Principal Specialist - Product

About Udhyam

Udhyam Learning Foundation (Udhyam) is on a mission towards Making Bharat Entrepreneurial. We believe that entrepreneurship is a powerful way to channelize an individual's potential. Entrepreneurship enables agency and allows an individual to work on their strengths while creating value for the world.

Our programs

• Udhyam Vyapaar focuses on nano businesses in India, and solving large problems faced by them, at scale; having already enabled an income uplift for close to 10,000 entrepreneurs.

• Udhyam Shiksha works on developing entrepreneurial mindsets among the youth and enabling them to achieve their potential, having impacted ~40,00,000 learners across 12 Indian states.

The goal for Udhyam is to build a thriving and supportive ecosystem, where every individual feels empowered to define their own path.

Why this role exists

Vyapaar works with nano-entrepreneurs: small shop owners, street vendors, home-based producers and a growing number of rural nano-entrepreneurs, many of them women. They run on thin margins, with patchy networks and limited digital literacy, and rarely in English.

Field operatives, M&E, and program and operations teams all need technology, and today those needs reach the tech team as separate requests. We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to set the product vision and turn these needs into one roadmap, grounded in time spent in the field. This is an individual contributor role reporting to the Head of Technology.

What you'll own

Vision and strategy

•      Set a 2–3 year product vision for how technology and AI can help Vyapaar reach more nano-entrepreneurs and make field operatives more effective

•      Own the product roadmap, combining field, monitoring (M&E) and operational requirements

•      Prioritize with evidence (impact on nano-entrepreneurs, effort, cost, risk) and be clear about what we won't build

•      Identify where AI meaningfully helps, and where it doesn't

Field discovery

•      Spend about 20% of your time with field operatives and nano-entrepreneurs in rural and urban locations

•      Run user research and quick prototypes with low-literacy, multilingual users

Delivery and outcomes

•      Write requirements engineers can build from; make scope, sequencing and build-or-buy calls with them

•      Plan pilots and rollouts with field teams, designing for multiple languages, voice and low-end Android

•      Define success metrics, track adoption and outcomes, and work with M&E on impact measurement

•      Make sure products respect privacy and consent, including India's DPDP Act

Stakeholders

•      Bridge program, field, M&E, operations, fundraising and technology teams, and communicate the roadmap to leadership, funders and partners

Skills and experience

Essential

•      8-10 years of experience, with at least 2–3 years in product management owning a product from discovery to launch

•      Bachelor's degree; an MBA or Master's is a plus

•      Experience in the service or social sector, ideally livelihoods, financial inclusion, MSME or rural development

•      Strategic thinking: able to set a product vision and connect it to organizational goals

•      Enough technical depth to build a technology roadmap and hold your own with engineers on APIs, data, mobile, web and cloud

•      Working knowledge of AI and LLM-based products, including evaluation and cost

•      Data-driven: comfortable with metrics, dashboards and basic SQL or analytics tools

•      Speaks and works in at least one of Kannada, Hindi, Tamil or Marathi, along with English, with empathy for multilingual and voice-first users

•      Able to travel about 20% of the time

•      Clear communicator who partners well with field teams, engineers, leadership and funders

Nice to have

•      Built for low-bandwidth, offline-first or low-end Android contexts in India

•      Experience with WhatsApp, chatbot or voice interfaces, or field data tools like KoboToolbox or ODK

•      Worked with M&E teams, or on DPDP and privacy-by-design

Mindsets we're looking for

•      A real pull towards livelihoods and social impact

•      Field first, comfortable with ambiguity, and honest about where technology doesn't help

•      Low ego, high ownership