Sulekha.net - VP - Product Management - IIT/IIM

VP - Product Management

We are looking for a VP Product who is passionate about building products for consumer internet companies and excels in blending creative thinking with quantitative analysis. We would like a deeply hands-on, experienced product development person to work and deliver on these job expectations:

Product Lifecycle & Execution (~60%) :

Product roadmap : Map the short-term (quarter), annual and 3 year roadmap to build delightful product for Sulekha local services that will triple the millions of user needs that Sulekha fills in its current state

- Lead the product thinking for a long-term product evolution, while balancing short-term priorities of the users and SMB customers

Innovations & Insights : Drive a continuous quantitative and qualitative view of user actions at Sulekha to drive new insights that will increase user and SMB customer satisfaction of Sulekha's local service offerings

- Innovations and insights to range from features that incrementally improve user experience, best practices of other firms abroad to truly innovative India-specific solutions

- Drive a culture of continuous beta-testing to drive testing of innovations and insights and show broad results to get buy-in from sales heads and other stakeholders

Product execution/Development : Manage the large engineering/development/design team to achieve the product goals in the short-term and medium-term

- Create and deliver on stretch goals of product enhancement and utilize external consultants and outsourcing companies as desired to achieve product evolution

- Work with CTO to simultaneously use some engineering resources for architectural enhancements

Mobile evolution : Manage and create new features that may exist only on mobile app or mobile web to drive local service need fulfillment on mobile

- Create a new paradigm of local services on the mobile app, as needed to deliver a world-class experience to mobile only users in both Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities

Internal Marketing : Drive internal assets of past users (through SMS and Email) to drive cross-sell and repeat usage of thousands of city-categories

Product Operations (~30%) :

Value Delivery : Manage the team that manages demand supply of local services in thousands of city-categories

- Drive this continuous match through a combination of both automated and manual tools

- Work with the Director SEM and VP/SVP Marketing to drive incremental users and SMB customers to do the matching of users and customers

Customer Support/User Support : Manage the team that services thousands of paying and free businesses to increase their delight - besides their propensity to repeat their contracts with Sulekha

- Drive a greater user engagement through automated and manual user support means that also includes phone based support

Other aspects (~10%) :

Competitive Analytics : Measure and benchmark Sulekha performance against both existing Indian competitors and other local service providers in USA/Europe/Asia etc

- Drive new product innovations as a result of user and SMB customer insights obtained from competitive analytics

Program Management : Manage the ~80-150 product resources and ~100-300 product operation resources and guide them to achieve the team goals

Desired Skills :

Professional :

- Engineering and MBA in Sales / Marketing from IIT/IIM in India or abroad

- Consumer internet product development experience of at least 3+ years

- Hands-on coding experience of at least 2+ years in the past

- Project/Program management experience of at least 2+ years in the past

- Built products of repute in India/Abroad

- 10-15 years experience with minimum 2-3 years in senior roles of product development

Personal :

- Track record of delivery, goal oriented along with ability to sets clear priorities and meets deadlines

- Positive, initiative driven, motivating and a natural leader

- Result oriented, entrepreneurial and self-motivated

- Ambitious and flexible

- Excellent communication and presentation skills

Other aspects :

- Reports into the Business Head

- Must be based out of Chennai and willing to travel if required

- Mostly team contributor with 200-500 team members reporting into this role

- Search marketing is outside of this role