About

Apurv Mehra is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft with over 7 years of experience in product development, management, strategy, research, and scale-up. He is passionate about innovation and is currently leading the BlendNet team, a novel platform that delivers digital services to underserved consumers in an assisted manner. Apurv was the co-founder of this project at Microsoft Research India, where he spent 5+ years working on several intrapreneurial efforts, developing new ideas, building them out through startup-like incubations, and leading them to business and societal impact. Apurv has also spent a year scaling Three Wheels United, a social enterprise focused on data-driven lending for EVs, which was a spin-off of his financial inclusion work at Microsoft Research. He completed his undergraduate and Masters degree in Computer Science from IIIT - Delhi, where his primary research focus was on improving the healthcare ecosystem using technology. As a product owner for intrapreneurial project Mishtu, Apurv leads a 10+ member cross-functional team of PMs, designers, engineers, and QA, where he conceptualized the platform to overcome several barriers that a typical novice user in rural India faces while accessing digital services online. He worked with a team of designers and engineers to conduct initial user studies, develop POCs, and architect the end-to-end technology platform for conducting pilots. The pilot results were presented to MS SLT and incorporated into MS India Retail Strategy. Apurv has also worked with several internal and external stakeholders to mature the idea from concept and research prototype stage to a product candidate. Apurv has worked at Microsoft in several roles, including Research and Development Engineer and Research Fellow. As a tech lead for the BlendNet project, he worked with a cross-disciplinary team of junior engineers, designers, and PMs to successfully engineer prototypes that helped in conducting scaled pilots spanning several cities. He also defined the technology roadmap and requirements to launch BlendNet as a full-fledged service on Azure. Apurv has also conceptualized a novel blockchain platform - Vishrambh - to address the problem of trust in the philanthropy sector and led engagements with NGOs to conduct ethnographic studies to identify gaps in the current use of technology. Apurv's technical skills include product management, research science, senior software engineering, blockchain, QA, integration, infra, Android, Azure, and mobile. With 9.20 years of relevant experience, Apurv is an accomplished professional with a keen drive for innovation