Mani Keerthan
Chittampally

Enterprise consulting for Varsity Brands, leading digital transformation across sales enablement, vendor platforms, and AI-powered enterprise data products.

• Won the Varsity Brands Fieldhouse engagement by translating business needs into product requirements and selling the concept through an on-site presales prototype and client pitch.
• Shipped Fieldhouse to 3,000 sales representatives supporting a $2.5B business in two months by leading a 3 person delivery team through discovery, prioritization, client workshops, and product delivery.
• Unlocked Ontologos' first client in 4 weeks after six months at the vision stage by repositioning the product and building a minimum sellable prototype for AI-led legacy-to-cloud data transformation.
• Demonstrated enterprise-scale data-management feasibility in 2 weeks by prototyping RAG-based schema mapping, retrieval, lineage, reconciliation, and data-quality workflows across 12 domains, 20 entities per domain, and 66 attributes per entity.
• Reduced projected vendor-platform implementation costs by 34% across four scope revisions by prioritizing essential supplier workflows against customer value, technical dependencies, delivery effort, and deferrable capabilities.

Advised a student fintech venture on P2P and merchant payments, product strategy, payment economics, GTM, and AI-assisted prototyping.

• Helped the team finish second in the Diamond Challenge by pivoting an infeasible cross-app concept into a unified P2P and merchant-payments product through ecosystem research and competitive analysis.
• Established a commercially viable payments model by combining a $3.50 unlimited consumer plan with 1.8%-2.5% merchant fees and evaluating RTP, FedNow, and Request for Payment rails with modeled transaction costs below $0.10.
• Achieved 90% comprehension of the instant, no-fee payments proposition and proposed sub-10-second onboarding by prototyping payment, confirmation, and recovery flows using Figma Make and Claude Code.

AI-enabled learning platform serving institutional clients, spanning LMS modernization, monetization, agentic AI, and product-led growth.

• Drove growth from 18K to 29K monthly active users (+61%) and seven institutional clients by shaping the platform's modernization, positioning, product-led growth, and agentic AI capabilities.
• Led Paid Certificates end-to-end against a 50:50 B2B/B2C revenue-mix target, from a ~95:5 baseline, owning product discovery, PRD, prioritization, cross-functional development, and launch.
• Launched 6+ fragmented university systems into one proactive AI experience "Rumi" in 5 weeks by applying RAG and vector retrieval across assignments, grades, events, library services, and dining information.
• Supported a successful multimillion-dollar merger with an Asian partner and advanced North American partnership discussions by developing a one-year AI roadmap and product-market strategies for the U.S., Malaysia, Singapore, and China.

Founded a consumer AI venture for location-aware recycling guidance; led RAG, computer vision, OCR, and monetization experiments, then sunsetted the product after two pivots.

• Validated early product utility with 60+ users and grocery-store field studies by leading ethnographic research, SME interviews, product strategy, roadmap definition, AI prototyping, and closed-group testing.
• Delivered 94% answer coverage across 9,000 ZIP codes by building a location-aware recycling agent using RecycleNation data, USPS validation, RAG, retrieval, and LLM fallback behavior.
• Expanded the product from text guidance into computer vision and OCR by training and testing multimodal workflows on 600+ real-world images using Roboflow, OpenAI, and Grok APIs with fine-tuning and guardrails.
• Stopped investment after two product and monetization pivots when field research showed that rewards did not produce durable behavior and retention remained constrained by fragmented local infrastructure and policy.

University innovation lab developing emerging-technology products; led a 0-to-1 spatial-design platform across discovery, product strategy, commercialization, prototyping, and IP.

• Secured a provisional patent and $40K grant by transforming an AR/VR research concept into a validated spatial-design prototype with support from six faculty advisors, IU Ventures, and the USPTO process.
• Converted spatial-creator workflow gaps into a prioritized roadmap and product requirements through market research and practitioner interviews with subject-matter experts from Microsoft, Meta, and HTC.
• Strengthened the product's commercial direction and research visibility by pivoting from a consumer tool to B2B SaaS, defining target personas and market opportunities, and representing Indiana University at international conferences.

Joined as employee #9 at an early-stage fintech marketplace connecting local advisors with financial products; owned growth initiatives across eligibility, lending, discovery, and automation.

• Drove product-led MAU from 800 to 150K in 1.5 years - while the platform reached 1.4M downloads across multiple acquisition channels - by building eligibility, profile-based recommendations, CRM engagement, and activation experiences.
• Reduced financial-product application rejection by 16% and increased advisor adoption by 20% by launching Check Eligibility and clarifying qualification requirements before application.
• Saved approximately $16K/month in customer-service operating costs by launching conversational self-service, lead-progress tracking, and automated CRM workflows that resolved recurring support needs inside the product.
• Informed a new direct-to-consumer secured-card business line by tracing 66% application drop-off to limited credit history, which contributed to 80% of credit-card rejections.

Founded and operated a multi-seller commerce marketplace, owning merchant acquisition, product strategy, customer insights, monetization, and marketplace growth.

• Grew the venture from $0 to more than $1K in average monthly sales within six months with no upfront investment by curating high-potential inventory from 20+ sellers and building a four-plus-distributor network across North India.
• Generated 3 to 4 additional orders per customer on average by identifying a focused buyer persona, assessing seller inventory for quality, and replacing catalogue-led selling with personalized recommendations and trust-driven service.