Kartik Wankhede
Category manager with 3 years of experience in driving GMV growth & leading key initiatives for major E-commerce businesses.
💻
Category Management💻
Program Management✨
Brand Management🛒
Ecommerce Growth📣
Marketing
India
Category Manager with 3 years of experience driving GMV growth, improving price competitiveness, and scaling high-impact initiatives across leading e-commerce businesses in India and the US. Hands-on expertise in category management, pricing, selection strategy, funnel optimization, and vendor management, backed by strong analytical and execution depth. Proven experience in reducing operational defects, strengthening supply alignment, improving NPS/NQD, and delivering measurable growth through data-driven decisions. Adept at leading cross-functional teams, solving platform-level challenges, and building 0 to 1 categories in fast-paced marketplace environments.
Senior Growth Associate, Meesho
October 2024 - September 2025
Bangalore
Led a team of 6 Key Account Managers in strengthening and driving the growth for Smartphones (0 to 1) category at MEESHO.
• Smartphones Category:
- Conducted focused user research to understand buying behavior, key decision factors, and unmet needs, and used these insights to shape category strategy while addressing 3 seller side challenges around selection, pricing, inventory planning.
- Reduced out of stock by ~15% by driving API based live inventory sync, strengthening existing inventory planning SOPs.
- Performed root cause analysis across the discovery funnel to diagnose drop-offs and deployed targeted fixes with product and tech teams resulting in a ~2X uplift in product views and lifted conversion rates for the category.
- Developed comprehensive playbook to build category awareness working closely with 2 teams (marketing & social media).
- Boosted price competitiveness by ~10pp running competition price benchmarking & driving price corrections from seller.
- Conducted focused user research to understand buying behavior, key decision factors, and unmet needs, and used these insights to shape category strategy while addressing 3 seller side challenges around selection, pricing, inventory planning.
- Reduced out of stock by ~15% by driving API based live inventory sync, strengthening existing inventory planning SOPs.
- Performed root cause analysis across the discovery funnel to diagnose drop-offs and deployed targeted fixes with product and tech teams resulting in a ~2X uplift in product views and lifted conversion rates for the category.
- Developed comprehensive playbook to build category awareness working closely with 2 teams (marketing & social media).
- Boosted price competitiveness by ~10pp running competition price benchmarking & driving price corrections from seller.
- Identified focused selection using category search data and grew its order contribution by ~20% through improvements in discovery, pricing, and inventory planning working closely with seller and internal teams.
- Sourced & onboarded 2 high-potential distributors and brands to strengthen selection breadth and drive competitive pricing.
• Brand Experience:
- Worked in the Central Strategy team to solve 3 key platform-level operational challenges for brands- including Tech/ OMS integrations for order fulfillment, seller panel issues, and new feature requirements to improve seller experience at scale.
- Achieved a 10pp improvement in NPS and 3pp reduction in NQD (Product Quality Metric) by diagnosing key quality issues and implementing corrective actions working closely with cross-functional teams and brands POCs.
- Refined selection quality on MEESHO Mall by designing 2 data-led guardrails using brand search demand and TOMA surveys; removed low-relevance brands and ensured only high-intent, well-cataloged brands qualified for Mall selection.
- Collaborated closely with Product, Tech, Category and F&E teams to streamline 3 issues around brand operations, reduce ERM for users, and strengthen retention and satisfaction for Mall.
- Identified high-TOMA brands for category teams across Tier 2+ cities using targeted user surveys, enabling sharper spending decisions and improved awareness outcomes.
Senior Analyst, Redseer Strategy Consultants
August 2023 - September 2024
Gurugram, HR
• Acted as a trusted advisor to 3 new-age companies, PE, VC firms, helping them drive revenue growth/ identify investment opportunities in India by providing in-depth competitor analysis/ industry insights focused on the E-commerce sector.
• Driving competitive benchmarking for 2 of India’s largest Horizontal Marketplaces in terms of GMV and Orders by:
- Built dashboards by validating & analyzing complex data sets to derive key insights influencing 3 client’s strategic decisions.
- Onboarding, interviewing 10+ industry experts to understand emerging trends/ strategic aspects of competitor’s business.
- Identifying areas of improvement through product benchmarking by conducting thorough app analysis of 3 leading platforms.
- Led brand analysis for 3 category teams, reducing TAT for identifying and onboarding emerging brands onto their platform.
• Drafted MEMOs to venture into 1 new LOBs by conducting sector research through multiple primary and secondary sources.
• Assisted the leadership team in authoring 2 newsletters, industry reports on the Online Retail Landscape in India.
Streamlined processes by drafting 5+ SOPs for multiple project deliverables for easier access/ future referencing across company
Business Operations Associate, VAHDAM India
June 2022 - July 2023
Noida, UP
• Managed the E2E operations of the company’s business across Walmart and 7 other niche marketplaces operating in the US.
• Drove Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) on Walmart.com by ~4x YoY:
- Optimized ad spends by ~50% resulting in an increase in the product sessions & average order value (AOV) by ~15%.
- Collaborated with the content team to improve the product listing quality by ~60% through competitor analysis/ SEO.
- Retained the Pro-Seller Badge for 35+ straight weeks resulting in a 15% discount on the seller commission by ensuring the required number of orders are met, listing quality is maintained, cancellation % is low, & on-time delivery rate is high.
• Attained a revenue growth of ~20% during the Christmas gifting season- Q3’22 YoY across other marketplaces:
- Gathering actionable insights on consumer buying behavior and market trends by connecting with all 7 marketplace POCs.
- Negotiating premium product positioning on all 7 platforms resulting in increased cross selling across the product catalogue.
Build your resume
Education
Bachelor of Engineering, Concentration in Instrumentation Engineering
2018 - 2022
Mumbai, MH
• Served as the Hostel President, spearheaded a council of 10 members to onboard new students, conduct donation camps, resolve issues pertaining to the hostel facilities by serving as the first point of contact b/w the student body and the hostel committee.
• Conducted 5 hostel events for an audience of 400+ during the 2020 academic year with a total annual budget of INR500K+.
• Presented a case study to the Union Bank of India jury & an audience of 250+, securing the 1st position out of 17 teams.