GM – Product, Vodafone Idea · Mumbai · Open to Head / Director of Product roles

I build products that move millions of users and real revenue.

Senior product leader with 10+ years across telecom, B2B e-commerce, airline digital, SaaS and IoT. I lead the AI and prepaid portfolio on the Vi app (30M+ active users) with a 40-member team that owns 70% of the app's revenue. Before that I built JSW One's B2B commerce platform from scratch and owned its $1B GMV enablement. I use AI where it creates leverage, not for its own sake.

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30M+active users on the Vi app, where I lead product
$1BGMV enablement owned at JSW One
50K+recharges a month through telecom's first LLM agent
70%of Vi app revenue owned by my 40-member team
Recognition Best Use of AI award Showcased at Global Fintech Fest 2× Dream Team 2× National CXX Hero Innovation Catalyst

Selected work

01 — Outcomes first
Vodafone Idea · Conversational commerce

Telecom's first LLM-powered recharge agent, with agentic payments

50K+ / monthrecharges completed by the agent
Context
Recharging is the core job on the Vi app, yet users still struggled to find and pick the right plan through menus.
What I did
Launched the telecom industry's first LLM-powered recharge agent. Then led an agentic payments use case in a strategic partnership with Razorpay, so users can complete the payment inside the conversation.
Outcome
The agent completes 50K+ recharges every month. The agentic payment flow was showcased at Global Fintech Fest.
LLM productPaymentsPartnerships0 → 1
Vodafone Idea · Growth & monetisation

Turning a once-a-month utility into a habit

+2–5M MAUfrom each of 4 gamification programs
Context
People open telecom apps about once a month, to recharge. That limits cross-sell, partner revenue and retention.
What I did
Started 4 major gamification programs across the platform, kept shipping feature improvements, and optimised the end-to-end experience. I also led the repositioning of the AI and prepaid portfolio.
Outcome
Each program added 2–5M monthly active users. The app's revenue contribution grew about 28%, transactions grew 27%, and the store rating improved from 4.2 to 4.4.
EngagementMonetisationExperimentation
JSW One · B2B e-commerce

Building a B2B commerce platform for 30K+ MSMEs from the ground up

$1B GMVenablement owned
Context
Buying construction materials meant offline orders, opaque credit and slow support. JSW One set out to bring the MSME supply chain online.
What I did
Built and scaled a 9-member engineering and design team for the Salesforce practice. Owned the sales, order-management and post-sales journeys, credit and limit workflows, omnichannel support (IVR, WhatsApp, email) and a distributor portal for 10K retailers.
Outcome
$1B GMV enabled. Credit workflows drove 15% month-over-month revenue growth, and omnichannel support cut response time by 80% and lifted retention by 25%.
MarketplaceB2BSalesforceTeam building
Accenture Strategy · Airline digital

Rebuilding digital and loyalty experiences for Malaysia Airlines and Qatar Airways

+11% DAUafter the mobile UI/UX overhaul
Context
Major airlines in Southeast Asia and the Middle East needed to modernise their direct digital channels and loyalty programs.
What I did
Set the product strategy for Malaysia Airlines' B2C web and mobile apps, led a full loyalty-program transformation, and shaped Qatar Airways' digital roadmap across customer touchpoints.
Outcome
An 11% rise in daily active users after the Android and iOS overhaul, plus real-time gate and flight alerts through airport system integrations.
ConsultingLoyaltyMobile

How I lead product

02 — Principles

Business outcome before feature

Every roadmap item traces to a number the business cares about: MAU, revenue, GMV or cost to serve. If it doesn't move one of them, it waits.

Research is leverage

A week understanding why users pick the wrong plan saves a quarter building the wrong thing. I put discovery inside delivery instead of treating it as a separate phase.

Technology serves the job

I've shipped LLM agents and gamification engines, and I'd ship a simpler button if it did the job better. The tool follows the problem.

Experience

03 — 10+ years
Vodafone Idea
Apr 2024 – Present · Mumbai

GM – Product Manager, Vi App

Lead the AI and prepaid portfolio for India's third-largest telecom app (30M+ active users), with a 40-member team owning 70% of app revenue across prepaid and partnerships. Won the Best Use of AI award for LLM-driven insights from app-store analytics.

JSW One Platforms
May 2022 – Apr 2024 · Mumbai

Senior Product Manager – Salesforce Web + Mobile

Built an enterprise B2B commerce platform for 30K+ MSMEs from scratch and owned its $1B GMV enablement. Shipped Salesforce Einstein bots (60% faster first response) and an ML deal-closure prediction model for sales.

Accenture Strategy
Sep 2018 – May 2022 · Mumbai

Management Consultant – Strategy & Digital Travel

Core strategy consulting, plus hands-on product roles on client programmes. Owned product for Malaysia Airlines' web and apps (an 11% DAU lift), led their loyalty transformation, shaped Qatar Airways' digital roadmap, and developed thought leadership on NDC for the airline industry.

Wipro Technologies
Jun 2017 – Sep 2018

Product Manager – Way2Go (B2B travel SaaS)

Took an Azure-based travel booking platform from inception to launch. Added 50% more content through an OTA partnership, removed about 16 FTEs of operational overhead, and handled $10M a month in transactions.

John Deere
Jul 2014 – Jun 2015

Graduate Engineer Trainee

Built IoT machine-monitoring apps for intelligent tractor displays and GPS integration for autonomous tractors. Named "Star of the Sprint" twice.

Builder's lab

04 — Still shipping

On weekends I build and ship small AI products myself, handling auth, payments, data pipelines and agents. Shipping my own products keeps me honest about the trade-offs my teams face every day.

Also built: a PM agent toolkit (Telegram + n8n + OpenAI + Pinecone) that plans backlogs by text message, answers questions about long documents, and drafts status emails from task sheets.

Point of view

05 — Writing
Build vs. buy vs. rent

Closed APIs are perfect for MVPs and terrible for scale

Calling ChatGPT or Claude means renting compute you can't inspect, fine-tune or host, and the bill grows with every user. I hosted an open-weight model myself to understand the real economics.

  • Run locally with Ollama in 10 minutes; use Docker + vLLM on a cloud GPU for production
  • Fine-tuning and prompt engineering solve different problems
  • Owning the stack gives you control of your data and better unit economics
Read on LinkedIn →
Learning by shipping

Four micro-SaaS launches taught me more than any AI course

One long weekend, four experiments shipped. The real lessons came from the blockers: payments, auth and integrations that should have worked but didn't.

  • The barrier to building is now almost zero
  • Payment rails decide what you can launch from India
  • Every integration failure taught me more than a tutorial would
Read on LinkedIn →
AI for PMs

Agents that save hours of PM busywork

Backlog planning, document Q&A, status emails and deadline checks are all repeatable. I automated each one over a weekend, and the logic still had to come from me.

  • AI executes the plan, but it doesn't replace the PM's judgement
  • Chat is a better interface than dashboards for quick answers
  • The real value arrives once organisations run private instances
Read on LinkedIn →
A field guide The Agentic Product Playbook Rahul Tirmale
06 — Author

The Agentic Product Playbook

A practical guide for product managers building with AI agents: how to pick problems worth automating, design for trust, and measure what matters once software starts acting on users' behalf.

Get it on Amazon ↗

Education

PGDM (MBA)
IIM Kozhikode · 2015 – 2017
B.Tech, Electronics
Walchand College of Engineering · 2010 – 2014

Certifications

Certified Scrum MasterSAFe Agile SM Six Sigma Green BeltSalesforce Admin

Toolkit

Product strategy0 → 1 launches Growth & gamificationMarketplaces Payment gatewaysLLM & agentic products A/B testingSQLGoogle BigQuery Adobe AnalyticsPower BIPython SalesforceFigmaJIRAAgile / Scrum

Hiring a product leader who ships at scale?

I'm exploring Head of Product, Director and Principal PM roles in India or remote. The quickest way to reach me is email.

Email me → LinkedIn Résumé