Varsha Shankar

Product Manager • Strategic & Detailed Thinker • Network Scientist • Machine Learning & Data Scientist

Coder • Thinker • Doer

Experience

Skills

Education

Volunteer

Awards & Leadership

Publications

Experience

Vice President Product

Dec 2020 – CUR

Receptiviti • Toronto, Canada

Startup • Delivering psychological insight from natural language
  • Managing end-to-end lifecycle of flagship products (RESTful API and on-premise solution) and data strategy from conception to launch
  • Leading product discovery, product strategy, and MVP creation while coaching product owners through process
  • Overhauling customer success and feedback mechanisms through customer engagements achieving 7x subscription rate

Director Product and Data

Jan 2020 – Dec 2020

  • Led data pipeline creation using Spark and Drill resulting in creation of company wide data hub, testing speedup of 93% and increased data accessibility
  • Innovated and prototyped network model of employee collaboration resulting in new product offering within 2 months

Technical Product Manager

Jun 2018 – Jan 2020

Receptiviti • Toronto, Canada

  • Created product roadmap and managed execution strategy for enterprise contract over 9-month development lifecycle with cross-functional team of 8 engineers, 3 data scientists, 1 designer and 4 executives
  • Integrated agile and led scrum ceremonies across team including sprint planning, retros and prioritization exercises
  • Derived and automated computation of 70% more accurate team productivity metrics to ensure timely project delivery
  • Organized and supported internal research journal club with data science and linguistics team

Product Management Intern

May 2017 – Aug 2017

IBM, Extreme Blue Internship • Ottawa, Canada

  • Managed team of developers for concept-to-pitch of new product feature in Watson Analytics Business Intelligence software using natural language processing to discover novel data sources
  • Fostered strategic partnerships and managed stakeholders while developing business case, user journey and technical viability totaling $101M in revenue and successfully pitched to IBM senior leadership in Canada and USA

Data Scientist

Mar 2016 – Jul 2016

GadlfyZone • Bangalore, India

Startup • Data-driven strategic consulting firm in chemicals sector
  • Conceived technology and data strategy within firm as technical right hand to founder and implemented back-end tech stack
  • Architected and designed machine learning capabilities to generate strategic and market positioning recommendations with efficiency improvements of 90% and accuracy increase of 50%

Senior Data Science Engineer

Apr 2015 – Mar 2016

GadlfyZone • Bangalore, India

  • Innovated and designed 5 context-based recommendation engines featured as core competency in client reviews
  • Designed candidate skills assessment package for technical recruiting and grew team to 2x as member of senior interview team

Researcher

Aug 2013 – Mar 2015

University of Pennsylvania • Philadelphia, USA

  • Conducted research on brain connectivity analysis and community detection in autism spectrum disorder with MEG and DTI data and co-authored 3 conference papers
  • Established and headed weekly journal club to discuss current trends in functional and structural brain imaging research; Led to collective brainstorming, critical feedback and higher productivity within research group

Research Assistant

Sep 2012 – Aug 2013

University of Pennsylvania • Philadelphia, USA

  • Implemented machine learning head detection with predictive gaze estimates using Kinect RGBD streams; Designed recording facility and conducted video data collection exercise for over 300 participants

Research Intern

May 2012 – Aug 2012

Neuromorphics Lab, Boston University • Boston, USA

  • Implemented biologically inspired vision system on assistive robotic platform to navigate around indoor environments controlled by SSVEP based BCI (steady state visually evoked potential based brain computer interface)

Senior Software Engineer

Software Engineer

Jul 2009 - Jul 2011

Yahoo! • Bangalore, India


Skills

Python R Mongo pipelines AWS - EC2, S3, EMR Jira/Admin Confluence/Admin Machine Learning Network Science Statistics Git Asana Cross-functional communication Roadmapping Agile Pyspark Invision Linux

Education

MBA

2018

Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto • Toronto, Canada

  • Academic: Dean’s List, GPA 3.78/4.0, GMAT 780/800
  • Creative destruction lab: Co-founded space robotics company
  • Teaching Scholar for >70 students in Statistics, Intro to finance, Data modeling and Managerial accounting
  • Notable Projects: Sustainability strategy for BASF Canada, Predictive model for carbon scope emissions for Corporate Knights

Master of Science in Engineering, Robotics

2013

GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania • Philadelphia, USA

  • Academic: GPA 3.97/4.0
  • Teaching Assistant for >120 students in Psychology department for Introduction to Cognitive Science
  • Notable Projects: RASC-AL Robo-ops challenge 2012, Temporal dynamics of core periphery structure, 2D SLAM, 3D UKF orientation tracking, Autonomous robot hockey team, Finger flexion prediction from EEG

Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering

2009

Delhi Technological University • New Delhi, India

  • Academic: University Gold Medal Award Winner 2009

Volunteer

Spaced Ventures – Data science advisor

Habitat Marte Space Analogue Mission – Participant & invited researcher

Canadian Space Society – Society development manager

Oct 2020 – CUR

Jul 2020 – CUR

Jun 2020 – Sep 2020

Oct 2019 – CUR


Awards & Leadership

  • Rotman Lisa Hamann Award 2017
  • Rotman Scholar Award 2017
  • Rotman Roger L. Martin Entrance Scholarship 2016
  • Vice President Rotman Net Impact 2017-2018
  • 2nd place at Rotman Sustainability Innovation 2017
  • 2nd place at Rotman Venture Capital Case Competition 2016
  • 1st place at Rotman Entrepreneurship Strategy 2016
  • Organized cross-cultural networking event for 70 students 2014

Publications

  • Ghanbari, Yasser, Bloy, L., Tunc, B., Shankar, V., et al. "On characterizing population commonalities and subject variations in brain networks." Medical image analysis 38 (2017): 215-229.
  • Tunç, Birkan, Shankar, V., et al. "Towards a quantified network portrait of a population." International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging. Springer, Cham, 2015.
  • Shankar, Varsha, et al. "A co-robotic assistant capable of object selection and search via a brain machine interface." 2013 6th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER). IEEE, 2013.

Every person at a product company is a product person.

Varsha Shankar