About Me

About Me

Meeting The President of India APJ Abdul Kalam

Meeting The President of India APJ Abdul Kalam

I am an internet professional based in Noida, India. I embrace technology, web standards, support the open source movement, and actively participate in and contribute to the social web. My areas of focus include Online Product Development, User Experience and Interface Design. I also have a passion for information architecture, usability, branding and promotions.

With more than 13 years extensive experience in successfully planning, directing, tracking, and managing complex web based and desktop products/projects, successfully led development and evolution of several online businesses, proven ability to manage in dynamic, fast-changing environments.

Key Competencies

Product Management Competencies

Product Planning

  • Defining new products
  • Gathering market requirements
  • Building product road maps
  • Product life cycle considerations
  • Product differentiation
  • Analyzing, manage and tracking

Product Marketing

  • Product positioning and outbound messaging
  • Promoting the product externally with press, customers, and partners
  • Bringing new products to market
  • Monitoring the competition

Business & Leadership Competencies

  • In-depth knowledge and expertise about online consumers
  • Ability to translate complex concepts into positive, action-oriented audience messages
  • Deep expertise with content management applications
  • Created business value focuses on achieving the greatest returns on resource invested
  • Effective in start-up environments and global companies
  • Experienced in creating and leading teams from multiple disciplines and creating vision, strategies and plans in midst of rapid growth and change
  • Managing teams including content writers, programmers, designers, SEOs, product analyst and online sales

My Current Employer

With The Times of India group I helped to start internet business like www.timesjobs.com (Recruitment solutions both Online & Offline), www.simplymarry.com (for prospective brides and grooms to meet and communicate with each other), www.simplymarryzine.com (content channel meant for people in the matrimony mood), www.ads2book.com (Online classified booking engine). All these initiatives are leaders or near leaders in the e-recruitment, matrimony, content and classified space.

Presently I am Head of www.simplymarry.com

Following are my KRAs:

  • Heading the complete Online Sales, Product, Marketing, CRM and Operations
  • Responsible for achieving Business plan objectives
  • To conceived & develop matrimony next
  • Define and plan product lines, navigational flow and user experience
  • Enhance overall approach to engage user on site
  • Collect, synthesize, and deliver consumer feedback
  • Strategic direction based on customer needs and business goals
  • Track results/impact of C2C engagement activities
  • Evaluating risks and trade-offs; proposes contingency plans
  • Participating in strategic decisions that will have long term impact on product
  • Scaling up ground events like Swyamvar, Personal Matrimony Day

Ongoing

  • Managing the product team, delegating responsibilities and overseeing successful completion of tasks
  • Working closely with SEO team to make SimplyMarry SEO complaint and increase site traffic
  • Delegating scenarios to the UAT team and working closely with them to test the site& identify bugs
  • Pulling out weekly reports for the site and analyzing user behavior and site performance
  • Contributing to content ideas

Achievements

  • Started from scratch got all teams and structure in place
  • Revenue growth of 1000%, Traffic growth of 800%
  • Simplymarry getting into top 100 sites in the country as per alexa rankings and comscore rankings
  • Significant contribution in making SimplyMarry the leading portal in India
  • Developed the CMS process flow for www.simplymarryzine.com

Experience

  • Head – www.simplymarry.com/The Times of India Group (May 2003 to Present)
  • Strategist Creative / NetLink Business Systems Pvt. Limited (September 2000 to May 2003)
  • Freelancer / Hope Technologies Ltd. (January 2000 to August 2000)
  • Visiting Faculty / NIFT - National Institute of Fashion Technology (February 1999 to December 1999)
  • Head – Computer Centre & Design / EMPI (Entrepreneurship & Management Processes International) Business School (October 1998 to January 1999)
  • Project Manager / Admas Advertising (Nagpur) Pvt. Ltd. (September 1997 to October 1998)

Technical Skills

Internet Technologies:
HTML, DHTML, CSS, Photoshop, Dream weaver, Fireworks, Flash, Edit Plus, FTP clients, Word press, Drupal, Joomla, Bugzilla, etc.

Application Software:
Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook), Adobe Acrobat (PDF), Microsoft Visio, MS Project, etc.

Usability:
User-Centered Design Practices & Principles, Brainstorming, User Surveys Support, Heuristic Evaluation, Paper Prototypes, Low-fi Prototyping ( power point, excel ), Hi-fi Prototyping (html, Photoshop), Task Analysis, Accessibility etc.

User Interface Design:
User Requirement Specs, Conceptual Wire Frames, Detailed Screen Layouts, UI specifications, Interaction Design, Iconography, dialog boxes and global look-and-feel, Creation of Style Guides, Web Site Functionality Testing, Cross-browser Compatibility Issues, Page Design Consistency, Conceptual Models, Process Flows, Navigational maps

Education, Quality Improvement & Professional Development Programmes

  • HCI - Human Computer Interaction, Conducted by IIT - Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
  • Certificate of Honor Umo2007 Workshop Information Visualization, Conducted by Prof. Ravi Poovaiah, HOD, IDC, IIT Bombay at UMO, Hyderabad, India
  • Microsoft Approved Course - Visual Basic 6.0
  • Macromedia Director
  • Honours Diploma in Software Technology & System Management
  • P.G. Diploma in Desk Top Publishing, Designing & Multimedia
  • Bachelor of Commerce

Email me: manishsinha.in [at] gmail.com