Hi, I'm Harshada — Bangalore

Ops & Quality background, now building products people actually use.

Ten years bridging platform teams and frontline users taught me one thing: the best PRD is worthless if it doesn't land on the ground. Now I write for that person first — with the PM craft to back it up.

Below: case studies, product skills, and the honest story of the transition. PRDs, prototypes, and evidence of thinking — no invented metrics.

Harshada Yerpude
Bangalore, India— probably drafting a PRD
01 · ProductHow I think, not just what I built

Case studies.

Four end-to-end product cases — problem, research, prioritization, MVP, trade-offs, and what I'd do next. Expand any card to read the full write-up. Want the PRD or deck behind a case? Just reach out.

Capstone · AI × Fitness2026

GymBuddy — an AI gym coach for budget gym beginners

Airtribe capstone · shipped & tested with real users

Budget gym beginners don't drop out because they don't know what to do — they drop out because deciding takes effort on a busy week. GymBuddy generates an adaptive weekly plan and a check-in simple enough to survive that week. Built, shipped, and tested with 10 real users.

User researchPRDNorth starGTM
10
Real users onboarded
Prototype screens
B2C · MobilityApr 2026

Smart Pickup Point Suggester

Uber India · APM Brief

GPS pickup friction at complex locations (malls, gated communities, airports) drops rider satisfaction and increases cancellations. Designed a suggested-pickup layer end-to-end.

User researchPRDGTM
↑
Pickup success & rider retention
Prototype walkthrough · screen recording
B2C · Q-commerceApr 2026

Zepto AOV Optimisation

Behavioural · RICE-prioritised

Low AOV isn't a discount problem — it's a spend-anxiety problem. Segmented users, ranked interventions, designed the A/B test.

Root-causeRICEA/B test plan
6→1
Interventions ranked to one bet
Prototype walkthrough · screen recording
B2C · FitnessMay 2025

VitaFit — Community & Instructor Engagement

Retention PRD

Retention doesn't come from streaks; it comes from someone noticing when you don't show up. Designed the accountability layer.

PRDMoSCoWNorth-star
D30↑
Retention target
Prototype walkthrough · screen recording

More work

Additional discovery sprints and prototypes.

Live assignment · AI healthcare2026

Product teardown for a YC-backed AI healthcare startup

Live product analysis · 2026

A timed, real-brief product analysis for a YC-backed AI healthcare company: I mapped the current user journey, pulled out where trust breaks down for a clinical user, sized the highest-leverage gaps against effort, and wrote up a prioritized set of recommendations with the metric each one should move. The work is shared as-is — walkthrough deck and analysis doc.

Open analysis folder

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B2C · Q-commerce2026

Flipkart Minutes — JTBDs & Top 3 Bets

Discovery sprint

Five JTBDs framing the 10-minute grocery user. Stack-ranked to three high-leverage bets: Smart Recurring Lists, Post-Order Cart Modification Window, and a Self-Serve Returns Tab.

Personal · FinTech2025

My Spend Buddy

Personal finance tracker

PRD-first build: user flows, edge cases, and acceptance criteria defined before a single screen was designed.

Open live prototype
B2C · Insights2026

Insight Navigator

Review mining → product themes

Turns a pile of unstructured app reviews into ranked, actionable themes so a PM can see what to fix first instead of reading 1,000 comments.

Automation · Social impact2026

Food Rescue Agent — Make.com

No-code AI agent · surplus food → nearby NGOs

Restaurants and event caterers throw away edible surplus because finding a taker in the last hour is manual work nobody has time for. I built an autonomous agent on Make.com that closes that gap: a donor submits a short Google Form (what food, how much, pickup window, location); the scenario fires on submission, calls an HTTP search step to find NGOs and food banks near that pin, and logs every request as a row in Google Sheets so there's a permanent audit trail. A Make AI Agent then reads the row, matches the surplus to the best-fit NGO on distance and pickup window, drafts the outreach message, and sends it — with the donor CC'd so the handover is verifiable. Product decisions: I kept humans in the loop for the final confirmation (an agent should not promise food it can't deliver), used a Sheet as the source of truth so anyone non-technical can audit or override, and scoped v1 to a single city radius rather than a national matching problem. Success measure: kilos rescued per week and time from submission to confirmed pickup.

Showreel · live builds

The prototypes, in motion.

Each case distilled to the one interaction that mattered. Phones marked Recording play a real screen capture of the build I shipped — no shareable link, so the work stays mine.

GymBuddy
Week 3 plan
Push · Pull · Legs
M
T
W
T
F
S
S
Bench press · 3×8
Lat pulldown · 3×10
Goblet squat · 3×12
One-tap check-in
AI Gym Coach
Adaptive weekly plan · capstone
Concept demo
Open live prototype
Uber
Recording
Pickup Suggester
Live map · smart pin drop
Screen recording of the live build
Open live prototype
Insights
1,204 reviews
Top themes
Delivery delays82%
App crashes61%
Refund friction44%
Ship fix → NPS +6
Insight Navigator
Review mining → themes
Concept demo
Spend Buddy
Recording
Budget Pulse
PRD-first finance
Screen recording of the live build
Open live prototype
Zepto
Recording
AOV Lift
Behavioural cart nudge
Screen recording of the live build
Open live prototype
VitaFit
Recording
Accountability Circles
D-30 retention loop
Screen recording of the live build
Open live prototype
02 · SkillsThe PM toolbelt

Product skills.

Grouped by what they're for. Not a checklist — the things I actually reach for.

Discovery
  • User interviews (qual + quant)
  • JTBD framing
  • Root-cause analysis
  • Competitive teardown
Definition
  • PRDs · user stories · acceptance criteria
  • Roadmaps & backlog
  • MoSCoW · RICE prioritization
  • GTM positioning
Delivery
  • Sprint planning
  • UAT cycles
  • Stakeholder choreography
  • Training & change management
  • Remote enablement at scale (100+ learners live)
Analytics
  • KPI · OKR design
  • A/B test plans + guardrails
  • Funnel & cohort thinking
  • North-star metrics
Tools
  • Jira · Figma · Confluence
  • Amplitude · GA · Postman
  • Lovable · ChatGPT · Claude
  • Zapier · Notion
03 · NarrativeFor hiring managers reading between the lines

Why Product?

A career changer's honest note — what I'm bringing over, and what's genuinely different about my lens.

Why I'm transitioning

For a decade I've watched platform decisions land — or fail to land — with the people actually using them. I've been the one running the UAT, training the rollout, and hearing the frontline groan when a feature misses the reality it's shipped into. I want to be upstream of that. Product is the seat where those calls get made, and I've spent ten years learning what makes them go right.

How ops makes me a better PM

UAT rigour translates directly to airtight acceptance criteria. Running training rollouts taught me that adoption is a design problem, not a comms problem. Building a QA framework with measurable KPIs was, in effect, a north-star exercise. I've already done the unglamorous half of PM work — I'm here for the strategic half now.

What's different about my lens

Most PMs meet friction in a dashboard. I've met it in a support queue, in a training room, and in the escalations that never made it to Amplitude. That means I default to "will this actually get adopted?" before I ask "is this shippable?" — which turns out to be the question that saves teams from shipping the wrong thing.

04 · WorkTen years, written as user stories

Work experience.

Same format I use in PRDs. It reads honestly — no invented job titles, no team-of-30.

Dec 2024 – Present
Product Trainer · Accenture
I want to turn platform releases into adoption, not just announcements so that features actually get used by the people they were built for.
Acceptance criteria
  • Own enablement for every platform rollout — from release notes to live cohort training
  • Turn post-rollout confusion into a ranked list of adoption blockers the platform team can act on
  • Cut repeat 'how do I do this' escalations by fixing the workflow, not just re-explaining it
Jun 2018 – Dec 2024
Quality Analyst · Accenture
I want to be the feedback loop between what shipped and what actually works on the floor so that product decisions are made on evidence from real usage, not assumption.
Acceptance criteria
  • Ran UAT cycles for platform releases and signed off on what was safe to ship
  • Built a QA framework with measurable KPIs — made quality a number the team could steer by
  • Synthesized frontline defects and escalations into recurring themes for the platform team
  • Held the line across ops, training and platform stakeholders when priorities collided
Jun 2017 – May 2018
Technical Support · Sutherland
I want to sit closest to the user at their most frustrated moment so that I learned to hear the real problem underneath the reported one.
Acceptance criteria
  • Diagnosed root causes instead of clearing tickets
  • Learned to translate user language into product language
Oct 2015 – May 2017
Adjudicator · Hexaware
I want to make consistent calls on ambiguous claims against dense policy terms so that I built the rigour that now goes into airtight acceptance criteria.
Acceptance criteria
  • High-volume decisions with an audit trail
  • Structured judgement under ambiguity
05 · Impact · Volunteering through Accenture

Teaching a whole rural classroom, live.

Through Accenture's community programme I taught students across multiple subjects in a village in Gadchiroli — one virtual room, the entire class at once, patchy connectivity and mixed comprehension levels. I front-loaded the one idea that mattered, swapped explanation for worked examples when the room went quiet, and checked understanding out loud. Designing for the person with the worst connection and the least context is exactly how I think about a first-run user.

Why it's here: a mixed-ability room with one shot at attention is user research, prioritization and onboarding design compressed into 40 minutes.
06 · LearningDeliberate transition, not accidental

Learning.

The formal side of the transition — programmes, certifications, and what each one actually gave me.

AI-First Product Management
2025 – 2026
Airtribe

The programme these case studies were built inside. PRDs, prototyping with AI tools, prioritization frameworks.

Generative AI Foundations
2026
upGrad × Microsoft

Foundations for AI-integrated product work — prompting, model choice, evaluation.

Agile / Scrum fundamentals
Ongoing
Self-paced

Sprint mechanics, backlog grooming, ceremonies — applied inside every case study.

BMS
2015 – 2019
Mumbai University

Business management foundations.

Certificates
07 · ContactYour turn

Let's build something that ships.

Actively looking for APM / PM roles in B2C, mobility, fintech, and AI-first products. If your team wants someone who can write the PRD, run the rollout, and still talk to frontline users — I'd love to talk.

Try the assistant

Ask anything about my work — the bot's got the brief.

Curious how I'd handle a vague PRD, walk through a project, or stack-rank a roadmap? Tap the chat at the bottom-right. Trained on this portfolio, powered by Lovable AI.

Why hire Harshada?Walk through the Uber projectHow do you prioritize?Tell me about VitaFit