Souvik Samanta
Product Manager — AI Products & Growth
Product manager with 12+ years spanning engineering, product, and enterprise SaaS transformation — building products that unlock new revenue, improve retention, and scale customer engagement. Track record of identifying whitespace opportunities, translating customer insight into monetizable product strategy, and leading cross-functional execution from discovery through GTM.
Blend of commercial strategy, product leadership, and deep AI product fluency. Built on 7 years of engineering and technical leadership before transitioning into product — bringing architectural depth to every product decision.
Blend of commercial strategy, product leadership, and deep AI product fluency. Built on 7 years of engineering and technical leadership before transitioning into product — bringing architectural depth to every product decision.
$1M+
ARR generated
+40%
Engagement lift
20–30%
Build cost saved
15+
Cross-functional team led
100%
On-time release cadence
5
AI systems in production
Work experience
● Current role
Buyerr | B2B SaaS Trade Engagement Platform serving FMCG & Alco-bev enterprises
Product Manager — AI Products & Growth · Thane
Jan 2023 – Present
AI-powered B2B revenue platform — $1M+ ARR, Sales GPT, CS GPT, 40% engagement lift.
$1M+ ARR
+40% engagement
20–30% cost reduction
Sales GPT
CS GPT
AI initiatives & business outcomes
| Business problem | AI initiative | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Low consumer engagement, high churn | AI personalisation + hyperlocalization engine | +40% engagement |
| No scalable consumer promotion channel | AI-driven campaign platform with loyalty mechanics | $1M+ ARR |
| Slow prototyping, high dev cost | No-code + LLM-assisted prototyping workflows | 20–30% cost reduction |
| Sales team losing time; slow deals | Sales GPT — RAG chatbot: SOPs, pricing, proposals, objections | Proposals in minutes |
| High post-sale churn; reactive CS | CS GPT — health scoring, churn signals, playbook automation | Proactive retention |
Strategic Product Leadership
- Identified a whitespace market opportunity in consumer promotions across FMCG and alco-bev through structured market analysis and customer discovery — led to a new product line that generated $1M+ ARR.
- Defined pricing, packaging, and commercialization strategy for enterprise adoption, shifting product monetization from transactional delivery to value-based pricing.
- Established product investment frameworks tying roadmap bets to measurable ROI — improving prioritization discipline and reducing unnecessary build investment.
Product Discovery & Customer Insight
- Led customer discovery with brand leaders, trade marketers, distributors, and sales stakeholders to validate unmet needs and shape product roadmap.
- Built continuous customer feedback loops to improve adoption, retention, and expansion opportunities.
- Used experimentation and behavioral analysis to redesign engagement journeys, improving activation and customer interaction metrics.
Growth & Product Optimization
- Designed and led experimentation strategy for AI-driven personalization and hyperlocal engagement experiences — delivering 40% improvement in engagement metrics.
- Analyzed funnel drop-offs and lifecycle friction points to define intervention strategies across onboarding and retention journeys.
- Partnered with revenue teams to align product capabilities with enterprise sales motions and customer expansion opportunities.
AI Product Transformation
- Led development of multiple AI-enabled product initiatives — AI-assisted consumer engagement platform, internal sales copilot for proposal acceleration, customer success intelligence workflows, and AI-assisted prototyping systems.
- Reduced product development cost by 20–30% by introducing AI-enabled product delivery workflows across the engineering and product teams.
- Accelerated adoption of AI operating models across product, sales, operations, and leadership teams.
Cross-functional Leadership
- Led a 15+ person cross-functional team spanning product, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success — driving alignment on roadmap priorities, release sequencing, and GTM readiness across competing stakeholder demands.
- Navigated a high-stakes trade-off between engineering capacity and a time-sensitive enterprise launch — secured leadership alignment to defer two internal initiatives, enabling on-time delivery and protecting the commercial commitment.
- Partnered with marketing to co-define campaign mechanics, messaging, and launch sequencing for new product lines — ensuring product capabilities were positioned accurately and adoption targets were met at launch.
AI tools: GPT-4o · RAG/FAISS · LangChain · FastAPI · Python · n8n · Zapier · Bolt · Mixpanel · Power BI
Previous role
Sproxil Brand Protection Pvt Ltd
Associate Product Manager · Thane
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023
First PM role — market research, user interviews, A/B testing, Mixpanel adoption tracking.
Platform & Product Scope
- Worked on Sproxil's core track-and-trace and consumer anti-counterfeiting platform — managing roadmap across 7 enterprise brand clients in FMCG and Alco-bev.
- Shipped 20+ product features across 2 years — spanning consumer engagement flows, brand verification journeys, and back-office reporting for brand managers.
Discovery & Insight
- Led market research and structured user interviews across FMCG and Alco-Bev clients — translated customer insight into prioritised requirements that shaped the core product roadmap.
- Conducted a customer discovery interview that revealed a high-priority feature the team had assumed was heavily used — data showed near-zero adoption. Killed the feature from the roadmap, redirected engineering capacity to a higher-impact initiative.
- Built feature adoption tracking using Google Analytics and Mixpanel; identified which features drove retention vs. friction — used findings to validate and kill roadmap items.
- Designed A/B testing framework for key product flows — validated UX decisions and made evidence-based prioritisation calls with engineering and design.
Cross-functional Execution
- Transitioned directly from Tech Lead at the same company — brought an engineering-first lens to product decisions. Understood not just what to build but why, and critically, what else could be built given the existing architecture.
- Collaborated directly with engineering without a translation layer — already fluent in the tech stack, could review PRs, assess feasibility, and estimate effort independently. Shortened sprint planning cycles significantly.
- Partnered with sales on client onboarding — gathered post-onboarding feedback that surfaced friction points and fed directly back into the product roadmap.
- Streamlined QA and release cycles in collaboration with engineering — reduced UAT issues by 25% through better acceptance criteria and pre-release validation.
Tools: JIRA · Miro · Figma · Mixpanel · Google Analytics
Previous role
Sproxil Brand Protection Pvt Ltd
Technical Lead · Thane
Nov 2017 – Jan 2021
Built and scaled the tech stack that drives 20–30% business growth today.
Platform & Scale
- Led engineering for Sproxil's anti-counterfeiting and brand protection platform — a microservices system built on Java Spring Boot processing over 10,000 transactions per hour at peak load.
- The architecture designed during this tenure is still running in production today — the platform's microservices structure, API design, and database schema remain the foundation for all current product capabilities.
Team & Delivery
- Led a team of 8 engineers across backend, integrations, and platform reliability — responsible for architecture decisions, code reviews, sprint delivery, and technical mentorship.
- Introduced CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and structured code review processes — these changes drove the 20–30% business growth by reducing release cycle time and improving deployment reliability.
- Boosted developer productivity 15–20% through coding standards, best practices, and structured mentorship across the engineering team.
Engineering Achievement
- Designed and implemented a performance optimisation that enabled the system to handle 1,000 requests per second without infrastructure cost increase — directly enabling the platform's commercial scale-up.
- Built and scaled the core tech stack that drove 20–30% business growth — without adding disproportionate infrastructure overhead.
The Transition to Product
- Engineering clarified how to build things — but working alongside business stakeholders raised a persistent question: why are we building this, and why is it needed? That question drove the move to APM in 2021.
- The Tech Lead role built a zeal for problem-solving beyond features — seeing the business side made it clear that the more important problems were upstream of the code.
Stack: Java Spring Boot · Microservices · CI/CD · REST APIs · MySQL
Previous role
Larsen & Toubro InfoTech
Senior Software Developer · Mumbai
Feb 2017 – Nov 2017
Automated DevOps integration; built Java-based surveillance HMI components.
Project & Domain
- Worked on a Java-based Air Traffic Control surveillance system — a mission-critical, real-time platform where reliability and precision were non-negotiable constraints.
- Part of a 20-person engineering team; focused on CI/CD pipeline implementation and DevOps automation within a tightly controlled delivery environment.
Technical Contribution
- Automated and integrated CI/CD pipelines throughout the development cycle — reduced manual deployment effort and improved release consistency across the team.
- Built Java-based surveillance HMI components for radar data processing and display — real-time data rendering under strict latency and accuracy requirements.
Context & Learning
- The role was primarily DevOps and L3 support — core feature development was owned by the client team. The deliberate choice to return to Sproxil was driven by the opportunity to own architecture and engineering outcomes end to end.
- Exposure to a defence-grade engineering culture — zero tolerance for downtime, rigorous change management — reinforced engineering discipline that carried through into every subsequent system design.
Stack: Java · CI/CD · DevOps automation · Real-time HMI
Previous role
Sproxil Brand Protection Pvt Ltd
Senior Software Developer · Thane
Oct 2015 – Feb 2017
Architected Java backend; built web services API with 0% production downtime.
Sole Developer — Full Ownership
- Sole developer for the organisation at this stage — responsible for the entire technical stack end to end, with no team support. Every architectural decision, implementation, and production issue was owned and resolved independently.
- Self-taught every component of the system as required — learned, designed, and implemented without external guidance, building a broad and deep understanding of how the full platform fits together.
Technical Work
- Architected Java backend with multithreading and design patterns; designed and optimised the full database structure — system served 20–25 enterprise clients simultaneously.
- Built and maintained REST APIs for data transmission across Sproxil's backend services — maintained 0% production downtime across the entire tenure.
- Inherited an unoptimised 100GB production database — identified query bottlenecks, restructured indexing, and rewrote slow queries, bringing performance to production SLAs without a database migration.
- Built web services API layer for data transmission across distributed servers — designed for reliability and low latency at client scale.
Foundation for What Followed
- The combination of sole ownership, cross-system responsibility, and client-scale operations built the instinct for thinking above individual feature delivery — the first signal of a product mindset developing within an engineering role.
- This role directly preceded the Tech Lead appointment — the architectural thinking developed here became the foundation for the full platform redesign undertaken from 2017.
Stack: Java · REST APIs · MySQL · Multithreading · Database optimisation
Previous role
I2India Pvt Ltd
Software Developer · Bangalore
Apr 2014 – Oct 2015
Server-side logic for multiplayer game; PHP analytics tool.
Project & Product
- Built server-side game logic in Java for an online multiplayer engagement platform created for Britannia — a consumer brand engagement product with 2,000+ daily active users.
- The game was designed as a virtual world engagement experience for Britannia's consumer base — blending entertainment with brand interaction on a live, concurrent platform.
Technical Challenges
- The hardest technical challenge was managing concurrency across simultaneous user activity — built session handling, state management, and server-side synchronisation to keep the game consistent across all active players.
- Developed server-side logic in Java handling real-time player state, game events, and multi-user interactions at scale.
- Built a full PHP analytics tool connected to the game database — gave the product and client teams visibility into player behaviour, session metrics, and engagement patterns.
First Role — Lessons from the Start
- First professional role after M.Tech in AI and Neural Networks — the immediate lesson was that theoretical and practical approaches are entirely different disciplines. Academic AI is about models; production software is about reliability, scale, and the humans using it.
- Working on a consumer-facing product from day one — seeing how real users interacted with software in unpredictable ways — planted the seed for the eventual shift toward product thinking.
Stack: Java · PHP · MySQL · Concurrent session management
Core competencies
Product strategy
Market research, A/B testing, GTM, pricing, customer discovery
Scale & execution
Cross-functional leadership, enterprise GTM, 15+ person teams
AI & LLM engineering
Builds production AI systems — RAG pipelines, GPT agents, multimodal engines
Product strategy
Full PM discipline — research, validation, pricing, GTM — applied to AI-led products
Skill breakdown
Customer discovery
Expert
Market research
Expert
A/B testing & validation
Expert
Pricing & tiering strategy
Expert
GTM & launch sequencing
Expert
Evidence
Market research
Identified consumer promotions gap through FMCG/Alco-bev research — shipped campaign platform in one quarter, $1M+ ARR
A/B testing
Tested personalisation variants — validated 40% engagement lift before full rollout; roadmap driven by test outcomes
Pricing strategy
Flat → value-based model unlocked enterprise deals previously out of reach
Scale & execution
Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams, manage enterprise GTM, and ship at pace
Skill breakdown
Cross-functional leadership
Advanced
Enterprise GTM
Advanced
Release & roadmap mgmt
Expert
Infra cost strategy
Solid
Engineering leadership
Advanced
Evidence
Team leadership
Led 15+ person cross-functional team — maintained 100% on-time release cadence throughout
Engineering background
Developer → Tech Lead → APM → PM. Built the Sproxil core architecture that runs in production today
Cost management
ROI-based AI framework reduced dev costs 20–30%; shipped faster without adding headcount
AI & LLM engineering
Not just a PM who understands AI — builds production systems that generate revenue
Skill breakdown
RAG pipeline design
Production
LLM prompt engineering
Production
Multimodal AI systems
Production
AI agent orchestration
Advanced
No-code / automation
Production
Evidence
Sales GPT
5-phase RAG chatbot (GPT-4o + FAISS + FastAPI) serving the full Buyerr sales team in production
CS GPT
Health scoring, churn signal detection, playbook automation — deployed for the customer success team
Business outcome
AI personalisation engine drove +40% engagement — A/B validated before full rollout
Skills & tools
Collaboration & delivery
JIRA, Trello, Miro, Postman, Swagger, GIT
AI & product tools
GPT-4o, RAG, LangChain, Mixpanel, Figma, JIRA
Engineering stack
Python, FastAPI, Node.js, AWS/Azure, CI/CD, MySQL
Collaboration & delivery
Tools that keep cross-functional teams aligned and shipping on time — every time
Tool proficiency
JIRA
Daily use
Miro
Daily use
Trello
Advanced
Postman
Advanced
Swagger
Advanced
GIT
Daily use
Used to deliver
100% on-time releases
JIRA-driven sprint management across engineering, QA, and design — maintained 100% on-time release cadence at Buyerr
UAT reduction
Postman + Swagger used to define API contracts early — reduced UAT issues by 25% at Sproxil
Cross-functional alignment
Miro for discovery workshops and roadmap planning across 15+ person teams spanning product, sales, and engineering
AI & product tools
Tools used daily in production — not just familiarity, but shipped outcomes
Tool proficiency
GPT-4o / LLM APIs
Production
RAG / FAISS
Production
LangChain
Production
n8n / Zapier / Bolt
Production
Mixpanel
Daily use
Power BI
Advanced
Figma
Advanced
HuggingFace / Replicate
Advanced
Used to ship
Sales GPT
GPT-4o + RAG/FAISS + LangChain + FastAPI — 5-phase chatbot in production for the Buyerr sales team
Engagement lift
Mixpanel analytics + A/B testing validated AI personalisation mechanics — drove +40% engagement
Automation workflows
n8n + Zapier replaced manual ops workflows — freed 20% engineering bandwidth
Engineering stack
8 years as a developer before PM — not just awareness, genuine hands-on depth
Tool proficiency
Python
Production
FastAPI
Production
Java / Node.js
Production
MySQL
Production
AWS / Azure
Advanced
CI/CD
Advanced
REST APIs
Production
GIT
Daily use
Engineering background
Sproxil architecture
Built the Java backend with multithreading and design patterns that the Sproxil platform runs on today — 0% production downtime
Sales GPT backend
Personally built FastAPI + Python backend serving the production RAG chatbot — not specced, actually built
Why it matters as PM
Can write the spec, review the PR, and spot the architectural risk — removes a full layer of translation between product and engineering
Education
Executive MBA — Product Management
Institute of Product Leadership (CMRIT), Bengaluru
M.Tech — AI & Neural Networks
University of Petroleum & Energy Studies, Dehradun
B.E — Electronics & Communication
North Maharashtra University
Executive MBA in Product Management
Institute of Product Leadership (CMRIT), Bengaluru
Completed · 2024 – 2026
Core modules
Product strategy & vision
Core
AI for product managers
Core
GTM & growth strategy
Core
Pricing & monetisation
Core
Data-driven decision making
Core
Leadership & org design
Core
Why it matters
Formalising the craft
8 years of hands-on PM work — the MBA structures and validates what was already practised in production
Enterprise readiness
Cohort of senior PMs from established companies — direct exposure to how product operates at scale beyond startups
Specialisation
AI for PM module directly aligns with Sales GPT, CS GPT, and RAG pipeline work done at Buyerr
M.Tech — AI & Neural Networks
University of Petroleum & Energy Studies, Dehradun
Completed · 2012 – 2014
Core modules
Neural network architectures
Core
Machine learning algorithms
Core
Natural language processing
Core
Pattern recognition
Core
Deep learning foundations
Core
AI applications & systems
Core
Why it matters
10-year foresight
Completed in 2014 — a decade before LLMs went mainstream. The AI expertise is foundational, not reactive
Technical credibility
Understands transformer architecture, embeddings, and vector search at theory level — RAG and LLM decisions from first principles
Direct application
NLP and neural network theory directly applied in the RAG pipelines, FAISS vector stores, and GPT-4o integrations at Buyerr
B.E — Electronics & Communication
North Maharashtra University
Completed · 2006 – 2010
Core modules
Digital signal processing
Core
Embedded systems
Core
Communication networks
Core
Microprocessors & systems
Core
Programming fundamentals
Core
Engineering mathematics
Core
Why it matters
Engineering foundation
Systems thinking, logical problem decomposition, and understanding of how hardware and software interact — the base for everything that followed
Technical PM edge
Engineering degree means no translation layer needed — can read specs, review architecture, and spot risk independently
Career arc origin
B.E → M.Tech AI → Developer → Tech Lead → PM — the full arc built on this engineering base makes product instincts genuinely technical
Achievements
Employee of the Quarter ×4
Awarded four times at Buyerr for delivery impact across product, AI, and cross-functional execution.
MBA with Distinction
Company-sponsored Executive MBA completed with distinction. Institute of Product Leadership (CMRIT), 2024–2026.
$1M+ ARR — Campaign Platform
Spotted the gap, scoped the product, and shipped the consumer campaign platform in one quarter from a standing start.
5 AI Systems in Production
Sales GPT, CS GPT, Multimodal SOP Engine, Campaign Platform, Internal AI Platform — designed and shipped personally.
Sales GPT — 2 Weeks to Adoption
RAG chatbot built and deployed in production — adopted company-wide within 2 weeks of launch. Zero external budget, fully in-house.
Sproxil Technical Architecture
Designed the full Sproxil Brand Protection technical architecture — still running in production today. The engineering base behind the PM instincts.
Portfolio
Company
5 products
CS GPT
AI campaign intelligence & CS query platform
Sales GPT
RAG system unifying sales knowledge & proposals
Buyerr CS Dashboard
Campaign analytics & branded PDF/PPT export tool
Loyalty Platform
Dedicated loyalty program — points, tiers & redemption
Consumer Campaign Platform
Self-serve campaign builder — 8 days → 1 day delivery
Personal
6 products
ResumeForge
Transforms your resume into an interactive site with AI chatbot
Finance Tracker
Encrypted family expense & budget management app
Monthly Groceries
Categorised monthly grocery list with carry-over
Weekly Groceries
Fresh produce tracker with quantity & status management
Trip Packing
Smart multi-list packing tracker for trips & events
Find My Stuff
Shared home inventory — know where everything is instantly
I don't just put AI on the roadmap. I build it.