OYO

Associate Vice President (Product): Oct 2017 - April 2020

OYO was where I transitioned from being an experienced product manager to a product leader. First headed the B2B demand channel (corporate travel, Travel Agent, etc.) and then the B2C Consumer Experience Product Team.

Also, contributed to building a team of world-class product team spanning India, Europe, APAC and North America.

Key Projects

OYO PowerBreak

OYO's offering focused on micro-stays (Stays < 1 day)

Micro-stays (Room booking <24 hours) is a complicated offering in hospitality industry. While everybody from OTAs (Yatra, GoIbibo) to large hotels (LemonTree, Taj, etc.) to some focused startups has taken an attempt at this, nobody in India was able to crack this at scale till we did!
I ideated and led one of the most complex projects ever undertaken at OYO (60+ engineers, 17 pods, impacted everything from the front-end to pricing algo to inventory to reporting among others) to deliver a new product-led revenue line for the company.

Promotional video

OYO B Direct

Booking product focused on the independent business traveller

OYO B, even when completely overhauled, was a sales-led product at least in the acquisition cycle.
I ideated & launched OYO B Direct: a product-led version of OYO B targeted at the independent business traveller offering them core OYO B benefits. While targeted at a very different customer, the growth principles of OYO B Direct were not very different from how products like Slack get adopted in companies.

A year post launch, OYO B Direct accounted for 50% of self-serve business travel revenue.

News Coverage

OYO B (aka OYO For Business)

OYO's business travel offering focused on both the traveller and the travel admin

OYO B is OYO's offering for the business traveller. This was the first product I managed at OYO and gradually expanded my responsibilities to product marketing and program management for adoption of our self-serve business travel booking product.

Through product innovation, customer-centricity and sales-incentives management, grew product-driven revenue of corporate channel in India by 8X and the number of users 13X over 1.5 years. Later launched the product in Indonesia, Malaysia and the US.

Blog Link

OYO SuperAgent

Booking Platform for Travel Agents ranging from small TAs to the biggest names in India

Launched OYO SuperAgent, a Travel Agent Hotel Booking Platform rebuilt from the ground up. The goal was to increase self-serve bookings by Travel Agents (TAs) as compared to account manager driven bookings. In addition to product management, I also led product marketing for SuperAgent.

By 2020-Q1, SuperAgent was live in India, Indonesia, Malaysia & Vietnam with 50K+ registered travel agents & self-serve bookings accounted for 30% of TA bookings compared to a single digit share before SuperAgent.

News Coverage

Recommendations

Anil Goel

President Technology, Byju's Group

Managed Amit directly at OYO as OYO CTPO

Amit is easily one of the smartest product leaders that I have ever worked with. I have hired him at OYO when he was relocating from the US after his long stint there. He took some time to adapt to the fast-paced and unstructured working environment at OYO, but was hitting out of the ball park within a couple of months. He brings great depth in product thinking and working customer backwards. As well as, he is a great executioner who simply gets stuff done on rapid timelines while ensuring good quality in an environment where priorities change frequently and quickly. He is pragmatic and able to make right tradeoffs between moving fast as well as built to last. He was a natural mentor to most of the product team at OYO and was a key leader in helping us build a world class product team. I will gladly work with Amit in any capacity, should an opportunity arise in future.

Priyank Choudhury

Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft

Managed Amit directly at OYO

Amit is one of the best people managers and a product leader I have worked with in my career. Amit worked with me in OYO as AVP of product. Even though Amit came from a much-structured world of MNCs, he adapted to the startup culture almost instantly. Amit’s product vision, planning, and execution skills made the corporate product portfolio one of the fastest growing businesses in OYO. Recognizing the leadership skills of Amit, he was promoted to a manager role. Even though he was new to the role, Amit did an exceptional job of managing his team, owning three critical product suites of OYO. He keeps everyone focused on critical goals and gets the job done. Would love to work with him again!

Nitesh Tripathi

Senior Product Manager @ Amazon

Reported to Amit directly at OYO

Exceptional Product leader and mentor! I have worked under Amit’s guidance at OYO. Being fresh out of campus, I was very new to the product world and Amit has helped me in providing valuable mentorship in every skillset of PM job - be it stakeholder management, customer obsession or Prioritisation etc. Amit pushed us hard on setting the right priority for the charter, identifying actual customer problems via customer research and go above and beyond for finding right solutions beyond the obvious. He also backed us with providing full product ownership and provide regular constructive feedback on course correction if needed. Extremely humble and down to earth person, I am very thankful to Amit for all the learnings during formative years of my PM career which has a huge impact and learnings I carry till date.

Kajal Arora

Principal PM Manager : Microsoft Xbox

Reported to Amit directly at OYO

I got to work under Amit’s leadership at Oyo, when we partnered together to launch an innovative and complex product offering ‘Powerbreak’(booking a hotel room for less than 24 hours) to our users. I learnt the art of building products from Amit and will remain grateful for his coaching on some of the key product management skillsets - customer obsession, product evangelism and data driven decision making. Amit is a gem of a leader as he carries the complete product leadership toolkit - from laying out an inspiring product vision and mission, to defining an actionable product strategy, to building and nurturing top notch product teams and leading them with empathy and care - which brings out the best outcomes for the customers and the business.

Niket Anand

Director of Product Management at IBO

Reported to Amit directly at OYO

When we look at all the experience at aspirational brands and colleges which Amit attended, it's was surprise to find Amit as extremely humble, approachable and down to earth human being with a Razor sharp focus, extremely high degree of customer backwards thinking and a strong business sense needed to build an impactful product and business. Amit gave a complete freedom to do whatever is needed to build the product, helped with constant feedback with constant course corrections and guidance to ensure we deliver successfully results. Constantly, pushing himself to do more than just what's in a usual product JD, looking at new avenues and business lines and also constantly be in touch with the customer are the learnings which I carry with me even today. It was an absolute privilege to work under Amits mentorship and thankfully can still reach out at any time for any personal or professional help!

Amit Gupta

Senior Director of Product : OLX

Product Leader, who worked closely with Amit B at OYO

I have known Amit for a little over four years now. We started as colleagues at OYO and built a bond over common interests about things even beyond work. Professionally, he is a great co-worker who is intellectual, process-oriented and possesses an eye for detail with excellent analytical skills. He was instrumental in shaping the product org and building the culture of product-first thinking at OYO. He spends a lot of time and energy hiring and mentoring the product talent within his team. I enjoyed collaborating with Amit on multiple projects and would look forward to working with him again in the future. On the personal front, I found Amit to be polite yet assertive, humble with high self-respect and a great human being whom you can trust and seek advice from.

Shailly Kalra

Marketing Manager at Amazon

Product Marketing Manager reported to Amit at OYO

An exceptional leader in true sense. I have worked under Amit’s guidance at OYO. His leadership style is very unique - he ensures he genuinely listens to his teammates, pushes & guides them to think, strategizes and builds for scale. Once he is convinced with an idea, he will give you complete ownership of the project and will help you with a constructive feedback throughout. He brings in a solid experience of working with multiple global leaders from the best brands and products in the world - this makes his thought process naturally innovative and customer oriented. Amit has truly been one of those inspiring managers who have left a noteable mark with his leadership.