AI-Native Product Leader

Mittul Desai

I build with AI, not just about it.

B2B Fintech & SaaS · Lending, Cards, Spend & Benefits · Mumbai, India

Mittul Desai

About

Product leader with 9+ years in regulated fintech and B2B SaaS — cards, lending, insurance, payroll, spend — across India and Saudi Arabia.

I'm currently Product Leader & GM at Jisr, running a six-product 0→1 portfolio and shipping AI into production finance workflows — including a system that ingests a customer's policy PDF and compiles it into executable rules and an org-graph-derived approval workflow, with zero implementation config.

Previously I scaled RazorpayX Corporate Cards to 10K+ businesses and ₹100Cr+ monthly spend, launched Loan Against Mutual Funds at Jio Finance to ₹500Cr+ in 9 months, and led product at Leena AI, one of India's first conversational-AI HR platforms.

M.Tech CS (Data Science) from IIT Hyderabad, with a graph-ML thesis. I'm a context chaser and nuance seeker — fond of reading, writing, music, and design.

AI-Native Track Record

Building with AI, in production

Policy-as-a-PDF → a live rules engine

Built Jisr's zero-config onboarding: the customer uploads their existing expense policy document, an LLM parses it into executable spend rules, and the approval workflow is generated automatically from the employee graph — collapsing an implementation-consultant engagement into a single upload.

AI in production, in a regulated domain

Shipped receipt OCR and the spend control engine — automating capture, policy checks and approval routing inside a payroll system where errors are audit findings, not bugs.

Conversational AI before it was a category

Head of Product at Leena AI (2018–20), an NLP platform for enterprise HR; 300% quarterly revenue growth from an engagement product built on the bot.

An AI-augmented operating model

Discovery, competitive research, spec drafting and analytics run through LLM agents — Claude Code, MCP servers, local models, n8n/Composio — as the team's default, not a side experiment.

Depth to judge the claims, and the limits

M.Tech CS (Data Science) with a graph-ML thesis. A regulated background (RBI cards & digital lending, SAMA, WPS) means AI proposals get scoped against explainability, audit trail and consent up front.

Experience

Where I've built

Jisr

Aug 2024 – Present

Product Leader & GM

Saudi Arabia's leading HR and payroll platform — thousands of businesses, digitized workforce, payroll and embedded financial services.

  • Lead six zero-to-one products across HR tech and embedded fintech — Cards, Travel, Expense, Insurance Broking, Payroll Wallet, Earned Wage Access — across teams in four countries; drove a 20% lift in product attach rate.
  • Conceived and shipped AI policy ingestion: customers upload their existing expense-policy PDF and the system parses it into a complete executable rule set, then derives the approval workflow from the employee graph — eliminating the manual configuration that gated every enterprise onboarding.
  • Shipped AI-powered receipt OCR and the spend control engine, closing the loop from capture through policy enforcement to payroll-integrated reimbursement.
  • Piloting LLM policy reviewers and MCP-driven internal agents in the product org's own workflow, compressing research and spec cycles.
  • Built the cross-functional team from scratch — 14 people (3 PMs, 3 designers, 8 engineers) — and implemented portfolio OKRs, accelerating time-to-market 30%.
  • Led GTM for payroll wallet and insurance — 15,000+ flights booked, SAR 10M+ annualized GWP pipeline; secured bank, card-issuer and insurer partnerships for co-branded enterprise programs.
  • Shaped company-wide regulatory positioning — WPS, Insurance Aggregation License, EMI license, SAMA wallet limits, digital salary disbursement.

Jio Financial Services

Aug 2023 – Aug 2024

Product Head

Reliance group's financial services arm — payments, lending, insurance and bank accounts for Bharat.

  • Owned digital lending at Jio Finance, the NBFC arm — building consumer and vendor credit on the group's distribution and brand.
  • Launched Loan Against Mutual Funds with a first-in-market end-to-end digital journey, scaling to ₹500Cr+ in 9 months.
  • Launched Loan Against Property and Home Loan — ₹400Cr+ book within 6 months; and Business Loans from scratch for ecosystem vendors.
  • Drove underwriting, KYC and journey design against RBI digital-lending rules — deciding where automated decisioning is defensible and where a human stays in the loop.

Razorpay

Feb 2020 – Aug 2023

Associate Director, Product

India's first full-stack financial solutions company; RazorpayX Capital is its lending and corporate-spend business unit.

  • Scaled RazorpayX Corporate Cards from zero to 10,000+ businesses and ₹100Cr+ monthly spend, with 10x growth two years running on both spend and customer base.
  • Led the strategy to win SME and startup segments, which became 70% of the customer base.
  • Promoted to lead product for the Capital business unit — Corporate Cards, Lending, Instant Settlement — mentoring the PM org across corporate banking.
  • Operated across the RBI perimeter (cards, digital lending, PPI/PA-PG) with risk, compliance and banking partners.

Leena AI

Dec 2018 – Feb 2020

Head of Product

Conversational AI for enterprise HR — a single NLP interface across fragmented HR systems.

  • 300% quarterly revenue growth from a new employee-engagement product line built on the core chatbot — bot-driven eNPS, sentiment analytics, leadership-facing workforce insights.
  • Cut deployment from 45 to 25 days via automation and process redesign, lifting deal conversion 35%; grew WAU 28% with new bot capabilities.
  • Led a dashboard and bot-interface revamp — +30 NPS; shipped the Leena AI iOS app. Managed 2 PMs and 3 designers, reporting to the founder.

Happay

May 2017 – Dec 2018

Product Manager

Travel & expense management SaaS for Indian SMEs and enterprises.

  • Spearheaded the Analytics Module — self-serve spend, policy-violation and category insight for finance teams — and stood up internal product analytics, surfacing friction that drove a platform-wide navigation redesign.
  • Re-architected sprint planning for +12% engineering productivity.

Evangelysis (Uncvr)

2015 – 2017

Cofounder & CEO

Live-performance analytics helping music venues align programming with audience demand.

  • Ran founder-led research across venues and programmers, shipped the MVP, and closed the first 15 paying venues.

Testimonials

What people say

“The thing that will strike you about Mittul's product thinking is his uncanny ability of (un)black-boxing things — he can think from a 30,000-foot level as well as at a microscopic level of detail. During one discussion he went from his vision for independent music to the minute details of an algorithm that can potentially change how music recommendations work. I highly recommend Mittul, especially in the realm of Product Management.”
Siddharth SrivastavCo-founder, PlatoLinkedIn recommendation
“It's grateful to work with a manager who is also a mentor to you. Mittul has always been a mentor to us and it's been a great learning curve working with him. He is communicative, listens to your ideas and ornaments them, which makes for a better idea. Working with him is learning a new thing every day.”
Shrishti SharmaProduct Analyst, HappayLinkedIn recommendation
“He's very enthusiastic, energetic and utilizes logical solutions that can be practically implemented. I would recommend him for product ideation, business planning and business development projects.”
Anand ChauhanFounder / Director, Gormetious FoodsLinkedIn recommendation

Education

Foundations

Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad

2014 – 2016

M.Tech, Computer Science (Data Science)

Thesis: COMBINED — Community Mining by Integrating Node and Edge Data; community detection on attributed-edge graphs via line-graph transforms. Head, Placement Cell · Head, Astronomy Club (Cepheid).

Gujarat Technological University

2008 – 2012

B.E., Computer Science & Engineering

Head, Placement Cell · Vice Chair, IEEE and CSI Student Chapters.

Skills

What I work with

AI & ML

  • LLM-native product design
  • Document AI / OCR pipelines
  • Conversational AI & NLP
  • Agentic workflows & MCP servers
  • Prompt engineering
  • Eval design & model selection
  • Local LLM deployment
  • Graph ML
  • Claude Code, n8n, Composio

Product

  • 0→1 strategy & launches
  • Portfolio management
  • B2B SaaS
  • Roadmap & prioritization
  • Customer discovery
  • Competitive research
  • OKRs
  • GTM & pricing

Fintech

  • Corporate cards
  • Digital lending, secured & unsecured
  • Insurance broking & aggregation
  • Payroll and wallets
  • Spend management & T&E
  • RBI (cards, digital lending, PPI/PA-PG), SAMA, WPS

Technical & Leadership

  • SQL
  • Product analytics
  • A/B experimentation
  • API design
  • Cross-functional leadership across four countries
  • Hiring & team design
  • Bank, issuer and insurer partnerships