Engineering taught me how things are built.Running a business taught me how customers actually behave.Product management is where both become useful.
Pranay Patil - targeting APM / Junior PM roles
Build / 01
Selected Work
Four projects, four different problems.
Building for people who can write English but freeze when they speak it
OutLoud
An AI speaking coach that gives you a private place to practice out loud. Researched, scoped, built, shipped, and tested with real users on their own phones.
- Live
- BUILT & MEASURED
- PRIMARY RESEARCH
100+ sessions · 30+ devices
Finding out the problem was narrower than it looked
Uber
Pickup friction is usually framed as something every rider faces. Eight interviews showed it concentrates in four venue types - which changes what you'd build first.
- USER RESEARCH
- PRIMARY, n=8
Discovery and research · May 2026
Pressure-testing a strategy against two incumbents' live pricing
Emburse
A three-year product strategy for B2B expense management in India and APAC, with the competitive position checked against what Zoho and Expensify actually ship.
- B2B STRATEGY
- DESK ANALYSIS + VERIFIED
Choosing a metric that can't be gamed by a discount campaign
Zomato
Funnel hypotheses, four retention cohorts, and why Weekly Ordering Households beats order volume as a North Star.
- METRICS & COHORTS
- DESK ANALYSIS
Funnel, cohorts and metrics · Tier-1 city food delivery
Think / 02
How I Decide
Five steps. Each links to where I actually used it.
01
Check whether the problem is the problem
Problems arrive pre-framed. The first job is finding out whether the framing survives contact with users.
Uber: the framing said universal, research said concentrated
02
Work out what evidence I actually have
Primary, secondary, or my own reasoning. Labelling this honestly changes what I'm allowed to conclude.
OutLoud: 42 survey responses that didn't match my own target persona
03
Decide, and name what it costs
Every choice removes options. The ones worth writing down are the ones where I can say what I gave up.
04
Build only what serves the core loop
Features are cheap to imagine and expensive to maintain. Most of what I cut from OutLoud was cheap to build.
05
Define the measurement before the result exists
Choosing a metric you can't game is harder than hitting one you can.
About / 03
Background
The Short Version
Three things that didn't look connected until they did.
I studied computer engineering at Mumbai University and graduated in 2024. Somewhere in there a friend and I noticed our area had barbershops for men and parlours for women, but no unisex salon with decent hygiene. We opened one in 2023 and I still run it. I joined Ampcus Tech in Thane as an intern in November 2025 and moved into a business analyst role there in January 2026, working on requirements, user interviews, SQL and UAT. The engineering degree produced two projects worth naming: a virtual classroom platform, published at INOCON 2024, and a crypto tracking app.
Looked at as a CV, that's three unrelated things and an obvious question about why I keep switching.
Looked at from the inside, it's the same question three times. What do people actually need, what stops them getting it, and can you deliver it with the resources you've got. Engineering gave me the technical half. The salon gave me customers, pricing, and every constraint at once. The BA role gave me stakeholders and the discipline of writing requirements someone else has to build from.
Product management is where all three stop being separate skills.
Now
- Role
- Business Analyst, Ampcus Tech, Thane
- Also running
- a unisex salon, since 2023
- Learning
- AI product management, through Airtribe and self-directed projects
- Building
- OutLoud
Skills / 04
Skills & Stack
Product Craft
- User Research
- Problem Framing
- Prioritisation
- PRD Writing
- Metric Definition
- Cohort Analysis
- Competitive Analysis
- Heuristic Evaluation
Business Analysis
- Requirements Elicitation
- Requirements Documentation
- User Stories & Acceptance Criteria
- Process Mapping
- Stakeholder Management
- UAT Planning & Execution
Analytics & Data
- SQL
- Data Analysis
- Funnel Analysis
- Power BI
- Excel
Technical
- AI-Assisted Build
- GitHub
- Postman
Tools
- Jira
- Confluence
- Figma
- Google Analytics
- Notion
Certs / 05
Certifications
Airtribe
AI-First Product Management
A sixteen-week cohort programme on building AI-first products: discovery, scoping, prioritisation and measurement. The capstone is OutLoud - researched, built, shipped and tested with real users, and written up as the flagship case study on this site.
Pendo x Mind the Product
Product Management Basics
Foundations certification covering discovery, prioritisation and product analytics.
Postman
API Fundamentals Student Expert
Working knowledge of REST, requests and collections, tested hands-on.
Simplilearn
Introduction to JIRA
Issues, workflows, boards and reporting - the tool the BA work runs on.
AICTE / EduSkills, with Celonis
Process Mining Virtual Internship
Ten weeks reading real process data to find where work actually breaks.
Cisco Networking Academy
CCNAv7: Introduction to Networks
Addressing, switching, routing and troubleshooting - the technical grounding behind the engineering degree.
Education / 06
Education
2020 - 2024
A. P. Shah Institute of Technology, Thane (University of Mumbai)
B.E. Computer Engineering with Honors in AI & ML
2020
Shubham Raje Junior College, Thane
HSC
2018
Vasant Vihar High School, Thane
SSC
Publication
MetaCampus - Advancing Online Education with Virtual Classroom, INOCON 2024.
Contact / 07
Let's talk
Looking for an APM or junior PM role.
Happy to talk about any of the work above - including the parts that didn't work.