Shanx - Work Experience Cover

HELLO.

I'm Shashank.

TLDR;

I love building products and transforming digital experiences. Across 35 countries and organizations of all stripes—Fortune 500 brands to fledgling startups—with budgets ranging from multi-million dollars to shoestrings and duct tape, I've delivered endeavors at the nexus of strategy, technology, data and design. I am fortunate to be able to share these learnings and teach Advanced Marketing Strategy at leading executive MBA programs, where one invariably learns more.

20+
Years of experience
7
Industry sectors covered
6
Global awards for digital products
8
Countries, lived in
35
Countries, worked in
5
Languages spoken; 3 fluently, 2 well enough to invite trouble

Never be shy to go the extra mile. It's seldom crowded.

Shashank Tripathi - Shanx - Black and White

EXPERIENCE

Spanning a few industries from Banking to Advertising, my work has always been rooted in a common theme: data backed optimization of brand experience along the entire customer lifecycle.

Digital Banking & Finance

8 years

Standard Chartered; Zafin

Advertising / Media

12 years

Dentsu; WPP; Interpublic; Publicis

Strategy Consulting

5 years

PriceWaterHouseCoopers; Shanx Inc

Entrepreneurship

5+ years

Three companies, largest grew to 180 people in 5 countries.

Journalism

3 years

The Times of India

Teaching

7 years

London Business School; INSEAD
Polishing the banking digital experience for Standard Chartered
Polishing the banking digital experience for Standard Chartered

Industry Sectors & Brands

Across industries, I have been fortunate to work with some illustrious brands and brilliant minds.

Financial ServicesStandard CharteredCIBC
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)Procter & Gamble (P&G)Philip Morris
High TechMicrosoftIntel
Consumer ElectronicsSonyPanasonic
AutomotiveToyotaScion
EducationBenesse 
PublishingNikkep Business Publications 

SKILLS

As one gets to leadership roles, exposure to a breadth of capabilities is inevitable. Hands-on depth is a little rarer. Even with oversight of teams and programs, I try to roll up my sleeves in the four areas that create differentiated products, delight users, and deliver business results—

 
  1. Design

    Universally mistaken for UI. Elegance is important, but a fanatic attention to user experience is more so: fewest clicks possible; device-agnostic ease of use; important functions most accessible, all the rest out of view. Polished micro-interactions and little touches come later and are the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

    Many beautifully thought-through designs still miss their mark if their implementation lacks finesse. This is why I try to stay abreast of the rapidly evolving ecosystem of frontend technologies such as React/Redux or the wild west of SVG animation. I am quite comfortable with:

    • Design thinking
    • Rapid prototyping
    • Design systems with ‘atomic’ modular principles
    • Implementing design systems in Sketch or Figma
    • Frontend (Foundational) - JavaScript, HTML, CSS  
    • Frontend (SPA Frameworks) - React
    • Knowledge of AA-grade Accessibility in advanced interfaces

    Notably, a good design mind will reform any experience, even without prior experience in an industry—whether it's the dashboard of a car, an airline booking system, or a kiosk at a retail outlet.

     
    Reimagining corporate banking sales
    Reimagining corporate banking deal management
     
  2. Data

    As the wag said: “What is a data scientist? An analyst who lives in San Francisco.” Whatever the slick title of the month, I find the mechanics of putting data to business use have stood the test of time.

    In the late 90s, running an exploratory logit or neural network on around 1 million records of any depth might have allowed you to take a lunch break if you had the best computers of the time; or a beach holiday if you used a humble Thinkpad. Today it is trivial to complete in seconds, without even owning a computer. Platforms have caught up.

    What’s more important and hasn’t changed is the need for a comprehensive data strategy that covers the entire customer journey and therefore cuts through silos in larger organizations. Easier said than done, regardless of all the verbiage in annual reports. This holds true whether it's a large retail bank (an industry notoriously behind the curve despite sitting on a deluge of rich behavioral data) or a CPG manufacturer such as Procter & Gamble (an industry that's passionately data-driven, but woefully short of post-purchase customer insight). In this area, I have hands-on deployment experience in:

    • Data Capture at scale (embedded JS or pixel trackers, or less structured data ingested via APIs such as Twitter firehose)
    • Data Storage at scale (Hadoop, Elastic)
    • Multivariate analytics (in SPSS, SAS, Unica; or Excel in a pinch)
    • Text mining (which becomes fun in multi-byte non-English languages)
    • Basic ELK stack (Kibana needs work to look decent in the real world)
    • ‘Machine Learning’ algoritms (Python, Jupyter)
    • Learning now: AI tools such as TensorFlow (we all are)
     
  3. Strategy

    As with Marketing, everyone thinks they are experts at Strategy. Some actually are.

    Working across a few industry sectors will give you a perspective that's remiss in the arsenal of people who have flourished in one. At its heart, broad boardroom strategy is the recognition and leverage of competitive advantage within a context while creating value for all participants involved (except, perhaps, direct competitors). But there's a lot to be said about operational strategy—how one takes a vision and translates it into on-the-ground executional excellence.

    In the world of Marketing, this could mean market-entry strategy, or a communications plan to grow the market share of a sagging brand. These strategies look different from, say, the operational mandate to revamp the digital presence of a bank to boost the productivity of online channels or migrate the volume of service requests to less expensive ones. Much of this in an organization of any size requires cultural change, education and idea evangelism. My experiences have covered:

    • Market Entry strategy
    • Brand Growth strategy
    • Media Digitization strategy
    • Strategic Roadmaps for startups from MVP to fuller propositions
    • Digital Strategy for a global bank
    • Technology Strategy for a government department
    • Launch Strategy for a new product in a market
    • Social Media Strategy for a portfolio of brands in a region
     
  4. Technology

    This is pervasive and an essay in itself, but having run websites of my own that received over 75 million clicks a month, and been in charge of the multi-country web presence of a global organization, I am fairly comfortable with:

    • Servers: Nginx, Apache
    • Hosting Setups: AWS, Digital Ocean
    • Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL (InnoDB), DynamoDB; for performance, Redis and MemCached
    • Security: Barracuda, Wallarm, AWS WAF — OWASP rules; dynamic automation rules engines; iptables rules; proper SSL implementations
    • Languages: PHP, Node/JavaScript, Python; in early days, hands-on work with J2EE/JSP, C++
    • CDNs: CloudFront, Akamai
    • Content Management Systems: Contentful, Craft, WordPress (headless)
    • Comms Platforms: Twilio, SendGrid, AWS SES, Campaign Monitor
    • OSes: CentOS / RedHat; FreeBSD (and the amazing Ports system)
    • API Platforms: MuleSoft, Postman, Amazon API Gateway
    • And of course, regardless of what I accomplish in life, I shall forever be the IT help desk for all my friends and family. Once a geek..

Much appreciate your taking the time to get to this point. Thank you for reading.

 

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