Twelve years of building the storefront (Amazon, Walmart), re-engineering the supply chain behind it (Ford, Unilever), and owning the product from the client side (TCS · Capgemini). One practitioner. One continuous loop. Now offered as research and pedagogy.
Most candidates for a digital-commerce faculty role have lived on one side of the transaction - the storefront, or the warehouse, or the boardroom. I have built on all three, in sequence, and the residue of each rotation is a teaching asset.
At Amazon I instrumented the seller-onboarding rails that put inventory on the page. At Walmart I shipped the checkout, fulfilment and catalog surfaces that converted demand. At Ford and Unilever I redesigned the SAP-driven supply chain that honoured those orders across 20 warehouses and 8 countries. At Tata Consultancy Services I now sit on the client side of luxury fashion defining the product itself, leading PI sessions, and shipping an in-house AI agent that has compressed our development cycle by 43%.
Few academics in operations and digital strategy can map the consumer click to the container ship to the boardroom KPI without translation loss. I can - because I was the translator. That is the pedagogical edge I bring to IIM Indore.
Where most candidates specialise vertically, my career has moved horizontally across Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, FMCG, e-Commerce and Supply Chain. Six industries & I have shipped product in each. That breadth is the rarest asset on a faculty bench.
Digital commerce is usually taught in slices - marketing teaches the funnel, operations teaches the chain, strategy teaches the deck. My career has closed the loop. Each rotation answered a question the previous one could only pose.
Built supplier-onboarding tooling at Amazon (+22% product availability, +18% AOV). Led product addition, checkout, order-confirmation and fulfilment surfaces for walmart.com (+128% catalog, +36% YoY sales, time-to-market cut from 13 weeks to 2).
“I learned what the click hides.”
Designed North-American supply-chain strategy on SAP APO at Ford ($21M revenue potential, vehicle-down mobile app reducing TAT by 18 hours, +56% CSAT). Led Unilever SAP route-optimisation rollout ($2M in 9 months; scaled 2→8 countries and 3→20 warehouses in 13 months).
“I learned what the warehouse must promise.”
Senior Product Owner on IBM Sterling OMS across 13 countries, 800+ stores, 5,000+ associates. Shipped an internal AI agent that cuts development time by 43% and lifts accuracy by 85%. Lead PI planning, MVP definition, UAT / BAT / OAT and digital-transformation consulting.
“I learned what the boardroom truly buys.”
Every figure below is drawn from a shipped artefact, an audited rollout or a client P&L - not from a pitch deck. They are presented here in the language an academic committee values which are measurable, attributable and reproducible in a teaching case.
The career timeline above answers where and when. The four dossiers below answer what and how - the practitioner craft I will bring into seminar rooms, case discussions and capstone reviews at IIM Indore.
I have built the digital surfaces that convert intent into revenue - from the supplier-onboarding rails that put inventory on the page to the checkout that closes the sale.
Owned product addition, catalog setup and merchandising flows on walmart.com - delivering 128% catalog expansion and 36% YoY sales growth. At Amazon, built supplier-onboarding tooling that lifted product availability by 22%.
Led the conversion-critical surfaces - checkout, order confirmation, post-purchase fulfilment - instrumenting funnel KPIs and reducing drop-off through experiment-driven iteration.
Partnered with automation teams to collapse Walmart's product-setup cycle from 13 weeks to 2 - by replacing manual ops with rules-driven catalog pipelines.
Ran deep category analytics at Amazon - identifying assortment gaps, price elasticity and seller-onboarding bottlenecks that drove 28% MoM sales lift in priority categories.
Designed cross-sell and merchandising interventions that lifted Amazon's YoY AOV by 18% - measured at the SKU, seller and category cohort level.
The order on the page becomes an obligation in the warehouse. I have re-engineered that obligation across 8 countries, 20 warehouses and two industries - on SAP APO and SAP ERP.
Built statistical + judgmental forecast workflows on SAP APO at Ford - blending historical demand, dealer signals and lifecycle events. Reduced forecast bias and unlocked $21M in revenue potential through better promise dating.
Owned S&OP reconciliation between marketing-driven demand and constrained supply - translating sales plans into production-ready master schedules without breaking service levels.
Led Unilever's SAP route-optimisation rollout across FMCG distribution - generating $2M in 9 months, then scaling 2 → 8 countries and 3 → 20 warehouses inside 13 months.
Designed inventory-balancing logic that flagged at-risk SKUs before they aged - protecting working capital and reducing write-offs across automotive parts and FMCG portfolios.
Conceived a mobile-first product for Ford's vehicle-down scenarios in North America - cut customer TAT by 18 hours, lifted CSAT by 56% and streamed real-time exception data to analytics.
Instrumented last-mile and warehouse telemetry feeds into BI - making route deviation, dwell time and SLA breaches first-class operational KPIs rather than after-the-fact audits.
On the client side, the product is decided - not received. I lead the full lifecycle discovery to documentation to launch, with Design Thinking as the operating system.
Facilitate empathise / define / ideate workshops with merchandising, store ops and CX leaders. Convert ambiguous business pain into validated problem statements, journey maps and opportunity canvases before a single story is written.
Choose the technique to fit the question RICE for roadmap trade-offs, MoSCoW for release scoping, WSJF inside SAFe PI planning, Kano for differentiation calls, and Cost-of-Delay for high-stakes investment debates. Prioritisation is a decision discipline, not a spreadsheet.
Author BRDs, FRDs (functional / FED), epics, user stories with acceptance criteria, configuration guides and traceability matrices - the artefacts that survive turnover and onboard the next engineer in a day, not a quarter.
Own UAT, BAT and OAT cycles end-to-end - defining entry / exit criteria, defect triage and sign-off gates. Operational Acceptance is treated as first-class, not an afterthought.
Plan GTM with marketing, store ops, training and support - sequencing pilot → wave → global, defining hyper-care, success metrics and rollback paths. Launched product across 13 countries and 800+ stores without a single critical-severity rollback.
Lead Program Increment planning, dependency mapping and roadmap negotiation across multiple ARTs - translating client OKRs into committed PI objectives.
Built and deployed an internal AI agent that drafts user stories, sample XMLs, configuration guidance and test cases - compressing dev cycle by 43% and lifting artefact accuracy by 85%.
Technical excellence reaches its ceiling without human credibility. I have spent twelve years building the trust capital that lets technical decisions actually get made.
Establish credibility through small, consistently kept commitments before pursuing the large ones. Publish decisions, risks and rationale in writing trust is the residue of repeated transparency.
Open every PI and discovery session with explicit invitation to dissent. Track 'second-opinion ratio' inside ceremonies silence is treated as a risk signal, not consent.
Negotiate scope, timelines and commercials using interest-based frameworks (BATNA, ZOPA, value-anchored opening). Reframe zero-sum demands into multi-variable trades - protecting both margin and relationship.
Translate sprint-level reality into board-level narrative - a single page, three KPIs, one ask. CxOs make decisions on clarity, not detail.
Operated across India, UK, US and EU - adapting cadence, escalation norms and feedback style by region. Cultural fluency is an operational asset, not a soft skill.
Treat conflict as data. Surface disagreement early, separate position from interest, and escalate with a recommendation never a problem alone.
Active mentor for aspiring product managers across India. Coaching pedagogy carries directly into classroom feedback and capstone supervision.
I do not teach digital commerce from a textbook. I teach it from the meeting where the decision was taken, the war room where the rollout was rescued, and the dashboard the CFO watched the next morning.
Each session is anchored on a real artefact - a BRD, a sprint demo, a P&L slide. Students leave with frameworks they can deploy in week one of their next role. As an active mentor for aspiring product managers, I bring a coaching pedagogy to assessment and feedback.
End-to-end teardown of a transaction - from page load to last mile using Amazon, Walmart and Unilever as live cases.
Discovery, PI planning, MVP definition, OKRs and the political economy of client-side product ownership.
OMS architecture (IBM Sterling), distributed inventory, promise dating and the operational economics of returns.
From hype to deployed artefact. Hands-on lab on building, governing and measuring AI agents inside the enterprise.
Design Thinking, adoption metrics and the cross-cultural realities of 13-country rollouts.
Brings institutional familiarity with IIM Indore's faculty, pedagogy and PGP ecosystem.
Engineering foundation underpinning systems thinking applied across SAP, IBM Sterling and AI-agent work.
Long-distance runner - the same discipline that ships 13-country rollouts.
Multi-day endurance rides across South India.
Field exposure that informs cross-cultural change-management work.
Writes web applications for fun & helping small business scale up.
Not a fast reader, but a steady reader of books and fascinated towards sports documentaries
Active mentor for aspiring product managers across India. Strengthening Coach for a running group, that consists of 300 runners.
© 2026 R. Soorya Narayanan