systems
  • Identified the need to reduce strong user dissatisfaction and executed a feature that gracefully handles hardware failures.
  • Delivered tightly scheduled, high-priority, client-requested features by coordinating with program management and team members.
  • Identified and rectified software license violations, preventing more than a million-dollar loss in lawsuits each year.
  • Guided five engineering and customer service teams in the US, Israel, and France to identify and solve security issues.
  • Led a team of five senior members and implemented complex security features in set-top-boxes within 67% of the scheduled time; recognized for team collaboration and execution.
  • Developed a product to enable the client to troubleshoot set-top-box issues remotely. Improved turnaround time of client’s customer service team by 90%.

Chatbot that Answers Customer Questions

Convinced leadership, defined vision, and received $1 million in funding for a chatbot that saves costs for the customer service team and improves customer satisfaction.

Due to a need to increase customer satisfaction and reduce call center costs, I proposed a chatbot.

I conducted a user study by talking to customer service agents and analyzing customer queries. I then identified the top queries of the customer and conducted the cost-benefit analysis of automating responses to these queries using NLP (natural language processing) models. With the help of two Machine Learning engineers, I created a proof of concept (POC) for the chatbot and designed the architecture.

I defined the vision and came up with a roadmap by prioritizing features based on value and cost.

This chatbot (that could reduce the 40% load on customer service agents) that I proposed to the leadership team got approved, and I received a budget for full-time development.

Improved UX and Key KPI of a New Offering

Analyzed and enhanced an offering in a SaaS product and improved key KPIs from 30% to 85%.

I observed that users were not engaging with a product offering we deployed to a particular user segment. However, at Facilio, we believed it had considerable value to that specific segment.

So, I sought to understand the problem better and improve their user experience. I spoke to our clients and their exec teams to get their perspectives. I also observed the end-users while they used the product. This helped uncover some major problems with the user journey and lack of training.

I then devised a set of to-dos for improving the feature and prioritized them in a backlog. I collaborated with the design and development team to execute them. I also created training videos for the new feature and took the help of the customer service team to train end-users. This helped me improve the user experience and improve the engagement metric from 30% to 85% for that offering.

Product and Marketing Consultation for a B2B Transportation Service

Designed an engagement and retention strategy for existing customers. The existing clients appreciated it. Helped articulate the value of clients' digital products to increase adoption. Created marketing videos, case studies, and visual aids

The client is a B2B transportation service provider. They had 35+ years of experience and an established client base. However, they needed help to understand where they stood in the industry, which has a lot of new entrants.
After auditing their current processes, competition, and value proposition, I recommended two major changes:
• To increase engagement with their existing clients and retain them
• To give the perception of a tech-enabled and tech-savvy company

For the following steps:
• I created an engagement and retention strategy that includes frequent, automated communication, case studies, better pitch and value proposition, newsletters, gathering feedback, etc.
• I also studied their existing digital products and introduced new products to help with engagement.
• I created pitches, onboarding videos, and automated mailers to onboard their existing clients on their digital TMS portal.

These efforts resulted in new inquiries, adoption, and appreciation from their clients for their digital products and services.

Third-party Software Integration

Integrated a building information management (BIM) system software into the Facilio product.

A Building-Information-Management (BIM) software that would offer a lot of value to our B2B real-estate tech product. The BIM integration partner is also a startup, and we had mutual business benefits.

This integration was technically challenging because both the vendor nor we had full-fledged APIs. I owned the integration effort from the Facilio side. I aligned multiple stakeholders and defined use cases to build in collaboration with the partner. We integrated incrementally and demoed the MVP with an alpha customer who gave valuable feedback for further integration.

Competition Analysis for Our Startup

As the second product manager, I organized competition analysis so that the sales, marketing, product, and CXOs team can refer to them whenever required.

I first identified 15 competitors - I had a general idea of who the competitors are and spoke to the sales team to see what names they come across often.

I then made a feature matrix in an excel sheet by listing all major features and capabilities. I studied the competitors by looking at their website, blog, whitepapers, public presentations, demo videos on YouTube and Vimeo.
Since the feature matrix is very detailed, I also made a quick one-pager for each competitor explaining the competitor’s value-prop and our differentiators.
I then updated the sheet every 30 days.

Pricing for a B2B SaaS Product

Provided a tiered pricing model for a B2B product that provides fleet owners with insights into fleet performance.

After market research activities, I segmented the product users based on their size, feature expectations, and willingness to pay. I then examined the competitors' products to understand their features and pricing. I also came up with the cost for the product based on development, support resources, and infra requirement.

Combining the above three, I came up with three business model options which I took to some alpha customers and other stakeholders. The pros and cons of each of the business models were apparent. I then finalized the most suitable business model.
2017 - 2019

MBA in Business Administration

Stanford Graduate School of Business - California, United States

2010 - 2014

Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Computer Science and Engineering

Anna University - Chennai, India

AUGUST 2019 - PRESENT

Certified Scrum Product Owner

Scrum Alliance

Collaboration That Works

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