Minal Mehta
Computer Science graduate from Stanford University, currently pursuing MBA at Harvard. Worked at Amazon.com as Senior Product Manager and Manager of Technical Product Management.
| Headline: | Entrepreneur |
| Skills: | Business, Entrepreneurship |
| Groups: | CleanTech Circle Forum, HBS Entrepreneurship Club |
| Interested in: | Brainstorming, Finding business partners, Finding cofounders, Finding team mates, Meeting new people, Professional opportunities, Promoting my startups, Recruiting for my startup |
| Schools: | Harvard Business School, Stanford University |
WORK EXPERIENCE
| Employer: | Amazon.com |
| Position: | Senior Product Manager, Product Ads |
| Time period: | November 2006 - April 2008 |
| Description: | Founding member of Product Ads, a new retail-specific advertising business with $1.0M in revenues and 1500 active advertisers in first year of operation
• Developed strategic pricing framework and presented tactical pricing plan to Amazon’s CEO. Regularly presented plans for product improvement to team’s VP and SVP, and Amazon’s CEO. • Led cross-functional teams of 20+ people in Finance, Sales, Account Management, Retail Product Management and Engineering on initial product launch and subsequent projects. Also directly supervised two employees. • Identified opportunities to increase ad revenue and improve customer experience. Wrote product requirements and collaborated with cross-functional team to ensure launch success. One such project to broaden the scope of ads displayed to customers delivered 27% of overall revenue for Product Ads within two months after launch. • Selected as one of 20 Customer Experience Bar Raisers across the company to help develop company-wide standards for customer experience and evaluate customer interactions proposed by other teams. • Interviewed over 50 candidates to hire Product Managers, Account Managers, Technical Program Managers, Usability Engineers and User Interface (UI) Designers to staff up team. |
| Employer: | Amazon.com |
| Position: | Manager, Search Experience Technical Product Management |
| Time period: | August 2005 - November 2006 |
| Description: | Responsible for increasing revenue from and enhancing competitive advantage in search (a $10.0B product)
• Directly managed five Technical Product Managers and UI Designers, and indirectly managed six Engineers. • Set up three team members for promotion by coaching them and matching them with projects to grow their skills. • Negotiated with teams seeking to add features to the search page to ensure that those features solved a real need and the proposed customer experience was intuitive, viable and consistent with the rest of the page. • Established set of unique key performance indicators used to measure success of search customer experience. |
| Employer: | Amazon.com |
| Position: | Technical Product/Program Manager, Discovery Applications Platform |
| Time period: | February 2005 - August 2005 |
| Description: | • Led a team of six in launching new navigation bar and new product page within first three months at Amazon. These changes enabled customers to easily find desired product categories, and discover related products.
• Restructured navigation on search pages to aid discovery using product attributes (e.g. brand for cameras). Customers using this navigation purchased 50% more than customers that did not. |
| Employer: | Expedia, Inc. |
| Position: | Program Manager, Luxury Technologies (Classic Custom Vacations – CCV) |
| Time period: | August 2003 - February 2005 |
| Description: | Prioritized and launched features for consumer business of CCV, a luxury vacation wholesaler owned by Expedia
• Established www.classicvacations.com, CCV’s first consumer website. Worked with in-house and offshore engineering, design, legal, marketing, operations, and market management. First year revenues were $5.0M. • Defined and launched an end-to-end product to track effectiveness of CCV’s online advertising spend; decreased marketing costs by 32% and increased revenues by 19%. |
EDUCATION
| University: | Harvard Business School |
| Time period: | 2007 - 2010 |
| Degree: | MBA |
| University: | Stanford University |
| Time period: | 1998 - 2003 |
| Degree: | Computer Science, BSc |
INFORMATION
| Hobbies: | Passionate about any type of dance (Indian Folk, Ballroom, Tap, Latin). Also enjoy yoga, traveling and mentoring - mentored inner-city high school student (3 years) and Amazon interns. |
| Clubs: | Harvard Business School: Section Representative for Women’s Student Association. Active in TechMedia and Entrepreneurship Clubs. Member of Venture Capital and Private Equity, Retail and Apparel, and Outdoors Clubs. |
Minal's Startups (1)
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Minal is Following (2)
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Livingry.us LLC
Disruptive, emergency, climate change technology that removes CO2 from the earth's atmosphere. Solar driven technology utilizes specially design photonic crystals producing unique frequencies suitable for dissociating CO2 molecules in an air stream.
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