Who I am
What I’ve moved
Five cold starts, in five industries. Each one without a roadmap, a dataset or a team.
Six results, each tagged with the beat of Shape-Ship-Synchronize it came from.
Gaurav thrives where most people falter: in absolute ambiguity. He has a rare ability to work in chaos, stepping into complex, unchartered territories and systematically carving out clarity.
AI, on the job and off it
Where AI has earned a place in the actual work - and what I build on my own.
Found what the detractors were really saying.
Analysed detractor voice-of-customer data, supplier content and regulatory text to surface three loops driving compliance risk and NPS damage. Turned them into two validated solutions: a readability redesign of lodging policy and cancellation content, and automated scanning of supplier content against regulatory sources to flag risky terms and trigger action. Both went to the owning teams, and the scanning concept is on the AI team’s backlog.
OWL, the assistant on this site.
Built solo with Claude as engineering partner. It answers visitor questions only from this portfolio: each fact is checked against the content, and every answer is cross-checked by a second model (Gemini generates, Claude evaluates). If a check fails, it declines rather than invents. Tested on a 120+ question suite including trick and prompt-injection questions, and audited with my AI Trustworthiness Matrix. Ask OWL →
Tata Safari AI Assistant.
A multimodal RAG assistant I built and deployed solo: ask in plain language, or upload a photo of a dashboard warning light, and get answers grounded only in the official manuals. Try it · Code
Designing and Building AI Products and Services.
In progress, 2026. Two Exemplary Assignment awards: AI-enabled organisational strategy, and a responsible-AI feasibility assessment of a generative solution.
Also built solo: The Puppeteer: Scenario Builder, a working MVP on Claude artifacts and not a commercial product yet, which runs the branching scenarios in my training method; and the build behind my daily Marathi word project.
The journey
2020 JPMorgan Chase2015 Cybage2008 Nihilent
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The journey
JPMorgan Chase
- Led product on a partner travel and loyalty platform with ~$25M monthly GTV, with a 27-person cross-functional team.
- Managed 4 product managers through the cloud migration, each owning a partner workstream, with dotted-line authority over their engineering and architecture teams.
- Designed the Goal-Based Travel Package framework (100-user research with Chase cardholders), then coded a working prototype solo at an internal hackathon.
- Most recently an individual contributor on cross-product strategy: greenfield initiatives with no data, benchmark or team, taken from scope to PoC decision.
Cybage Software
- Owned product definition for platform foundations - role-based access control and a configurable rules engine - keeping shifting architectural direction anchored to the business.
- Delivered a major overhaul to an enterprise leave management product within 18 months; my decision-table method for complex rules was adopted by other teams.
- Managed 3 senior analysts on independent modules and mentored 5 juniors through training content I built on BABOK.
Nihilent Technologies
- Customer loyalty evaluation product: a CEO’s concept to a commercial B2B2C launch in 12 months, as a two-person team.
- Standard Bank South Africa: business case for centralised procurement, then a 12-person contact centre PoC in 3 months. Rolled out nationally as Project Prologue.
- SuperSport and M-Net: onsite lead for a content contracts, scheduling and inventory platform - 7 consecutive releases over 2.5 years.
- Banking Association South Africa: strategy map and balanced scorecard automation in 6 months, later taught as a case study at Wits University.
Certifications: SAFe POPM, CSPO, CBAP. Designing and Building AI Products and Services, MIT xPRO (in progress).
Recognition: CIPS Southern Africa Best Process Improvement award (2010). Outstanding Alumni Award. Nihilent Best Team Award. Wits University case study. Contributor, IIBA Product Ownership Analysis guide. White paper on AHP-based content scheduling. Speaker, IPA Summit.
Résumé (PDF): Product Manager | AI Product Manager | Transformation Consultant · Professional brief (PDF)
Skill map
Self-rated, grouped by the beat of Shape-Ship-Synchronize each skill serves.
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Skill map
Go deeper
Each of these opens the full version on How I think.
Problems I worked end to end
- A struggling dairy farm, turned into a multi-tenant platform0→1 strategy, product to platform, market sizing
- Groups within groups: a moderation model for WhatsAppProposed in 2020, ~2.5 years before WhatsApp shipped Communities
- The Puppeteer: content where the viewer decides0→1 concept on a blue-ocean canvas
Lenses you can use
- Swanubhava™My product management behavioural model
- AI Trustworthiness MatrixRate eight AI-trust dimensions, then pair each rating with how sure you are of it.
- PKVit prioritisationPainkiller-to-vitamin scoring when everything looks urgent
Writing
- I've been a product manager for 18 years. Building my first AI product humbled me in week one
- The Hidden Bias Behind Viral Hype - Base Rate Neglect
- PKVit - Product Prioritization Framework