A thought leader, capable of churning out innovative ideas, open to realising customer pain points, and equipped with problem-solving skills – all while racing against time.

Hold it! This is not the description of a corporate leader, but the strengths of a great product manager.

And, there’s no dearth of such professionals in India. They not only embrace this responsibility but also excel at it like true champions. Their efforts, however, remain largely unnoticed despite the massive success of the products they design.

That was the trigger behind Upraised, a platform to train individuals to become product managers without an MBA degree, to come up with Upraised Game Changers 2024 list, celebrating the product managers who not only solved problems that affected millions of users but also created significant business impact. Product managers from Swiggy, Myntra, Uber, Invideo, INDmoney, Rapido, MPL, and many other leading Indian brands have been picked up through a multi-step process which included an expert-led shortlisting based on their framework evaluation, community engagement, public voting, and a final review.

With this, we bring you the second batch of 25 product leaders, who made the cut by leading innovation, bringing positive disruption, and proving to be the real game-changers in an increasingly bustling startup ecosystem in India. Let’s take a look at the Upraised Game Changers 2024 list.

Here’s The List Of Upraised Game Changers 2024

1. Aarish Khanna, SDE-1, Swiggy

Making a grocery list and handing it over to the shopkeeper for weekly or monthly supplies is a good old practice in the ubiquitous Indian household. In the process, no matter how much you try, one or two items are sure to fall out of the list.

When quick commerce came into play and replaced the traditional grocery shop for most urban households, shopping for supplies became a lot easier, but searching for items on the app turned out to be a lot harder than making the list in longhand.

Swiggy’s Aarish Khanna realised the pain point and got into brainstorming with his team. They developed a feature that allows users to scan their handwritten or printed grocery lists using their phone camera to search for all items at once on Instamart, Swiggy’s quick delivery venture.

Once the feature went live, it became an instant hit, and Swiggy recorded a considerable improvement in the cart-to-conversion rate. It also helped save time for the user.

2. Naina Bansal, Senior Product Manager, Swiggy

Naina Bansal worked with Aarish Khanna in the team that developed the feature for Swiggy Instamart that helped the customer scan their handwritten or printed grocery lists using their smartphone camera and cut down the hassle of searching for each item individually on the platform.

The feature earned massive love and appreciation from Instamart users and gained popularity on social media while also cutting down the delivery time for consumers.

3. Abhijit Khasnis, CTO, Healthify

Healthify, a digital health and wellness application, was trying to find a solution to deal with the inaccuracies in user-fed data on their calorie intake. The data shared by users for assessing calories in their meals was often based on estimates, while feeding every detail about the meal made the whole process quite tedious.

Abhijit Khasnis turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to devise a solution by deploying an AI-powered image recognition tool. He made it capable of identifying a food item from the image shared by the user, estimating the portions, and calculating the calorie intake for that serving.

This made meal logging faster, more accurate, and more engaging for Healthify users. The result was a 50% surge in food-tracking activity among the users.

4. Abhishek Madan, Former VP, Product Management, Paytm

Will there be a parking facility? How much do they charge? Will it be safe for kids? Can we get food there? What sort of food? How about beverages? Alcohol? Such endless thoughts crowd our minds whenever we book tickets for a live event. More often than not, the event detail page (EDP) lacks these details, which can hamper the user’s experience on the booking platform.

Paytm Insider (later acquired by Zomato), wanted to spare the user of such worries. Abhishek Madan decided to develop the EDP as a collection of widgets that could be easily updated from the backend. With this, the organisers could add as many details about the event as possible, along with YouTube videos and PDF files, directly on the details page.

With a Spotify widget, they can also add a handcrafted playlist of the artist, helping the audience discover or rediscover the performers at the event.

5. Aditya Narayanan, Senior Product Manager, Swiggy

When you are hosting a party, it’s easy to get the food through a delivery app like Swiggy. But it’s quite a tough task, and cumbersome too, to ask everyone what they would like to have and place the order without messing up with the quantity or missing out on one or two items.

Every host hates such an experience. When Aditya Narayanan was tasked to ensure a better user experience, he came up with a new feature for group ordering. This allows the user to choose a restaurant, invite all the guests to share a cart, ask everyone to add items to the cart, and finally process the entire order together. The feature cuts the chaos and makes the food-ordering process smarter.

After this feature was added to the app, Swiggy’s average order value grew 0.25% and increased user participation by reactivating dormant accounts, with an activation rate zooming 85%.

6. Akash Yadav, Senior UX Manager, Myntra

Short video contents seem to have set off a storm in social media, driving a billion-plus Indian smartphone users into scrolling.

As these short videos emerged as a great mobiliser of sales,........

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