Aditya Pandya • Classic Portfolio

About Me

How do you scale products to serve millions without compromising quality? How do you meaningfully integrate AI to transform experiences?

Throughout my career, I've tackled these challenges head-on, building intuitive products that genuinely improve lives, whether simplifying how people plan their travels, streamlining hiring, or enabling better team collaboration.

My journey spans three countries and a singular mission: building products with genuine purpose. What drives me is the challenge of creating experiences so intuitive they feel invisible, yet powerful enough to transform how people work, connect, and thrive.

With experience leading teams across India, Japan, and the US, my approach to building products is deeply collaborative. I partner closely across engineering, design, and data science teams, aligning technical innovation with clear product vision and genuine customer needs.

Leadership, for me, is about creating environments where teams feel empowered to consistently outperform expectations. I invest in building clear frameworks that foster autonomy and creativity, allowing teams, large or small, to deliver impactful results.

Today, I advise forward-thinking companies to navigate strategic growth challenges, refine impactful product strategies, and build effective, empowered teams that drive results at scale.

Beyond work, I'm passionate about community-building. I founded totalBarça, a globally renowned community for FC Barcelona fans, with over 780,000 followers. What makes me proudest isn't the scale, but the impact, channeling all revenue to UNICEF in alignment with the club's philanthropic mission. This experience reinforced my belief that technology can bring people together across boundaries in meaningful ways and create positive societal impact.

Leadership Philosophy

My leadership approach is built on three core principles that have guided me across industries and challenges:

PRINCIPLE 01

Start With Purpose

Great products begin with clearly understanding and solving real human problems. I consistently emphasize clarity of purpose and deep customer insight. At Indeed, this meant questioning our "ease above all" approach when data showed it no longer served our job seekers and employers. At MakeMyTrip, it guided our mobile-first strategy that simplified trip planning for millions of travelers. This principle ensures we build what truly matters to customers.

PRINCIPLE 02

Empower Through Structure

I create environments that balance clear frameworks with autonomy, enabling teams to innovate and consistently achieve outstanding results. When scaling Indeed Apply from 5 to 150+ people across six countries, I implemented a "follow the sun" model with clear ownership boundaries. This balance between clarity and autonomy consistently unlocks extraordinary team performance and sustainable growth.

PRINCIPLE 03

Measure What Matters

I establish cultures driven by clear, outcome-focused metrics, ensuring teams deliver real customer and business value rather than just outputs. Whether introducing AI-powered job matching at Indeed or driving mobile growth at MakeMyTrip, I establish clear success metrics tied to customer and business impact. This approach ensures teams remain focused on outcomes rather than activity and delivers measurable results.

Transformative Achievements

01

Reinventing Marketplace Dynamics

At Indeed, I led a fundamental shift that transformed the company's flagship job application platform from a quantity-focused to a quality-centered marketplace, challenging a decade and a half of company orthodoxy around "ease above all else."

This vision required aligning over a dozen teams across six countries and reimagining the job seeking and hiring journey for tens of millions of job seekers and employers. The result was "Smart Apply," a tailored, guidance-driven job application process that drove a significant increase in hiring outcomes.

The impact was exceptional: Over a million more people found meaningful work annually, substantial business growth, and a complete shift in Indeed's product philosophy. By extending this platform to power job applications across Glassdoor, SimplyHired and partner sites, I established market leadership that created a sustainable competitive advantage in HR Tech.

02

Transforming Team Performance

My leadership approach consistently transforms team performance at every scale. I evolved Indeed Apply from a 5-person startup-like team into a thriving 150+ person organization across six countries, implementing a "follow the sun" model that enabled continuous innovation and drove 13x product growth.

When I inherited Indeed's Profile team, the foundation of the company's billion-dollar sourcing business, it was on the verge of a collapse. I executed a comprehensive turnaround by restructuring into focused pods, rebuilding leadership capabilities, and establishing frameworks that fostered both accountability and innovation.

Within 18 months, this once-struggling team became central to Indeed's marketplace strategy and a key driver of business growth. The true testament to my leadership approach is how well my teams performed after my departure, maintaining momentum and continuing to innovate independently.

03

AI Innovation & Partnerships

I drove Indeed's shift to AI-first user experiences, creating an intelligent content platform that collected hundreds of millions of qualifications and preferences every month to improve matching for tens of millions of job seekers. This transformed Indeed from a search-first job board to a recommendations-driven job marketplace, significantly improving satisfaction for both sides of the platform.

One of my most game-changing contributions was building the foundation for the AI-powered Indeed Profile. Instead of being just a static resume, Profile became a dynamic, intelligent job-seeking tool, allowing 350M+ job seekers to showcase their skills, preferences, and experience in a way that made hiring faster and smarter. My work on Profile helped Indeed transition to a true AI-powered job marketplace.

I also drove the first strategic integration between Indeed and Glassdoor, navigating complex stakeholder dynamics to align two sister companies with completely different priorities and cultures. This partnership not only strengthened both companies' market positions against competitors but also created a more unified experience for tens of millions of people.

04

Zero-to-One Product Creation

At MakeMyTrip, I spearheaded the creation of a mobile-first experience when India's smartphone adoption was rapidly accelerating. Starting with extensive customer research in emerging markets, we built a lightweight app optimized for slow internet connections and mid-tier devices. This resulted in overwhelmingly positive app store ratings, featured placements by Apple and Google, and nearly double year-over-year growth in shoppers.

At Indeed, I conceived and built the Interview Scheduling platform from scratch, taking it from concept to facilitating millions of interviews annually. By focusing on core customer needs, rapid validation cycles, and iterative improvement, I simplified the hiring process while significantly reducing time to hire, benefitting both sides of the marketplace.

I bring this product creation experience to my advisory work, helping early-stage founders define MVPs, find product-market fit, and build with capital efficiency, reducing time to market while focusing resources on features that directly accelerate customer acquisition and retention.

Start a Conversation

Throughout my career, I've helped businesses solve their most critical challenges:

Building and scaling products from zero to millions of people

Building high-performing teams across multiple continents

Creating experiences that drive customer satisfaction and growth

Implementing evidence-driven cultures that enable better decisions

If any of these align with your current goals or challenges, let's talk. The best collaborations start with a simple conversation.