Résumé — Rahul Bala

Work experience

Product Manager — Contentstack June 2025 – present

Own the Visual Experience product line (Studio, Live Preview, Visual Builder) for a leading composable DXP, shaping how enterprises visually author and publish at scale.
Built an AI-powered Figma-to-component workflow, translating designs into reusable components and speeding design-to-dev.
Shipped Drafts & Auto Save, a top editorial request, across 400+ organizations, enabling real-time content collaboration.
Built Studio from 0→1, an enterprise composable page builder, and led its Early Access GTM across Sales, CSM, and TSO.
Built AI-assisted prototypes and internal tools for live demos, reducing product feedback cycles from weeks to days.

Senior Product Manager — Asianet News Media Network June 2022 – June 2025

Solely owned the product roadmap across 8 languages, driving AI-powered content expansion through a period in which users grew 130%.
Built a working AI real-time avatar debate platform for a Google grant bid; advised against self-funding on compute economics.
Rebuilt the legacy CMS 0 to 1 with AI workflows, tripling editorial output and creating the foundation for future products.
Launched content-format products 0→1, increasing traffic 30% and contributing 6% incremental ad revenue.
Partnered with leadership on product vision, KPIs, and roadmap while streamlining org-wide data tracking.

Associate Product Manager — Lokal App Oct 2021 – May 2022

Redesigned Tier 2 & 3 user onboarding (+9% completion) and sharing (+10% organic installs), through field testing and interviews.
Reduced new language launch times by 30% through process automation; expanded Lokal into 2 languages.
Assessed cohort navigation patterns to identify UX gaps, informing the app's IA restructuring.

Product Operations Lead — ShareChat Jan 2020 – Oct 2021

Built & executed the roadmap for "Creator Hub", impacting 50M users and lifting internal tool adoption 65%.
Drove creator retention strategy with customer research, data analysis, and performance metrics.
Initiated a creator feedback loop that cut query turnaround from 7 days to 2 days.

Co-Founder — TamilGlitz May 2015 – June 2022

Bootstrapped an entertainment news site to 3M monthly users and $50K annual revenue; digital partner, Chennai Spartans.

Independent AI product work

Founder & Operator · Jan 2025 – present

motomotar.com — Built and operate a one-person AI content product with an end-to-end production system spanning source-grounded research, constrained generation, automated QA, human review, and post-publish verification; 1,000+ pages live. Case study →
Defined the product's AI quality framework: a seven-dimension evaluation rubric scored by an LLM judge against absolute anchors, combined with deterministic signals and explicit publish / repair / reject thresholds, including hard caps for factual errors.
Diagnosed and corrected silent LLM-evaluator drift by archiving state, re-anchoring and versioning the rubric, and rescoring the corpus — uncovering ~10 points of score inflation that had changed model rankings and misclassified publishable output.Write-up →
Built a repeatable model and prompt evaluation process, benchmarking 12 configurations across 28 fixed test pages to make shipping decisions on measured quality rather than subjective preference.
Bigg Boss Telugu Vote — shipped an Android app and web property built entirely with AI coding tools; 1,000+ downloads.

Education

MBA — University of Madras, 2016–2018
BE — College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, 2012–2016

Skills

AI & ML: LLM evaluation & LLM-as-judge, rubric design & judge calibration, model & prompt benchmarking, deterministic + model-based scoring, AI guardrails & regression testing, grounded & constrained generation, agentic workflows & tool use, human-in-the-loop systems, cost-per-task optimization, AI prototyping.

Product: Product strategy, roadmapping, 0→1 product ownership, user research, personas & journeys, usability testing, experimentation & A/B testing, stakeholder management, data analysis, product design.

Tools: Figma, Jira, SQL, Google Analytics, Looker, Claude Code, Gemini API, WordPress, Google Search Console.