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Walmart is one of the most well-known retailers worldwide. Building notoriety with its “price rollback” discounts and generally affordable product selection, Walmart became a superpower in the retail space, acting as a model for other brands and retailers to emulate. With its buying power, Walmart works with many existing brands to stock its shelf, but it also regularly puts out new products under its brand. Those products are designed, developed, and offered to customers because of the hard work of product manager Manoj Suryadevara and his team.
As a Staff Product Manager in Walmart Global Tech, Manoj’s ability to understand customer requirements and translate them into products delivers the company millions in incremental value every year. Designing and creating a product is just half the battle; once it’s ready to go on the market, Manoj ensures the infrastructure is in place at all critical points. His efforts span the globe because he works with global markets, including Mexico, Canada, South Africa, India, and Chile.
Working to understand customer requirements and bring them to life is familiar to Manoj. He has spent his career working in the product space and has a solid technical education background. He studied Electronics and Communication Engineering at Karunya University in India before getting his Master’s degree in software engineering at the University of Houston. His foundation as a software engineer makes him incredibly detail oriented and a great fit to manage digital products. Filling a digital product role with someone who gets the world’s business and technical aspects can be challenging, but experts like Manoj help bridge that gap.
He began his work in the product space as a product owner for the US-based financial institution American Express. He helped build product roadmaps, design strategies, and manage product portfolios there. He even got to flex his design and technical skills by creating UX designs and mockups using A/B testing. These tools increased customer engagement by 25% and improved Net Promoter Score (NPS).
At Inovalon, Manoj worked with clients that are household names in the healthcare space, such as Aetna and Humana. He helped build healthcare products and managed risk analytics for each product. His ability to lead a product’s go-to-market strategy came out in this role because he was given the space to develop those skills and perfect his approach. Even with a refined go-to-market approach, Manoj was reminded that if the foundation of a product were lacking in any way, it wouldn’t bring about desired results.
Continuing to focus on the importance of product development, Manoj spent hours partnering with stakeholders from every part of the patient care process to understand specific requirements. This due diligence resulted in a new system combining retrospective and prospective risk adjustment assessments for health plans. Medicare, Medicaid, and other reimbursement vessels could then rely on this system to determine the risks associated with specific health plans. The thoughtful details included in this system provided a new, more effective way for providers to interact with insurance companies and government agencies.
Proving his versatility, Manoj expanded his skills and prowess with product management roles at Expedia and AT&T before moving to Walmart in 2020. At Expedia, Manoj conducted extensive market research before managing the hotel product division, which was full of complex customer requirements. His products helped the business grow organically by 15% each year, and his approach brought together several functions within the organization, including sales, marketing, UI/UX designs, finance, and more.
Working in the business-to-business (B2B) division at Expedia meant that Manoj wasn’t just trying to capture individual product needs; he was working to meet the strategic needs of large, complex organizations. His division, Expedia Partner Solutions, provided new tools and technologies to hotels, airlines, and vacation rental properties that regularly partnered with Expedia to do business. Not only were Manoj and his team able to provide these travel partners with new application insights, but they were also able to help with customer management, marketing campaigns, and business tools. These products boosted Expedia’s ability to serve its customers and helped independent hospitality businesses worldwide work more effectively.
It would be easy for product managers to stay in a similar niche or industry, deepening their knowledge within one vertical, but since Manoj has always been big-picture-minded, his career has been expansive. He knows how to enter a new, unknown industry, communicate with business leaders and customers, and bring revolutionary product development solutions. Especially in the digital space, Manoj stands out as a fearless thought leader in getting his hands dirty and delivering a product. He seamlessly moves between a strategic and tactical mindset, changing how those around him see and solve problems.
To help bolster product creation capabilities on a bigger scale, Manoj spends time judging product awards for young entrepreneurs and creators. He has worked with the Stevie Awards, the Globee Awards, the Codie Awards, Devies Awards, Brandon Hill Awards, Judge at Startup Grants, and more. To him, being a judge in these competitions is just as inspiring to his career as it is to the bright minds of the future. Manoj knows first-hand what it takes to truly see things from an “out-of-the-box” perspective, and he’s committed to teaching young leaders how to do just that.
Good products are paramount to positive business results. No matter who the end customer is for an organization, figuring out how to anticipate their needs and create products that alleviate their pain points is what every business aims to do. It takes product management professionals to help bridge the gaps between customer needs and product possibilities. For Manoj, being a visionary is the easy part of the job, but he’s dedicated his career to perfecting the ability to bring those visions to life to benefit both his employers and their customers.
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Photo provided by the author
