Sharmistha D.

About Sharmistha D.

50 million was riding on an algorithm the merchandising team didn\'t trust.I\'d spent months building Nike\'s AI-powered pricing platform. The tech worked. The models were solid. But the real problem? Getting people who\'d priced products manually for a decade to hand over control.I didn\'t win them with data. I won them by starting small, showing them the process, letting them see it work before scaling it. When we rolled it across channels, we delivered $50M+ in revenue lift. The skeptics became my biggest advocates.That\'s the pattern: the hardest part of building products isn\'t the technology.THE REAL WORK HAPPENS IN THE MESSY MIDDLEAt Visa, I drove the conversational AI chatbot initiative. It almost didn\'t ship—not because of engineering challenges, but because three executives couldn\'t agree on who owned customer support strategy.I spent two months aligning incentives, getting people rowing in the same direction when they couldn\'t even agree which direction that was.We shipped it. Today it\'s core infrastructure supporting millions of customers.I also led Visa\'s Global Marketplace Program globally. The challenge wasn\'t payment authentication technology—it was balancing regional requirements, regulatory constraints, and competing executive priorities.At the Principal level, that\'s the job: making strategic calls without enough data. Influencing without authority. Choosing long-term platform investments over short-term wins when everyone\'s screaming for results.WHAT I\'VE SHIPPEDMachine learning authorization systems processing millions of transactions. B2B API platforms for Fortune 500 clients. Products scaled from pilot to global deployment across five time zones.What I\'m good at? Driving clarity when everyone else sees chaos. Rebuilding architecture mid-flight when market signals change. Getting consensus from executives who fundamentally disagree.I\'ve generated $500M+ in measurable business impact across fintech, AI, and retail over the past decade at Visa, Nike, and eBay. The wins matter. But the real skill is navigating the parts too messy for case studies.BEYOND PRODUCTSWhen I\'m not making product trade-offs, I\'m creating with my hands—crochet projects that take months, watercolor paintings that rarely turn out how I planned. Same muscle: comfort with ambiguity, trust in the process.Based in the SF Bay Area.Let\'s grab coffee if you\'re building products where the playbook doesn\'t exist yet—or you want to talk about the unglamorous reality of Principal PM work that never makes it into LinkedIn posts.#AI#Fintech#B2B

Experience

1. Principal Product Manager

   Visa

   Jan 2020 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   Led platform product strategy at Visa AI driven system, fintech marketplaces, and core payments authorization modernization, operating at global payments scale in a highly regulated environment. DRI on production-grade AI platforms, a 0→1 B2B marketplace, and mission-critical authorization systems directly in the path of real-time money movement.Built and scaled enterprise AI and LLM-based platforms, including Conversational AI and chatbots, designed to be safe-by-default for regulated financial workflows. Defined an agentic AI architecture with LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), confidence scoring, and human-in-the-loop escalation, enabling self-service at scale while maintaining compliance, auditability, and trust. Partnered closely with Legal, Risk, Compliance, Data Science, and Engineering to operationalize Generative AI across regions and products.Led modernization of core authorization platforms, evolving legacy rule-based systems into scalable, service-driven, API-first architectures. This improved reliability, latency, and decision quality across authorization, fraud detection, transaction risk scoring, and issuer behavior prediction, safely introducing AI-driven decisioning into real-time payments flows.Also led the 0→1 creation and global launch of Visa’s Marketplace Program, a B2B platform enabling fintechs, banks, and technology partners to discover, integrate, and monetize cross border payments capabilities. Defined strategy spanning API enablement, partner onboarding, pricing, monetization, and governance, and built self-service developer and partner tooling for adoption. Operated the marketplace as a multi-tenant platform, driving >$300M revenue through partner-led distribution.This role combined AI platform ownership, authorization modernization, fintech domain depth, marketplace strategy, API monetization, and revenue accountability, innovation with safety, scale, and trust at the core of the global payments ecosystem.

Skills

• Requirements Analysis
• Requirements Gathering
• Business Analysis
• Sdlc
• User Acceptance Testing
• Sql
• Gap Analysis
• Business Requirements
• Business Intelligence
• Data Warehousing
• Business Process Design
• Solution Architecture
• Testing
• Data Modeling