Ramanuja Mangla

AVP, Products

Gameskraft

Ex: Swiggy, Nearbuy

Career Milestones

I couldn’t have asked for a better way to transition into product management. During the course of the first 5 years of my experience, I was working very closely with engineers, was doing requirement gathering by speaking with clients, was creating SOPs and templates to improve efficiency and most importantly, was learning all about the world of ads at Google. In 2015, when I finally moved into product management at nearbuy.com (formerly Groupon India), the first 6 months were spent in setting up the base to understand all the underlying behavioural data which helped me generate meaningful insights at a user segment level. This enabled me to ship my favourite product so far - the algorithmically driven storefront at nearbuy. During this journey, I also developed great relationships with my peers across business, marketing, design and engineering which set me up for my next challenges.

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Organization and You

I’m currently working at Gameskraft which is India’s fastest-growing online gaming company. Every day is a rollercoaster; I need to constantly keep zooming in and zooming out. The key is to strategically drive the planning and execution. I need to ensure that my team is regularly shipping high impact items which are steering the product towards more revenue and customer satisfaction. On a typical day, you’ll see me wearing multiple hats - becoming the analyser where I spend time in going through the data to dig out insights, becoming an influencer where I work with different stakeholders and drive focus towards a common goal and becoming a facilitator by removing friction for my team by resolving conflicts and setting up contextual and achievable processes.

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Core Competencies

Perseverance
Always optimising mindset
Structured thinking and communication

Go to food for thought

Twitter (tip: follow not more than 5-10 product leaders)
Reforge blog (https://www.reforge.com/blog)
Harvard Business Review
If I had to recommend just one book, it would be High Output Management by Andrew Grove

Favorite Products

Spotify - continues to delight me almost every week with their amazing curations. A product which truly understands the music I like and helps me discover new tracks and also easily access my favourite ones.
WhatsApp - for getting the job done every single time. Be it for personal or professional use, be it a text or media communication, I can depend on it.
Amazon - for their incredible customer centric approach and ever expanding catalogue, a product which I can trust with my shopping needs.

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