BlackBuck - Product Manager

About BlackBuck:

Keeping technology at the core, BlackBuck makes transportation simple and effective. BlackBuck is an online marketplace for logistics requirements for the businesses. It caters to long distance, in land truck requirements of Companies, providing them with a reliable, transparent and low cost channel of freight procurement. BlackBuck works with audited and verified trucks, and has more than 85,000 trucks listed on its platform. With its wide geographical coverage comprising of more than 300 cities through a passionate workforce of 800+ Blackbuckers, Company successfully caters to more than 230 customers across industry segments and has a long list of very prestigious clients including HUL, Asian Paints, Reliance, Berger, Amul, Coke, Nestle and Pepsi, to name a few. Its comprehensive and smart solutions bring a positive impact to the entire logistics ecosystem, which stitches across large number of livelihoods. BlackBuck empowers countless businesses realize their full potential by providing effective technology solutions: - Smart, easy and economical - Online booking of trucks, tracking and management of the transportation- for the customers - Optimal utilization, fair price and effective management of the fleet for the truck owners - Improved network of facilities and support for the truck drivers

BlackBuck, was started in Bangalore in 2015 by Rajesh Yabaji (IIT Kharagpur alumunus, previously worked with ITC), Ramasubramaniam B (previously MD- Meibach Consulting, APAC )and Chanakya Hridaya (IIT Kharagpur alumunus, previously worked with ITC), with the vision of creating World's largest transportation Company. In numbers, in passion, in simplicity, by talent- by far the leading tech-enabled logistics Company in India. The logistics sector is poised for a revolutionary growth journey, BLACKBUCK MARKS THE BEGINNING!

Small set of problems engineering team is trying to solve :

Route Optimization - Better customer experience by reducing time, money, resources along with fuel savings, with unpredictable waiting time during loading, unloading, and transit . Far more complex challenges in Inter-City travel than what Uber/Ola face in India in Intra-City travel

- Travelling Salesman Problem

- Vehicle Routing Problem

- Permutation Enumerator

- Greedy Search Algorithm

- Ant Colony Optimization

Accurately predict - where, when, and how many trip requests we would receive at any given time. Extreme events such as Holiday season or Festival season only heighten the importance of forecasting for operations planning, forecasting for extreme events can be difficult because of their infrequency. We are building our own even prediction algorithm based deep neural network.

Roles and Responsibilities :

Overview -Product Manager is the owner of a product, sub-product or a set a features in the DTS Ecosystem. He/She works closely with engineering team to build, release, and scale the product. As the owner he/she decides what is built, when it is built, and how it scales. The success or failure of the product lies completely with the Product Manager.

The role can be quite diverse in nature opening multiple responsibilities as the product goes through the BUILD - SCALE - REBUILD Cycle.

Traits of a Great Product Manager

- Builds a clear roadmap with early wins - SHIPS FAST

- Reduces effort wastage by validating solutions in the design phase or via MVPs

- Uses data to infer and tweak the roadmap aggressively

- Works with the end-user to remove all adoption road blocks

- Sets a high standard of tests from all angles - frontend, backend, inter-systems, analytics, comms. etc.

- Documents, evangelises, and open shares 

Skills :

To be an effective Product Manager, one must have :

- Strong analytical abilities

- Broad understanding of programming, databases, infrastructure, algorithms

- Deep understanding of UX and psychology of the end user