EV & Hybrid Vehicle
Product Strategy
Product & Strategy Manager
“5 years learning how product decisions get validated by telemetry, simulation, and customers — not opinion.”
- EV Strategy
- Hybrid Vehicle Strategy
- Vehicle Analytics
- Competitive Intelligence
- Cross-functional Leadership
01 · Context
The Context
2018
Graduate Engineer Trainee
Joined India's largest automaker by volume
Role
Assistant Manager
EV & Hybrid Vehicle development
Fast Track Promotion
Promoted in 2 years
Post-promotion
Deputy Manager
Product & Strategy — EV & Hybrid product scope
Fast Track Promotion — 2 years vs. 3 years on the normal track
Maruti Suzuki India Limited is India's largest automaker by volume. I joined as a Graduate Engineer Trainee in 2018 and progressed to Deputy Manager through a Fast Track Promotion awarded to the top 1% of employees and recognised with the ACES Award (1 in 20,000 employees) by the CEO.
Primary scope
Electric Vehicle and Hybrid Vehicle product strategy and development — combining customer usage insights, vehicle telemetry, simulation models, and competitive benchmarking to shape product decisions at scale.
5 yrs
EV & Hybrid product work
11+
R&D teams coordinated
10+
Global EV platforms benchmarked
02 · Problem framing
The Product Challenge
EV product development in India was a moving target.
03 · Ownership
My Product Ownership
Six workstreams I personally owned — select one to see the scope and the decision it enabled.
Ownership 01
Product Strategy
Defined EV and Hybrid product strategy from converging evidence streams.
- Customer usage data
- Vehicle telemetry
- Simulation models
- Competitive benchmarking
Goal
Make product decisions grounded in evidence rather than assumption.
04 · Product strategy
From Data to Product Decisions
Evidence did not stay as analysis. Every input had a path to a decision, and every decision had to survive validation.
Input
Customer Usage
How customers actually drive — trip lengths, charging behaviour, duty cycles — framed the problem before any target was set.
The point of the framework was never the analysis. It was making the trade-off explicit, then proving it before committing.
05 · Data & analytics
One Decision View, Not Five Reports
Power BI dashboards consolidated vehicle performance, testing data and customer feedback so feature, performance and control-strategy calls were made against the same evidence.
Product decision view
Conceptual composition
Range
Drive-range behaviour in real use
Efficiency
Energy / fuel economy signals
Performance
Drivability and control strategy
Customer Satisfaction
Feedback themes and severity
Testing Results
Validation status by workstream
Illustrative visualization of the decision framework
Consolidated inputs
Vehicle performance, testing data and customer feedback in a single view.
Prioritisation surface
Used to sequence features, performance improvements and control-strategy decisions.
Replaced siloed reporting
Teams argued about the trade-off, not about whose numbers were right.
06 · Competitive intelligence
Benchmarking a Moving Target
Benchmarking and reverse-engineering 10+ global EV platforms turned market intelligence into product recommendations. Shown here is the methodology, not competitor data.
How it was assessed
Compared how platforms achieved usable range — pack sizing, thermal behaviour and energy management — then mapped that against Indian usage patterns.
Product output
Where our range gap was real versus where it was a perception gap.
Methodology view · no competitor names or specifications shown
07 · Cross-functional execution
Cross-functional Product Orchestration
EV and Hybrid product decisions sat at the centre of 11+ R&D teams. My job was to keep evidence, trade-offs and decisions moving between them.
EV / Hybrid Product
Central decision node
Simulation
Model-based exploration of trade-offs.
Software
Control strategy and embedded delivery.
Testing
Validation of every committed decision.
Vehicle Development
Integration into the vehicle programme.
Other R&D Functions
Supporting engineering workstreams.
11+ R&D teams · simplified view
~0%
Compression of average decision cycles
Resolved cross-team blockers and improved decision velocity across complex product-development workstreams.
What orchestration actually meant
- Aligning simulation, software, testing and vehicle teams on one set of evidence.
- Surfacing blockers early rather than at programme milestones.
- Holding the trade-off conversation once, with the right people in the room.
08 · Greenfield innovation
Building Beyond the Product
The work extended past vehicle product development into the Model Factory Concept / Digital Twin initiative at MSIL — applying the same evidence-first discipline to how an R&D facility gets planned.
Before
Traditional layout preparation
Facility layout preparation ran as a sequential, manual exercise — slower to iterate and harder to review before commitment.
~0%
Improvement in layout-preparation efficiency
The initiative established a new standard for R&D facility planning — and was the work recognised with the ACES Award by the CEO.
09 · Brand & growth
Product Thinking Beyond the Vehicle
IGNITION
Internal brand advocacy program
I spearheaded initiatives for EVs and Hybrid Vehicles as a part of IGNITION program and owned its product and content strategy — treating outreach like a product: understand the audience, sequence the content, measure the reach, iterate.
~0%
Cumulative growth in digital reach
Achieved across outreach platforms through product and content strategy ownership.
10 · Impact
Outcomes
Measured movement in the product, the process and the organisation.
~0%
Improvement in EV drive range
Delivered through evidence-led control and configuration decisions.
~0%
Increase in Hybrid Vehicle fuel economy
Efficiency levers validated against real-world usage, not simulation alone.
~0%
Increase in customer satisfaction scores
Product targets reframed around customer-perceived performance.
~0%
Compression of average decision cycles
Cross-team blockers resolved and decision velocity improved.
0+
Global EV platforms benchmarked
Continuous competitive intelligence feeding future vehicle strategy.
0+
R&D teams coordinated
Simulation, software, testing, vehicle development and other functions.
~0%
Improvement in layout-preparation efficiency
Model Factory Concept / Digital Twin initiative.
~0%
Growth in digital reach — IGNITION
Internal brand advocacy program, product and content strategy owned.
11 · Recognition
Recognition
ACES Award
1 in 20,000 employeesAwarded by the CEO of Maruti Suzuki for leading development of a next-generation R&D facility.
Fast Track Promotion
Top 1% of employeesPromoted from Assistant Manager to Deputy Manager for exceptional contributions to EV and Hybrid Vehicle development.
CEO Award
Cross-functional leadershipLed a 4-member cross-functional team to ensure uninterrupted product development during COVID-19.
STAR Performer
2020 & 2021Recognised in consecutive years for sustained performance.
12 · Reflection
What Automotive Product Development Taught Me About Product Management
“You cannot ship your way out of a bad requirement.”
01
Get close to reality
Telemetry and customer behaviour reveal what actually happens, not what a model assumes will happen.
02
Validate before committing
A decision based on incomplete evidence can create downstream consequences that are expensive to reverse.
03
Product discipline transfers
The medium changes from vehicles to software, but the discipline remains: understand the problem → gather evidence → make the trade-off → validate → commit.
The medium is different. The failure mode is identical.
13 · Capability
Skills
Product
- Product Strategy
- EV Product Development
- Competitive Analysis
- Customer Insights
Data
- Vehicle Telemetry Analytics
- Power BI
- Data-driven Decision Making
Delivery
- Agile
- PLM
- SDLC
- V Model
- Cross-functional Delivery
Innovation
- Digital Twin
- Model Factory Concept
- Greenfield Product Development
Leadership
- Stakeholder Management
- Cross-functional Leadership
- Strategic Communication
From engineering systems to product systems.
“My automotive experience taught me how to make high-consequence product decisions using evidence, cross-functional alignment, and disciplined validation. I now bring that same product discipline to building customer-centric digital products.”