Samyak Sahu

+91 8130611380f20180421@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in
Product Intern
Useplaza
India’s Top 40 Product Intern
Successfully qualified for Upraised APM Internship Programme out of 10,000+ aspirants
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My Top PM Skills
Foundational Aptitude
Product Sense
Problem Solving
View Detailed Test Report

Education

BITS Pilani
B E, Electrical and Electronics Engineering
2018 - 2022

Internships

PM Intern
Varidus
Dec 2020 - Apr 2021
UX Intern
SHGSE, Govt of West Bengal
May 2020 - Jun 2020

My Case Studies

Here is my take on the problem statements which were of particular interest to me. For ease of scanning, these have been structured as follows:
Metrics
Approach
Recommendations
Artefacts
Improving user experience and engagement on Disney+ Hotstar
An attempt to refine the popular OTT platform through social features.
Metrics
  • Increase user engagement on the platform through network effects.
  • Improve user experience through personalization of content.
Read More
Approach
Are you a robot?
Content recommendation through algorithms could prove to be mechanical and in extreme cases, detrimental to user experience.

To avoid the pain point of users using crowdsourced recommendation platforms or talking to their friends to ask for suggestions, users could use newly introduced social features on Hotstar.
Fam, where you at?
A large section of Hotstar users watch live streams of matches hosted on the Star Network. Given a remote way of watching content has took charge and stadium gatherings have taken a hit, a social aspect to matches is much missed.

These social features could then be tailored to fit to a crowd chanting the same names from their respective homes.
Recommendations
User profiles
  • A user profile for each paid user: access to a gated community.
  • Anonymous username (searchable only if known) with minimal details to curb privacy issues.
  • A gallery of shows watched, to-watch lists, people following, favorites, etc.
Customized Notifications
  • A push notification sent out to the user about the users they follow.
  • Ensures content visibility.
  • Gives off a humanized recommendation.
Recommendations
Live chat for live streams
  • A live chat feature which could help fans cheer on for their favorite teams.
  • Usage of emojis and reactions could create self-reinforcing cheerleader effect.
  • Similarly marqueeing commentary could also be introduced to generate user delight.
Interested to know more?
Detailed
Document

My Publications

Turn off the lights: How the Dark Mode is Taking Over Our Displays
The COVID Stock Market in India: Rising to Fall?
Quadruped: A Nature Inspired Challenge

My Product Observations

What makes Notion stand in a league of its own?
Notion is hard to describe in a single line, then why is it so successful?
  • Notion as a note-taking tool/database management tool, does more than just that.
  • Its recursive page-within-a-page structure makes it highly functional for a note-taking app.
  • The consistency and elegance in design makes it popular among the young folk.
  • It can a strong community around it, mostly carried through word-of-mouth by social media influencers & and an active social media-based feedback mechanism.
  • The community effect leads to hundreds of templates, analytics tools, website-hosting solutions, etc. crowdsource its functionality and make it even more powerful.
Effective brand building by Apple
The tech giant is still a trendsetter, and an epitome of innovation in the industry - technical or strategic.
  • Apple has been at the forefront of innovation ever since its inception: from the Apple I to the iPhone back in 2007.
  • Very recently, Apple sent shockwaves to the portable computer industry by launching the M1 Macbook Pro. They still are trendsetters in the smartphone industry through the iPhone.
  • The seamlessly integrated device ecosystem (hardware and tailored software) builds a business moat and creates opportunity for developers to secure revenue from the most well-paying users entering this ecosystem.
  • The marketing campaigns focus a lot over the people using it instead of the underlying technology. Examples include: "Shot on iPhone" over discussing the camera features. This signals high user centricity.
  • The recent overhaul over delisting apps in the App Store was received with contempt first, but Apple's concern for privacy in their recent press releases appealed a lot of existing users afterwards.
Linux: An Open-Source Success
How did Linux thrive on the power of community to become the most important Operating System in the world?
  • Linux is an open-source operating system family started out in 1991, which gave it a strong first-movers advantage, since computer adoption was scarce back then.
  • It has hundreds of "flavors": variants with different types of GUIs, with new ones still coming every single year. There's a great degree of customization which could be carried out for each of those.
  • The fact that its open-source allows a distributed set of users to see through the code and look for potential problems, makes it one of the most reliable platforms to host enterprise software.
  • Now, we're seeing several electronic devices using Linux for their operation too: from calculators to the Large Hadron Collider and everything in between.
  • The foundation running the project is funded by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and many more, showing its dependence in the world of software.

Achievements & Extra Curriculars

  • Head of Sponsorship & Core Team Member of Team Robocon, BITS Pilani. Fetched sponsorships worth ₹ 4.5 L.
  • Led the Project Micromouse through design, construction and debugging phases to represent the college in International Micromouse Challenge, conducted in Techfest, IIT Bombay (2020).
  • Wrote multiple articles for the Science and Technology section of the academic magazine FreeLunch Magazine, BITS Pilani as Author, Science and Technology.
  • Mentored 10+ students as Core Team Member & Mentor at Peer Mentorship Programme, BITS Pilani
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