Esha is a distinguished Senior Product Management leader with over a decade of training and experience building social technology products. She currently leads the effort to help billions of users around the world engage in thriving online communities on WhatsApp. Prior to WhatsApp, Esha led the effort at Facebook to build digital safety and privacy tools for billions of women and at-risk populations around the world and led the online communities product portfolio at Meetup. Esha has been recognized as one of the top 100 emerging women leaders and has received a Globee Award for her contributions in her field.
Early education and training was a big contributing factor to her current success
Esha's success in becoming an established leader in the social products space can be attributed to the years of education and hands-on training she received in technology, product development and social media. This education and training she received came through 3 main sources below.
The first was her education in Computer Science. The education she received included both theoretical and practical training in Human Computer Interaction and Computer Graphics + Operating Systems which are critical for any digital social product, Data Structures and Computer Architecture which are critical to both building machine learning models that can scale to serve millions and even billions.
The second was her Master's education in Engineering Management. This education was largely practical where she had to on several occasions consult large organizations and work on case studies to solve hard consumer problems. In her consulting practicum with Parsons (a provider of technology driven solutions for national security and global infrastructure markets), she provided recommendations on how their company could improve their product development practices.
The last was her tenure building digital mobile products at Citigroup. This was the first opportunity Esha had to solve problems at scale - impacting the lives of hundreds of thousands of users who were using her products to manage sizable amounts of money. This is also where Esha first practiced and leveraged the power of analytics and models to ensure the security of actions taken on the platform.
These experiences ultimately led Esha to specialize and focus her career on building social products with privacy and safety at the forefront.
Making big advances for consumer facing social media products
Esha was always passionate about working on consumer facing software products that had a mission of connecting people through technology. This desire led her to join Meetup in 2018: a social product that focused on bringing people together in real life through common hobbies, interests and activities. Shortly after she joined, she was tasked with two large mission critical efforts for Meetup.
The first one focused on addressing the big inefficiencies and difficulties that event organizers faced in creating live local events for community members to connect and engage in person. Esha led the design, engineering and marketing teams to build and launch quick schedule templates that ultimately ended up being used by millions of community organizers to more efficiently bring their members together in real life. She also led the development and launch of an organizer recognition & loyalty program (Supergroups) to encourage the best organizers to continue hosting on Meetup.
The second one was arguably the toughest challenge that any social community product faces: which was ensuring that community members who attended live in-person community events could be kept safe from harm. There have been numerous incidents of live events created from online communities resulting in danger and harm. In order to ensure that community members could make an informed decision on whether to attend a live event, she worked with the product development teams to bring to life a reputation system which utilized feedback from real attendees among other data available on the Meetup platform to provide community members visibility into Meetup's evaluation of an event and helped them make an informed decision about attending.
These two big initiatives played a pivotal role in keeping the Meetup platform alive with over a million active members and subscribing organizers and eventually led to evolving Meetup's business model into a thriving business (member paid events & subscriptions). This experience helped Esha establish her credibility as a leader in the social products space with an expertise in digital safety and privacy.
A significant contribution to digital social safety and privacy of Facebook users
Her most impressive achievement thus far has been to successfully lead the product development and launch of "Locked Profile", Facebook App's first ever private profile offering in emerging markets - to help millions of users feel safe and in control of their digital identity. Prior to this product being available, there were numerous reports of digital abuse and harassment that women in emerging markets faced on the internet. Facebook did not have a private profile offering which was hampering their emerging market user engagement on the platform.
Esha played a big part in championing the development and launch of 'Locked Profile' - a solution to this 'safety' concern and successfully obtained Facebook C-level buy-in and alignment on scaling it to 12+ emerging markets. When a user's profile was locked, all digital social content for that user could only be accessed by their trusted circle of Facebook friends, thereby preventing digital and physical harm from bad actors on the internet or the Facebook platform. As a result, this offering empowered users (especially women and citizens in high risk countries) to connect and engage with friends and family around the world while being protected from harm.
She led the team that launched the offering in India first (2020), and later led the effort to help refine the product offering by adding a suite of more comprehensive functionality and expanded privacy and safety protections to scale it to 12 other emerging markets. Most impressive among the accomplishments from her work was that it safeguarded the lives of millions of citizens in countries with sensitive geopolitical environments (Afghanistan after withdrawal of US troops, Ukraine military conflict and Myanmar coup). This functionality has resulted in the safety of millions of people across the globe, making it among the biggest privacy focused product launches since Facebook's inception.
Continuing to make a big dent in privacy and safety on digital communities
Currently at WhatsApp, Esha is driving WhatsApp Communities: one of the top initiatives in the entire WhatsApp org which has C-level daily visibility. Through WhatsApp communities, Esha continues to focus on building products that connect people through group and community messaging in a safe and private manner. She helped to launch a suite of new features that provided millions of admins more proactive control over who can join their groups to prevent bad actors and spammers from causing harm to the groups ecosystem. She also led her team to build a way to provide millions of group admins a way to moderate their group messages and prevent or get rid of large volumes of harmful content that can cause societal harm.
A recognized product leader in the industry
Given her significant contributions to the product management field in social products and privacy, she's a recognized product leader who has been invited to be a speaker, judge and coach across well reputed award organizations, companies and blogs. She has been recognized among 100 emerging women leaders by a leading tech media publication in India, and recently been awarded the Bronze Globee Award for Product Developer of the Year (non-executive category).
She is a guest speaker and coach at Product School and has also been invited on MindTheProduct's podcast. Both of these are the leading authorities for news and best practices in the digital product development and management industry and Esha's talks have been recognized among the top 10 talks in 2022.
In this constantly evolving technology landscape of generative AI, virtual reality and more to come, it's critical and encouraging to see that product leaders like Esha are committed to empowering users with appropriate controls needed to keep their digital experience safe and are championing for this to be an industry best practice.
