Milestones

15+ Years of experience leading Product Management at Salesforce, PayPal, Hitachi

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Salesforce

• Spearheading Retail cloud for Salesforce’s Unified-Commerce vision.

DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

PayPal

• Agent Experiences Platform: Head of Product for PayPal’s Customer Success Agent Platform Organization, serving 450M+ customers, 33 million merchants and 12K+ internal users. Oversaw product strategy, road mapping, build vs. buy assessments, and launch operations, ensuring alignment with strategic business goals. Responsible for a multi-year transformation building AI/ML driven product strategy, leading global teams of PMs, engineers and UX, resulting in over $25M operational savings, yielding benefits in YoY productivity.
  P&L: Opex (Reduction) and product KPIs: Adoption, Avg handle time, Self Service containment, LTV
  
  Cultural Transformation & Team Development: Led a transformation Change Ambassador initiative implementing human-centered design playbook for 40 product management teams across global offices, fostering a culture of product excellence.
  
  AI/ML Personalization Platform: Pioneered 0-1 Enterprise Decision Platform providing AI & ML based Personalized recommendations. Led MVP adoption across Mobile home page, Loyalty/rewards, Marketing recommendations to SMBs.
  
  Fraud / Risk Platform: Led multi-year strategy to unify 17 PayPal's core products under next-gen Risk / Fraud Detection Platform leading 17 engineering teams serving PayPal's 450M user base, with ~500M in annual savings.
  
  Global Initiatives: Led the geo-enablement strategy for markets in India and China, with the multi-tenancy initiative, integrating PayPal Inc. companies such as Xoom, Venmo, and Braintree into a unified CRM.

HEAD OF PRODUCT

Hitachi Data Systems

• Led 0-1 Product Management for Hitachi's first Video Analytics based IoT Smart City SaaS platform. Led demos with Hitachi’s C-suite, managed 25+ lean PMs & Engineers to drive all aspects of launch: MVP, API integrations, pricing, branding, & PR briefing, demos at trade shows

• Delivered Sales Enablement training to Channel Partners, 150+ Sales & Pre-sales for HDS's top Public Safety accounts

Startup Vision & Leadership: Pioneered Criya AI, a MarTech AI startup from 0-1 developing MVP with the vision to revolutionize B2B marketing with AI driven hyper-personalization, led to rapid VC-backed growth, delivering 85% cost savings, engaging over 40,000 SMBs at zero CAC (in 2023). Launched successful B2B SaaS product, signing several enterprise contracts (in 2024).

Product & Team: Recruited CTO and led a lean 15 person high growth engineering, design, business development, customer support & marketing team. Spearheaded Criya's proprietary RAG based AI model, LLM prompt engine and AI Agent workflows to deliver end to end personalized AI driven Campaign marketing in under 60 seconds.

Investor relations: 4X valuation increase in 6 months with $5+ million raise, backed by top investors like Y Combinator and VCs (Felicis -Shopify, Canva, Notion).

GTM strategy: Engineered a flywheel with PLG (zero CAC) followed by multi-prong content and event strategy - website SEO, social media, influencer UGC, brand marketing. Led strategic PR & built community on Socials & Newsletter (200K+), and launched CriyaCon - flagship AI conference.

Revenue & Sales Operations: Founder-led sales, established a repeatable sales playbook, recruited first SDR & AE, trained customer support staff, SMB & Enterprise SaaS pricing.

Deb is a strong Advocate for Women in Tech, Product management & Leadership and is a Featured Speaker at several events.

Public speaker
- Harvard Business School 2025
- SXSW 2025 main stage
- Grace Hopper 2024
- Keynote - Women in Product 2022,2024
- CBS News 2023
- IEEE 2023
- Google I/O 2023
- Carnegie Mellon guest lecture 2023,2024,2025
- UC Berkeley / Haas guest lecture 2019
- UC Santa Clara guest lecture 2019
- Draper university startup judge 2024
- UC Berkeley SAGE startup judge 2019
- Keynote speaker at White Label expo Las Vegas 2021
- Product leadership program - 2021
- Run the world - virtual speaking engagement - 2020
- Speaker ProductCon 2019
- Speaker Product Event 2019
- SAGE - young entrepreneurs event judge at UC Berkeley
- HPE women in leadership panelist
- Product School speaker (multiple events)
- TV interview at RegalixTV
- Expat Women Speaker (multiple events)
- Launched the Women in tech platform at Hitachi Data Systems Bay Area chapter

Carnegie Mellon University: Advisory board for Carnegie Mellon Tech Entrepreneurship

Forbes: One of the earliest Forbes council members - on both Business and Non Profit councils.