Bala Sankararaman

Team: PruForce, a B2B SaaS (Web) and Mobile product for Insurance agents and candidates interested in becoming Insurance agents and also addressing various workflows for 7-9 geographies across Asia Pacific (APAC) region Domain: Health Insurance and Life Insurance Products Roles & Responsibilities:

• Led the development of B2B SaaS and Mobile (Android, iOS) product from 0-1 through various stages
• Drove the product development from exploration to execution being accountable of the outcome
• Developing roadmaps, writing user stories, grooming product backlogs and coordinating/prioritizing conflicting requirements in a fast paced, ever-changing environment.
• Collaborated closely with both Engineering & UX to ensure technical requirements, scenarios, business process maps and other artifacts aligned with User Experience designs.
• Module Lead for Experience Keys for PruForce project to ensure internationalisation and localisation for different capabilities and ensuring code rework is minimal
• Preparing and Drafting CIM (Common Information Model) for different capabilities from core templates to screens
• Conducting Backlog grooming sessions and other scrum events with the development team
• Conducting and co-ordinating Technical Feasibility Assessment sessions with the development team Languages & Tools: JIRA, Confluence, Figma, FigJam, Java, NextJS, Salesforce

Team: BDF (Beiersdorf, manufacturers of Nivea, Hanselplast), Deductions management is a trillion $ market, a sample deduction is a coupon submitted by a customer at a supermarket which is reconciled and settled by the supermarket with the vendor. In this product, we worked on a customised deductions management workflow for settlements and reconciliation for Beiersdorf with retailers/carriers I was also responsible/lead for developing a customised generic product that would address the concerns of all vendors and retailers/carriers based on the learning lessons learnt from the BDF product. The existing competitors were HighRadius Domain: Ecommerce, Retail, Supply Chain, Logistics Roles & Responsibilities:

• Led the development of B2B SaaS product – BDF Accelerator from 0-1, 1st member of the Product Management team in India
• Conducted Customer Interviews with Beiersdorf Employees to elicit and gather requirements
• Populated the Product Backlog with the requirements specific for each retailer/carrier
• Automated 8 retailers out of 14 total and 4 carriers out of 4 total for document retrieval and reconciliation
• Identified, escalated, and removed roadblocks, triaged defects, and provided clarity from customers on issues where appropriate.
• Led stand-ups, grooming meetings, estimation meetings, retrospectives and other key meetings for the scrum team
• Consulted on a regular basis with leadership to align expectations and prioritize deliverables. Languages & Tools: Java, React, Python, Microservices, API, JIRA, Confluence, InVision, Mural, Azure Cloud

Team: Watchtower, a Monitoring/Tracing and Troubleshooting tool that provides “Actionable Observability” across Kroger Business Systems (approx. 45 different systems) for multi-modal (Delivery, Ship, Pickup, Instore) triaging issues in an e-commerce setting. Kroger is the third largest retail e-commerce platform in the US after Amazon and Walmart. Domain: Observability, Ecommerce, Retail, Supply Chain, Logistics Roles & Responsibilities:

• Led the development of B2B SaaS product – Watchtower from 0-1 through multiple releases
• 1st member of the team, Grew the team size from 2 to 10 based on delivering successful business outcomes
• Reduced the current triage time by 8% which translated into time savings of 1.2 hrs
• Onboarded 700 users onto the Watchtower platform
• Awarded quarterly high-performance award under “Shining Sun” category
• Directed self-contained team of other Product Manager (Reportee)
• Drove the product development from exploration to execution being accountable of the outcome
• Developing roadmaps, writing user stories, grooming product backlogs and coordinating/prioritizing conflicting requirements in a fast paced, ever changing environment.
• Collaborated closely with both Engineering & UX to ensure technical requirements, scenarios, business process maps and other artifacts aligned with User Experience designs.
• Owned personal OKRs and contributed in the group level strategy and OKRs
• Consulted on a regular basis with leadership to align expectations and prioritize deliverables.
• Built a culture of end-to-end ownership within the team; became the go-to person for all functional needs of the engineering team
• Defined SLA’s/ SLO’s and Metrics
• Validated that test scenarios meet the feature acceptance criteria and customer expectations through functional tests, end-to-end tests, acceptance tests, performance tests, smoke tests and sanity tests.
• Responsible for product demonstration to clients/business owners and provide product acceptance
• Identified, escalated, and removed roadblocks, triaged defects, and provided clarity from customers on issues where appropriate.
• Understanding and usage of agile metrics (velocity, burn downs) to help the team be more productive.
• Participating in stand-ups, grooming meetings, estimation meetings, retrospectives and other key meetings for the scrum team Languages & Tools: Java, React, Microservices, API, JIRA, Confluence, ServiceNow, Google Analytics, InVision, Mural, Sketch, Swagger, Snowflake, xMatters, Docker, Grafana, Prometheus, Helm, Harness, JFrog, Kubernetes, Terraform, Azure Cloud, Apache Kafka, Azure Events, Azure Functions, Azure Event Hub, Java, GitHub, React

Domain : FMCG B2C Roles & Responsibilities:

• Designing and Delivering the Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy for DermisLove to go D2C
• Conducting Customer Interviews, Surveys and Market Research
• Customer Research for gap analysis, identifying insights, translating them to outcomes
• Connecting with VC’s and Angel’s for potential fund-raising

CareerTrail: CareerTrail is an all-in-one career platform and the second revision of eHired, it enables customers to build, manage, monitor their personal brand, ATS compliant job search, Relocation Planner and for Career Planning and Career Management. CareerTrail is a suite of 4 products. Domain: B2C, Human Resources (HR), ATS Roles & Responsibilities:

• Owned a product and managed the entire product lifecycle from strategic planning to tactical execution to go-to-market and product release
• Provided deep understanding through analysis of market needs and industry/competition landscape
• Defined User personas and Business model canvas
• Defined product features according to product vision, roadmap and strategy, responsible for tactical execution
• Designing mock wireframes and coming up with user stories
• Prioritizing feature releases in product roadmap
• Providing inputs to technical roadmap and strategy
• Determining SEO strategy and approach as part of tactical execution Skills: Product Roadmap, Product Strategy, Product Branding, Product Positioning, Business Model, Market Research, Features Definition and Identification, Wireframe and Mock-up Design, Sprint Planning, Requirement Gathering and Analysis, Asana, Trello, Balsamiq, Google Trends