Expert Product Manager Sunil Tej Gorantla on Personalization Without User Data at Risk

With the explosive growth of ChatGPT, discussions around how to integrate AI have made their way into corporate boardrooms and product roadmaps at a rapid pace. In fact, AI already plays a vital role in our daily lives.

Billions of people spend hours every day glued to apps such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter, all of which use AI ranking algorithms to personalize your feed.

These algorithms analyze thousands of data points per second to predict what a user would like to see most. And the key to getting personalization right is user data.

Except, when dealing with user data, it is critical to uphold user privacy laws and protect users from breaches. The mainstream public is still shaken by how Cambridge Analytica used people’s personal data to maneuver politics.

According to a report by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), the US experienced a record number of 1,862 data breaches in 2021. Prominent companies such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, Plex, and Cash App experienced significant data breaches in just the last two years.

Fortunately, product experts like Sunil Tej Gorantla, who are passionate about building products, are focusing on keeping user data sacrosanct.

Having graduated from VIT University, one of the top engineering institutions in India, with a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Sunil has a technical background. With more than a decade of experience in product management, Sunil has helped various startups build large-scale web and mobile applications that generate millions in revenue.

He is a founder, product expert, growth hacker, and writer who believes in solving what people need, making data-driven decisions, and building products with a strong mission at their core to serve others.

During his extensive career, Sunil was fortunate to be mentored by some of the industry's eminent personalities, such as Harishankaran Karunanidhi, Hunter Walk, and Justin Kan.

Sunil spent the early years of his career working with leading high-growth early-stage startups. He joined HackerRank as the first Product Evangelist immediately after the company became India’s first YCombinator startup. To acquire HackerRank's first few thousand users, he spearheaded the campus ambassador program.

He recruited hundreds of student ambassadors who formed Hacker Clubs at their universities to encourage students to solve programming challenges and participate in weekly programming contests online. He also collaborated with companies such as Airbnb, Adobe, Quora, and NetApp, which hired top programming talent from these contests by being sponsors.

However, at the time, retaining users after the contests was a challenge for HackerRank.

To improve retention, Sunil implemented gamification and designed HackerRank’s first incentive mechanism to keep users hooked to the product. Working with the team, he launched "Hackos"—a term he coined—which are points users earned by solving programming challenges.

Users loved this feature so much that the product's retention rate experienced a significant increase.

Sunil's experience scaling HackerRank from scratch to the first 200k users has made his skillset attractive to startups worldwide. His ability to articulate unmet user needs and build product features to drive growth led him to places he least expected.

As a Growth Hacker, he helped scale Mobilizr, a consumer tech startup in Nigeria. He also worked as Head of Data for a property tech startup in London.

Afterward, he joined Global Savings Group (GSG) in Munich, Germany, as the first Product Owner for CupoNation's mobile web application. In just a few months, he launched CupoNation's first mobile web application in 17+ countries, which tripled the revenue generated from mobile users.

Today, GSG is one of the most successful ventures from Rocket Internet, which also spun off Delivery Hero, Zalando, HelloFresh, and Jumia.

After leaving GSG, Sunil joined Juniqe, a startup that was ranked as one of the top 3 fastest growing companies in Germany at the time. As an experienced Product Manager, he managed two cross-functional teams to rebuild the entire technical stack, scaling the mobile and web applications to handle millions of users.

In addition to leading the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) team, he was also the stakeholder manager for Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

During his time at Juniqe, he played a pivotal role in scaling the product from less than a million to €20 million in annual recurring revenue, turning the startup into one of the largest art e-commerce sites in Europe.

While exploring strategies to improve conversion rates at Juniqe, Sunil encountered Dynamic Yield (DY), a personalization solution for e-commerce products. His foray into personalization began as he worked on integrating DY with Juniqe to bring features like “Users who bought this also liked” and “Products you might like.”

As one of the first handful of customers to try out DY, he worked closely with DY's team to fix their product issues and share feedback to improve their machine learning (ML) algorithms. This gave Sunil a behind-the-scenes look into how ML was deployed at scale and equipped him to suggest strategies that helped DY become successful.

Gartner has named DY a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines for the past five consecutive years. Later, DY was first acquired by McDonald's and then by Mastercard to enhance customer experience using personalization.

Armed with the experience transforming user experiences using personalization, Sunil currently leverages his expertise in product development and growth hacking to build Gulpie—a personalized food discovery application.

The app helps people discover restaurants based on their unique tastes, while also helping restaurants fight against the manipulation of their reviews and empowering reviewers to monetize their expertise.

To create Gulpie, Sunil interviewed hundreds of food lovers, food reviewers, and restaurant owners. Through these interviews, he discovered that a lack of trust in restaurant reviews and user data protection leads to inefficiencies in the current restaurant discovery process, leaving many people perplexed and frustrated.

To address inefficiencies in the market, Sunil built a state-of-the-art personalized recommendation engine using an ensemble of cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms. This engine provides users with personalized restaurant recommendations based on their individual tastes, helping them make informed decisions without going through a cumbersome search process.

While working on the recommendation engine, Sunil gained key insights into how to deduce unique user tastes. He found that gaining users' trust to share their data requires a promise of user data protection and strict privacy measures.

Leaders in the industry like Sriram Krishnan—an investor at a16z who previously built product teams at Twitter, Meta, and Snap—share this sentiment.

https://twitter.com/sriramk/status/1631779635376828416?s=46&t=m-tchH2RTFFMPB2qJSBrFQ

What Sunil Had to Say

Sharing his experience working on personalization at Gulpie, Sunil explains: “Before the invention of blockchains, users were unable to truly own their data as centralized entities held control over it. However, with Gulpie, our aim is to empower users to take control of their data and provide them with better visibility into its usage. We understand that users expect product builders to be cognizant of the skepticism people experience when sharing their data with apps.

That’s why we focus on enabling personalization while ensuring that users’ data is absolutely not at risk. We anonymize user data before training our machine-learning models. Additionally, with GDPR and other privacy protection regulations in place, it's important for companies to actively monitor and prevent the misuse of user data to avoid situations like the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal.”

In an age where large organizations scavenge user data and abuse privacy without consent, product experts like Sunil lead the way in protecting user privacy. As product managers, builders, and founders strive for personalization without sacrificing privacy, they can rely on experts like Sunil who push the boundaries of what’s possible.

With his expertise and vision, we can look forward to a future where user privacy is truly protected, and products can provide tailored experiences that put users first.