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Product Manager · Product Owner · Business Analyst

Yash Todkari turns ambiguity into product decisions.

Research-driven product candidate combining product strategy, business analysis, structured discovery, and applied research to turn ambiguous problems into clear product decisions.

Double Master's graduate across Italy and Poland, with research in product discovery and practical exposure to market analysis, platform analysis, stakeholder coordination, and requirements validation. Interested in contributing to international product teams where thoughtful discovery leads to measurable outcomes.

Portrait of Yash Todkari
Milan, Italy
Double Master's Graduate Aha! Certified Product Professional GenAI Product Discovery Research PSPO I — In Progress 4th of 13 Teams — Ayuda Product Teardown Hackathon
About

Structure first, then the solution.

Yash's path runs through two Master's programmes — International Economics & Commerce at UNIVPM in Ancona, Italy, and International Management at Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland — a route that forced him to keep re-explaining ambiguous problems to new audiences, in new languages, from scratch. That habit became the throughline of his product thinking: before proposing anything, frame the problem so precisely that the solution feels almost obvious.

His Master's thesis pushed that habit into research: a mixed-methods study of how Product Managers actually adopt Generative AI in discovery work, built on an 82-respondent practitioner survey and four enterprise case studies. It produced an original 5-stage adoption maturity model and a framing — the Discernment Principle — that treats AI adoption as a question of calibrated trust rather than raw usage.

Outside the thesis, that same structured instinct shows up in his work across consulting, platform-issue analysis, and eCommerce and travel operations — reading recurring error patterns, coordinating with UK-based stakeholders, and turning findings into requirements a delivery team could act on. The Notion Product Teardown, built independently under hackathon time pressure and placing 4th of 13 teams, is the clearest proof point: a full activation-flow critique, from flow-mapping through falsifiable experiment design, completed in days rather than weeks.

He's now looking for Product Manager, Product Owner, and Business Analyst roles on international product teams — ideally ones where discovery is taken as seriously as delivery.

What I Bring

Six ways of working, one habit underneath.

01

Product Discovery

Able to structure ambiguous problems, identify user and business needs, compare opportunities, and translate insight into product decisions.

02

Roadmapping & Prioritization

Connecting product opportunities to business objectives, evaluating trade-offs, and organizing initiatives around impact and feasibility.

03

Business Analysis

Analyzing platform issues, requirements, recurring errors, operational patterns, and business impact.

04

Generative AI in Product Discovery

Research focus on how Product Managers adopt GenAI, where it creates value, and why human judgement, context, and governance remain essential.

05

Stakeholder Management

Translating analysis into clear communication for cross-functional and international stakeholders.

06

Data-Informed Decisions

KPI thinking, reporting, structured analysis, SQL, Power BI, Google Analytics, and evidence-based prioritization.

Master's Thesis | Applied Product Research

Generative AI in Product Discovery

How Product Managers are integrating GenAI into discovery work — and what that reveals about trust, not just usage.

0
PM/PO survey respondents
0
Enterprise case studies — Figma, Notion, Miro, Atlassian
0
Stage original adoption maturity model
Research Question

How are Product Managers integrating Generative AI into product discovery, and what are the perceived impacts on efficiency, output quality, trust, and role evolution?

Methodology Snapshot

A convergent mixed-methods approach: an 82-respondent PM/PO survey combining descriptive statistics with open-text thematic analysis, triangulated against four enterprise case studies (Figma, Notion, Miro, Atlassian) for organisational-level evidence.

Usefulness vs. Trust

Usefulness0
Trust0

The Refined GenAI Adoption Maturity Model — Original Contribution

Teams advance not by using AI more, but by using it with greater discernment, calibrated trust, and governance maturity.

~2%
No Adoption
Manual methods, GenAI unused
~5%
Experimental
Curiosity-driven trials
~24%
Selective
High-value tasks, heavy checking
~62%
Integrated
Daily, broad use — the modal PM
~6%
Strategic
Agentic pipelines, governance — "strategic editor"

Routine, not experimental

93% of PMs use GenAI daily or several times a week across discovery work.

Barriers are about trust

Hallucination, missing product context, and privacy/policy limits — not usability — are the binding constraints.

The role is reshaped

Manual production shifts toward judgement and orchestration — the "strategic editor."

"The advantage no longer belongs to the teams that use AI the most — but to those who have learned, precisely, when not to trust it."

This exploratory study is based on a convenience sample. Findings should be read as directional practitioner evidence rather than statistical generalization to the full Product Manager population.

Generative AI in Product Discovery

Master's Thesis — Final Defence Deck
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Investment Guardian

Product Owner Case Study — Independent Revolut Concept
Role

Product Owner Candidate

Problem

Protection mechanisms may exist around payments, but customers can still face risk when entering high-risk investment activity such as CFDs, crypto, or precious metals.

Why It Matters

The case study explores how a product could combine risk understanding, behavioural signals, targeted interventions, and compliance-ready reporting before a high-risk transaction proceeds.

Solution
  • Pre-trade risk-understanding checks
  • Scam-archetype classification
  • Tailored interventions scaled to risk
  • Compliance-ready reporting
Architecture

Built around existing platform capabilities — PRAGMA, FinCrime AI Agents, AIR, decision engine, compliance audit log — rather than a new ML platform.

Metrics — proposed KPIs / hypotheses
Investment-scam loss rate ↓ Conversion impact — acceptable range Complaint / ombudsman escalation rate Consumer trust score Legitimate first-time deposit conversion
Execution — 90-Day Plan
Days 1–30
Discovery, stakeholder interviews, shadowing fraud/investment teams, confirm cohorts, define KPIs, map platform capabilities.
Days 31–60
Scoped MVP in one market, selected high-risk flows, instrumentation, experiment design, intervention UX testing.
Days 61–90
Analyze results, refine concept, modularize reusable elements, define scaling/governance roadmap.
Why This Reflects How I Operate

Research before solutioning; structured problem framing; pragmatic use of existing capabilities; clear metrics; cross-functional thinking; attention to user trust and risk.

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Notion Product Teardown

Independent Coursework / Ayuda Hackathon — 4th of 13 Teams
Context

Prepared for the Ayuda Product Teardown Hackathon; competed against 13 teams; placed 4th.

Frame

Goal: evaluate how effectively Notion's sign-up-to-first-workspace flow converts a first-time user into a structured, reusable workspace. Persona: "Mani," a 24-year-old early-career PM job-hunting, comparing Notion against a Google Sheet.

Job To Be Done

"When I am actively job hunting, my data is scattered across notes, spreadsheets, and to-do lists... I want to build one common workflow that helps me track applications, portfolio work, interview prep, and networking follow-ups."

Business Model Snapshot

Freemium subscription (Free / Plus / Business / Enterprise). Proposed North Star: % of new signups reaching a self-built structured page within 24h, plus supporting funnel and guardrail metrics.

Flow Map

9 screens observed, severity-scored 1–5. The AI-chat homepage (severity 5) was identified as the highest-risk drop-off point.

Screen Teardowns

Element-level analysis of 4 selected screens: onboarding personalization, AI-chat homepage, manual/template blank path, final built workspace.

Friction Log Synthesis
  • A — AI-first default hides alternatives
  • B — Output quality vs. perceived AI capability gap
  • C — Stacked minor friction points
Top 3 Problems — Impact vs. Effort
Impact
Effort · Verdict
AI-first default hides alternatives
High
Low/Medium — Change
Output quality vs. perceived capability
Medium/High
High (real fix) / Low (messaging) — Change
Stacked minor friction
Low/Medium
Low — Change confirmation step
Top Finding

Notion's AI-chat-first default hides manual/template alternatives (severity 5), with a proposed disclosure experiment measuring path-split shift across 5,000 users per arm.

Falsifiable Experiments

Three A/B tests, each with a hypothesis, primary metric, guardrails, audience/duration, and a pre-committed action if results come back flat.

Why This Reflects How I Operate

Structured teardown methodology under time pressure; impact-vs-effort prioritization; steelmanning opposing views before recommending change; designing falsifiable, metric-driven experiments rather than opinion-based fixes.

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Technical Curiosity

Not a PM case study — just curiosity about the interface.

YouTube Clone — HTML/CSS Build

A static front-end recreation of the YouTube interface, built to practice layout precision, spacing systems, and responsive structure with plain HTML and CSS — explicitly not a PM case study and not evidence of applying for technical PM/PO roles.

HTMLCSS

What it reinforced: attention to interface detail and grid discipline sharpens the questions I ask engineers and designers during product reviews.

View on GitHub
Resume & Credentials

The full record.

Highlights

Product StrategyRoadmappingMarket & Competitive Analysis Requirements / PRDs / User StoriesKPI TrackingA/B Testing Stakeholder ManagementAgile / ScrumPlatform Issue Analysis Business AnalysisSQL / MySQLPower BI Google AnalyticsJiraConfluenceFigma MiroAha!ChatGPTClaudePerplexity
Aha! Certified Product ProfessionalCompleted
PSPO I — Scrum.orgIn Progress
Product Management, Roadmapping & AI-for-Product courseworkLearning / Coursework
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Future Case Studies

A living portfolio.

This portfolio will grow with more Product Manager, Product Owner, and Business Analyst case studies over time, using the same reusable PDF-preview system used above.

Coming Soon

New Product Discovery Case Study

A fresh discovery narrative, framed and evidenced the same way as the two flagships above.

Coming Soon

Business Analysis Case Study

Requirements, process mapping, and operational-impact analysis on a real workflow.

Coming Soon

Growth or Experimentation Case Study

Hypothesis design, guardrail metrics, and prioritization for a growth problem.

Contact

Let's talk about product.

Interested in discussing product opportunities, research-led discovery, or business-analysis work? I would welcome a conversation.