Ananya Rao

Senior Product Manager · Payments & Lending

Summary

Product manager with 9 years of experience building payments and lending products used by millions of customers across India. I turn ambiguous problems into shipped, measurable outcomes: led the relaunch of a UPI checkout that lifted conversion by 18%, and built the team that took a credit line from pilot to ₹400 crore in annual disbursals. Comfortable in the details of compliance, data and design.

Work experience

Senior Product Manager, Checkout & UPI
Brightlane Payments · Full-time
Apr 2022 – Present
Bengaluru
- Led the redesign of the UPI checkout across web and app, lifting payment conversion by 18% and cutting drop-off at the PIN step by a third.
- Own a roadmap for a 22-person team across engineering, design, risk and operations; ship on a two-week cadence with a quarterly OKR review.
- Introduced UPI Autopay mandates for subscription merchants, now 31% of recurring volume within nine months of launch.
- Partnered with compliance to deliver RBI tokenisation guidelines three weeks ahead of the deadline with zero merchant downtime.
Product Manager, Consumer Credit
Kestrel Finance
Jan 2019 – Mar 2022
Mumbai
- Took a pay-later credit line from a 2,000-user pilot to ₹400 crore in annual disbursals with a portfolio default rate under 2.1%.
- Built an underwriting experiment framework with the data science team, reducing time-to-decision from 3 days to 4 minutes.
- Defined the collections journey that improved on-time repayment by 11 percentage points.
Associate Product Manager
Northfield Retail Labs
Jul 2016 – Dec 2018
Pune
- Launched store pickup for an e-commerce app serving 1.2M monthly users; 14% of orders moved to pickup in the first quarter.
- Ran 40+ A/B tests on search and listing pages, shipping the winners behind feature flags.

Projects

Open-source UPI test harness
Creator & maintainer
Jun 2023
github.example.com/ananya/upi-sandbox
A local simulator for UPI collect and intent flows that lets teams test checkout edge cases without a bank sandbox. Used by engineers at four fintech teams.
Tech: TypeScript, Node.js, Docker

Education

MBA, Strategy & Finance
Western India School of Management · First class with distinction
Jun 2014 – Apr 2016
Ahmedabad
B.Tech, Computer Science
Deccan Institute of Technology · GPA 8.6 / 10
Aug 2010 – May 2014
Hyderabad

Awards

Product Leader of the Year
Brightlane Payments
Mar 2024
Company-wide award for the UPI checkout relaunch.

Volunteering

Mentor
Women in Product, Bengaluru chapter
Jan 2021 – Present
Mentor six early-career product managers a year through a structured 12-week programme.

Welcome back

Ananya Rao

Summary

Work experience

Senior Product Manager, Checkout & UPI

Product Manager, Consumer Credit

Associate Product Manager

Projects

Open-source UPI test harness

Education

MBA, Strategy & Finance

B.Tech, Computer Science

Awards

Product Leader of the Year

Volunteering

Mentor

Rohan Verma

Summary

Education

B.Tech, Computer Science and Engineering

Work experience

Software Engineering Intern

Projects

Campus Canteen Pre-order

Skills