MANOJ
Bengaluru, India

Manoj
Radhakrishnan

Most business problems look like product problems, or marketing problems, or people problems. They're usually the same problem: parts of a system that have stopped talking to each other. That's the lens I bring to everything — and why I work across strategy, product, growth and AI rather than inside any single one.

Business Strategy Systems Thinking Customer Research Product Thinking Growth AI Communication
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Business is more connected
than it looks.

Across customer-facing, revenue and operational roles within the PropTech industry, I've had the opportunity to watch businesses operate from the inside — the decisions, the trade-offs, the gap between what was planned and what actually happened. Every organisation I worked with taught me something different about how businesses create value, and where that value quietly leaks away.

The pattern I kept noticing was this: the most important things in a business are almost never contained within a single function. A product decision shapes what sales can promise. A sales decision shapes what operations can deliver. A delivery experience shapes what marketing has to explain. Pull one thread and the whole system moves. Understanding that — really understanding it — changes how you approach almost any problem.

That's why I work across product thinking, growth, analytics and AI rather than specialising narrowly. I find that I understand a business problem better when I can see it from multiple angles at once. I'm naturally curious about why certain businesses compound while others plateau, what makes a product genuinely useful rather than just usable, and where technology creates real leverage versus the appearance of it. This website is where I work through those questions.

8+
Years working across PropTech — in roles close to customers, revenue and operations
Perspective
Generalist by design — the full system is more interesting than any single part
Approach
Understand the system before proposing changes to it
Execution
Working builds understanding that reading alone doesn't

Working principles

Not a list of values. Patterns I've noticed in how I actually approach problems — and keep returning to when things get complicated.

Businesses behave like living systems
Change one part and something unexpected shifts elsewhere. A pricing decision affects sales behaviour, which affects customer quality, which affects retention, which affects revenue. I try to trace those second-order effects before recommending anything.
Customer understanding precedes everything
I've seen teams build for the customer they imagined rather than the one that exists. The gap between those two things is where most products fail. Getting that picture right — through conversations, behaviour and honest observation — is the first job.
Data sharpens judgment — it doesn't substitute for it
Numbers tell you what happened. They rarely explain why, and they can't tell you what to do next — that still requires a human with context. The skill isn't reading dashboards. It's knowing which question to ask before opening one.
Execution is the real teacher
You understand a problem differently after you've tried to solve it. The plan always looks cleaner than the work. I prefer to move faster toward a testable version of an idea rather than optimising a plan that hasn't met reality yet.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it yet
Complexity is easy to generate. Clarity is hard to produce. A recommendation that requires a twelve-slide deck to justify is usually a recommendation that hasn't been fully thought through. I hold my own thinking to that standard.
AI amplifies judgment — not a replacement for it
The most useful thing AI does is compress time on work that's already understood. The most dangerous thing it does is make poorly-understood work look finished. I use it heavily — and stay deliberate about where the thinking still has to be mine.

How I look at problems

Each of these is a way of seeing. The interesting work happens at the edges — where one perspective meets another.

Business Strategy
Understanding why some businesses compound value over time and others stall — even with the same resources. Strategy is less about choosing what to do and more about understanding what forces are actually at work in a market.
Product Thinking
Products fail at the point where business assumptions diverge from customer reality. The discipline is in narrowing that gap systematically — through better problem definition, sharper prioritisation and honest feedback loops.
Growth
Growth is a system, not a campaign. How a business acquires customers, how those customers experience the product, and how that experience generates referrals and retention — these three loops compound or collapse together.
Analytics
Evidence-based decision making starts before the data is collected — with knowing which questions matter. The goal isn't to measure everything. It's to identify the small number of signals that actually indicate whether the business is improving.
Customer Research
Customers describe their problems in the language of their symptoms. The job is to translate that into what's actually happening beneath the surface — what they're trying to accomplish, what's blocking them, and what would genuinely help.
Revenue Operations
Revenue is a result. The process that produces it — how leads flow, how deals progress, how customers expand — is what operations controls. Most scaling problems are operations problems that have been misdiagnosed as sales or marketing problems.
AI & Automation
AI is most valuable for compressing the distance between a clear question and a useful answer. It works well on problems that are already well-defined. Applying it to poorly-defined problems just produces confident-sounding noise, faster.
Communication
Analysis has no value until it changes how someone thinks or acts. The last mile — turning a complex finding into a clear recommendation someone can act on — is where most analytical work either lands or gets ignored.

SpeakUp — English
Confidence App

Problem Discovery Product Strategy Retention Design Growth Framework

SpeakUp interested me because the problem beneath the product is a behavioural one, not an educational one. The users understand English — they've studied it for years. What stops them is something else: the instinct to stay quiet, the fear of being judged mid-sentence, the gap between comprehension and confidence. Products that misread that distinction don't just underperform — they solve the wrong problem entirely, and then wonder why retention is low.

This analysis works backwards from that insight — through retention design, pricing psychology and growth strategy — to understand what it would actually take to build a product that earns consistent engagement from this kind of user.

SpeakUp
English Confidence App
01 — PROBLEM
Confidence gap, not grammar gap
Most English apps are built for learners. SpeakUp's users aren't learners — they're avoiders. They understand the language but freeze when they have to use it. That distinction reframes the entire product challenge: this is a psychology problem wearing the clothes of an education problem.
02 — STRATEGY
Habit over content volume
The north star: 3+ practice sessions per week. Not completion rates, not lessons unlocked. Retention design focused on lowering the psychological cost of showing up daily. Pricing structured as a stepped entry — ₹149 → ₹249 → ₹399 — to separate acquisition friction from monetisation depth.
03 — INSIGHT
The real competitor is avoidance
SpeakUp doesn't compete with Duolingo. It competes with the user's instinct to stay quiet. That changes acquisition messaging, onboarding tone, notification strategy and even UI copy. The analysis indicates a ₹1Cr+ ARR pathway is structurally viable — but only if the product treats retention as its core engineering problem.
3+
Sessions/week — north star target
20%
D30 retention hypothesis
₹1Cr
ARR — structural model projection
15%
Churn — target at maturity
How I Approached This
End-to-end analysis — from problem framing to growth model
Problem Discovery User Research Market Analysis Competitor Mapping Product Strategy Retention Framework Pricing Design Growth Model Presentation
Tools Used
Notion Google Sheets Figma PowerPoint Claude ChatGPT

The starting point wasn't the app — it was the user. Specifically, understanding why someone who already knows English would hesitate to use it. That meant looking at the social and psychological context first, before considering any product decision. The problem definition came from that, not from the feature list.

From there, the analysis built outward: how competitors are positioned, what they're missing, what retention actually requires when the barrier is emotional rather than informational, how pricing can reduce friction without undermining the product's perceived value.

The growth model at the end isn't a target — it's a structure. It maps the conditions under which a ₹1Cr+ ARR pathway becomes viable, and what would have to be true about retention and churn for those conditions to hold.

Professional
background.

Customer-facing, revenue and operational roles across the PropTech industry — the detail behind what's on this website. Write to me directly and I'll send it across.

Get in Touch
Manoj_Radhakrishnan_Resume.pdf
Updated June 2026
Headline Strategy · Product · Marketing · Analytics
Experience 8+ years
Education PGDM + B.Tech CSE
Location Bengaluru · Remote open

Have an interesting
problem?

If you're working on something in product, marketing or business strategy — or want to explore working together — I'd like to hear about it. I'm also open to conversations that don't fit a neat category.