Senior Product Manager

The OpportunityCovid has thrown the world in disarray and it will never be the same again. Enterprisesaround the world are looking towards automation of cognitive tasks to help them becompetitive or even survive. Agara has built some of the most forward-looking products thatdrive this digital transformation and looped in some of the biggest brands in the world asearly <customers.You> have the opportunity to be early members of the go-to-market team, lead it from thefront and shape it as you go along. Being an early member comes with its own benefits – awide-open berth to acquire new logos, being on the forefront of truly the next-generation oftechnology, industry-standard compensation, a competitive options package and the abilityto work from your location.This is a rapidly growing market and Agara is solidly positioned to take advantage. You canhave pole position to capitalize on that.

Quick IntroductionAgara is building the AI-led organization of the future where machines undertake swift,intelligent and interactive conversations with people and create a great experience for all. Itspatented artificial intelligence platform brings together the best of machine learning andongoing internal research to create engaging virtual agents to understand, process andresolve customer issues without human assistance.Agara works with some of the largest brands in the world helping them offer ever betterexperiences to their customers. We are backed by blue-chip investors from the US (KleinerPerkins), Europe, Japan and India.Agara’s product & engineering teams are based in India (Bangalore) and we are nowbuilding our entire go-to-market machinery in the United States.

Longer IntroductionAgara is building the next generation of autonomous Conversational AI experiences overvoice for global enterprises.Almost 40% of all customer support requests in the US are over voice. This massive volumeis managed by over 3.5m customer support agents located in the US who spend 60% of theirtime handling calls. However, the experience with customer support on phone continues tobe abysmal with over 50% customers hanging up before their query is resolved.Agara intends to turn this situation on its head.Agara builds virtual voice agents that can field customer calls, ask questions, getinformation from company systems and provide resolutions - exactly the way agents do. Weuse proprietary machine learning / AI models that excel in understanding intents fromspeech, making decisions about the right manner to handle the query and talk the customerthrough the resolution.Agara’s voice bots are highly conversational. They can do all the things that people do - holdthe line if the person is busy, repeat things, understand frustration and change their tonebased on the context. They can also do some things that people cannot - understand allkinds of accents, respond instantly every single time and instantly handle a rising volume ofcalls.

Post Covid ContextWhile there was a short term disruption as everyone figured out a way to work from home,Covid-19 has been an overall positive for Agara.Companies around the world are now looking aggressively at automation solutions for everypart of their business. Customer contact centres, in particular, have suffered due to theirinability to manage process-heavy setups while agents are unavailable or not as <productive.Digital> transformation journeys have accelerated dramatically and Agara’s focus on helpingautomate their voice conversations is an important component of that journey.We are doubling down on our go to market efforts across key industries to capitalize on thiskey space.

The CompanyAgara was founded in the summer of 2017. In the background of this birth was a coming ofage of cutting-edge Deep Learning capabilities and Agara has been part of this wave ofglobal applied AI companies who are bringing the tech to real-world problems. From the 4members working out of a tiny coworking space, we are now a 35 strong team and have builtseveral products, completed several deployments and proven their capability on severalplatforms.Along the way, we have had the support of some great people and companies.Kleiner Perkins came onboard as an early supporter and led our seed round. We alsowere able to sign up Procter & Gamble, the $40bn global giant, as an early customer toautomate their email support.Over the next couple of years, we had our heads down and solving the thorny problemsfacing us over email and voice. In 2019, we released our voice assisted customer support andon the back of it, raised new funds from Blume Ventures of India and RTP Global ofEurope. By the end of the year, we had released the beta version of our fully autonomousvoice agents.2020 was a difficult year for everyone but not only did we weather the storm, we came outon top. The world is moving to greater automation and we see a big role for us. We also wereable to execute a fund-raise despite fully remote discussions (announcement coming soon!).2021 is our year of expansion. One that you will have a driving role in.

Key PeopleAbhimanyu is a founder and serves as the CEO. He brings to the table 14 years ofexperience in executive roles across multiple industries. In 2010, he founded his firststartup in the travel space which brought about among the first marketplaces ininternational travel in India. Since then, he served as VP Product at Stayzilla, a VC backedAirbnb-clone. He spends 6-8 months on the road and will be working with all sales reps.

Arjun Maheswaran is a founder and serves as the CTO. For the past decade, he has beenliving and breathing machine learning. For 5+ years, he worked with Twitter in SanFrancisco, first in spam fighting and later with Cortex, their core Deep Learning team. Hehas built global-scale, real-time bots to identify, analyse and action upon tweets whilecreating and managing complex rules. He has also served stints at Cisco and Google. Arjungraduated Georgia Tech with a MS in Theoretical Computer Science.Pankaj Gupta is a founder and an advisor. He serves as a Senior Director of Engineeringat Google and has played a pivotal role in several of Google’s new age products includingpayments. He served a long stint at Twitter (emp # 25) and is credited with building theWho To Follow feature on the platform. Pankaj holds a PhD in Computer Science fromStanford University.Dawn Varghese is a Director of Sales and the first senior sales hire. He comes to us afterspending 12 years in Salesforce, IBM Watson and Infosys. He has spent his entire career inselling wide-scale, high technology products to large enterprises with complex decisionmaking.Responsibilities:

● Define product strategy and roadmap. Identify customer andmarket requirements and write use-case-driven requirements,focused on user-interaction workflows and security outcomes.● Understand technologies within product area and articulatetechnological requirements. Identify risks early on and askthe right technical questions.● Impact customer experience, feature usability, success and team-levelbusiness goals.● Drive feature discussions with customers, engineers, andpartner teams and produce clear, concise documents likefunctional and technical specifications.● Plan, reinforce, coordinate, and direct day-to-dayoperations around product delivery/customersupport and professional service requirements.● Assist sales team with representing roadmaps for newer markets.● Provide a leadership presence to product and engineeringteams providing direction and oversight.● Act as product evangelist both internally and externally.● Monitor and continuously improve operational efficiency and capacity.● Define and monitor key performance metrics to ensure productsuccess, and continuously optimise to deliver world classproduct experience.

You Must Have:● 8 + years of experience in product development and/or product management(experience in managing growth in a product-centric company is a plus).● History of achieving and maintaining strong operational excellence.● Demonstrated ability to lead and manage multiple projects with a broad range of internaland external constituents.● Proven ability to think strategically about complex issues and develop thoughtfulrecommendations and action plans.● Successful at presenting core business values clearly, concisely, and with conviction.● Bachelor’s or Master's degree in engineering from

Halli Labs Private Limited (Agara) is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, pregnancy, veteran status, marital status, creed, status with regard to public assistance, genetic status or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.