Product Manager - Digital & Artificial Intelligence

Product Manager — Digital Products (Field Adoption & Business Impact)

Reports to: Head of Digital & AI

Location: Chennai, with ~20% field travel

Experience: 4–8 years

Role Summary

This role owns the adoption, user experience, and measured business impact of the digital, analytics, and AI products built for a nationwide field sales organisation. The internal users - field sales teams spread across multiple states - are the customers of everything we build. The mandate is not to ship features; it is to ensure every platform, MIS, and AI recommendation is operationalized on the ground, used consistently, and delivers quantified P&L and working-capital outcomes. Equally, the role is responsible for channeling on-ground intelligence back into our data and AI systems so recommendations keep improving in accuracy and relevance.

Key Projects You Will Own

• Demand forecasting → P&L improvement: Operationalizing forecast outputs into sales planning, inventory positioning, and scheme decisions; closing the loop between forecast accuracy and field reality.
• Spend allocation intelligence: Driving usage of ad-spend and scheme-allocation recommendations; measuring lift versus legacy allocation methods.
• Product mix optimization: Adoption of recommendations balancing new/patented product push versus generic mix at territory and dealer level.
• Credit risk & bad-debt reduction: Rollout of dealer credit-intelligence scoring into credit decisions; tracking bad-debt and DSO movement attributable to the product.
• Collections assistance: Field rollout of tech/AI-agent-assisted collection workflows; measuring collection efficiency and cycle-time improvement.

Expectations & Responsibilities

Adoption & Change Management

• Own end-to-end rollout of every product release across the field organisation: communication, training (in-person and remote), champion networks, and escalation paths.
• Define and track adoption metrics (activation, weekly active usage, depth of usage by role/region) and run structured interventions where adoption lags.
• Build trust with sales leadership at all levels so that digital tools are pulled, not pushed.

User Experience & Feedback Loops

• Spend meaningful time with users; observe how recommendations and reports are actually used (or worked around) and translate findings into prioritised product changes.
• Run a structured voice-of-field programme: periodic user councils, in-app feedback, and documented territory visits.
• Champion vernacular, low-bandwidth, mobile-first design suited to a distributed rural/semi-urban salesforce.

Ground-Truth for AI

• Design mechanisms for the field to feed local intelligence (crop conditions, competitor activity, dealer health signals, local demand drivers) back into the data platform so AI recommendations reflect on-ground reality.
• Own the recommendation efficacy loop: track acceptance/override rates and reasons, and work with the data science team to improve model accuracy and explainability.

Impact Measurement

• Define the business-impact measurement plan for each initiative before rollout (baseline, control where feasible, attribution logic) in partnership with Finance.
• Publish a monthly adoption-and-impact scorecard for leadership covering usage, efficacy, and quantified P&L/working-capital movement.

Cross-Functional Orchestration

• Work daily with data/analytics engineers on requirements and release readiness; with sales leadership on rollout sequencing; with Finance on impact validation; with HR/L&D on capability building.

What Success Looks Like (First 12 Months)

• 70–80%+ sustained weekly active usage of priority products among target field roles.
• Documented, Finance-validated impact narrative for at least two initiatives
• A functioning field-feedback-to-model pipeline with measurable improvement in recommendation acceptance rates.
• Sales leadership actively requesting - not resisting - the next rollout.

Qualifications

Must-Have

• 4–8 years in product management, product operations, or digital transformation roles where field/frontline adoption was the core deliverable - ideally in agri-inputs, FMCG, pharma, rural BFSI/fintech, or other distribution-led businesses.
• Demonstrated experience driving adoption of digital tools among large, dispersed, non-desk workforces.
• Strong analytical fluency: comfortable with adoption funnels, phased-rollout logic, and reading dashboards critically; able to pressure-test an impact claim.
• Exceptional stakeholder management - credible with both a Regional Sales Head and a data scientist.
• High agency and bias for action: comfortable with ambiguity, willing to travel extensively, and able to operate without a playbook.
• Fluency in English and Hindi; one or more Regional Indian languages (Punjabi/ Bengali/ Oriya/ Telugu /Kannada) is a strong plus.

Good-to-Have

• Exposure to AI/ML-powered products (recommendations, forecasting, scoring) and the practicalities of human-in-the-loop adoption.
• Experience in Agri-inputs or allied sectors (seeds, crop protection, fertilizers, farm equipment, agri-fintech).
• Familiarity with SAP/ERP-driven sales processes, dealer/channel management, and trade schemes.
• Prior experience designing training content or running train-the-trainer programmes.