In an era defined by brisk technological expansion and digital development, Rupesh Kumar has been a driving force of innovation, skills, and integrity. He has had an esteemed career, recognized by numerous global firms and is committed to the development of future product managers. Rupesh has led products in Integrity, Privacy, AI, analytics across several cutting-edge technology companies including Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Workday and other startups. Among his most notable works is devising strategies to mitigate misinformation and fraudulent actions on WhatsApp, thereby reinforcing user trust and safety and driving compliance in Facebook Ads Data inline with changing privacy regulations.
Rupesh Kumar is a respected Product Manager (PM) with nearly 20 years of industry experience, 6 years of those being at the epitome as a PM at Meta. Core tenets of his product management philosophy include:
- Empathy for Users: This is the top skill to have as a Product Manager, that is, understanding and empathizing with consumers of a prospective product. A good product can only be ideated around user problems and opportunities. Imagine a note taking tool that works seamlessly across all devices and has great editing, and visualizing tools. It improves a user’s life by reducing time on tasks, and providing better ways of expression, among other benefits.
- Grounding on existing solutions: Being researched on existing solutions and landscape of competitive products on targeted problems is necessary. Example, a new map (navigation) app wouldn’t work unless its ‘substantially’ better than existing products available to users. Building products that are just marginally better than existing products would be a waste of resources as existing products will have early mover’s advantage. A new product can be substantially better than existing solutions through several tactics in positioning, user experience (e.g. simplicity), use of data, partnership (integration into an existing system) and low cost
- Influencing without authority: It takes a village to build a good product requiring expertise in research, marketing, data science, UX design and engineering. A good Product manager orchestrates needs across all these functions and is good at influencing not just with their team members in design, data, engineering but also leadership (VPs, CXOs). Being collaborative by gathering continuous feedback on feature/product to build and brainstorming solutions to problems effectively.
- Proactive with Risks: A good product manager ensures privacy, legal, and integrity policies are adhered to for building the right things for the users, in the right way and organizes external communication, product testing and early feedback for new launches to ensure compliance with policies and regulations.
Rupesh has had extensive experience in devising machine learning models and has keen observation towards Generative AI which he considers a game-changer.
- It will transform customer support, research based industries and build efficiency in day to day jobs for everyone by automating routine tasks. Functions that will be most disrupted by Artificial intelligence would include content writing, data science and analysis, and project management.
- AI will however also accelerate progress in technology and create new avenues of growth. Most notably in areas of AI deployment and upskilling/reskilling, IOT, robotics, hardware capacity optimization, space research, among others. Further, AI will change job focus by needing humans for specialized skills and for better integration of AI in future tasks.
