# Rishi Bhilawadikar > Product Designer, Leader and Builder | AI Product Strategy, Retail & Content Platforms| Unblocking Revenue & Velocity | Adobe, ex-Amazon, Gap Inc, Walmart, SAP Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/rishibhilawadikar I diagnose product problems that block revenue growth and operational scale, with 18+ years leading product strategy, product management, and UX strategy for content platforms and e-commerce systems. I blend a business owner’s risk lens, a senior product manager’s strategic rigor, and a designer’s empathy to de-risk business decisions, improve customer experience, and unlock product velocity across enterprise and B2B SaaS workflows.​ Open to hybrid senior or principal product manager or designer roles (including contract-to-hire), as well as interim product leadership and short-term strategy engagements in content platforms, retail and e-commerce, workflow automation, and internal tools. Founders and executives tend to bring me in when product complexity, execution churn, or systemic trust and adoption gaps are slowing growth and they need a product leader who can diagnose, design, and deliver a clear path forward. At Adobe Express, I owned AI-driven submission workflows and internal tools that shifted brand metadata compliance from manual to AI-governed systems, reducing errors, improving guideline compliance, and accelerating content velocity in revenue-driving content categories.​ Across my tech career, I’ve operated at the intersection of enterprise platforms, complex system behaviors, and gnarly business workflows, using product discovery, and data-informed decision making to ship products that resolve adoption and growth challenges, reduce enterprise renewal risk, bridge customer trust gaps, and increase throughput for internal teams. My work spans content operations, workflow automation, internal tools, and search and browse optimization in large-scale environments.​ My strengths are in translating leadership vision into coherent product strategy, diagnosing ambiguous problem spaces and organizational structures, and synthesizing conflicting inputs into clear product roadmaps that teams can execute without churn. I’m passionate about business impact, eliminating missteps, and creating momentum; I applied the same skills to a zero-to-one feature film, owning end-to-end “product” delivery from concept and funding through distribution on Netflix and major U.S. theaters.​ ## Work Experience ### Senior Product Lead (Product Design) @ Adobe Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area I owned Adobe Express’ end-to-end content pipeline workflows and internal tools with a mandate to scale content velocity. I delivered AI-driven business workflow enhancements, content quality and curation systems that reduced metadata errors, improved guideline compliance, and accelerated time-to-publish across Express’ contributor ecosystem. Worked across engineering, content operations, design, and moderation teams spanning US and India. Shipped systems used by thousands of contributors submitting templates every week. 1. AI-Infused Submission Workflow Devised a prompt-based auto-suggest which generated brand-compliant keyword suggestions at submission time; created the prompts, ran feasibility tests, and influenced leadership to adopt the approach. Implementation of this auto-suggest reduced submission errors by ~80% and compressed moderation timelines by ~50%. Extended the same insight into Autometa, a RAG prototype that auto-fills all metadata fields using brand rules, enabling consistent quality at scale without adding moderation load demonstrating a scalable path for multiple Adobe brands 2. Template Quality Checker Envisioned this content submission tool as a “Grammarly for visual creations”; developed competitive insights, utilized past UX research insights, scoped phased delivery, and prototyped prioritized quality checks Launched pilot in Q4 2024 with GA in Q3 2025, improving upstream submission quality and reducing moderation cycles. 3. Collection Curation Tool (Internal Ops) Conducted discovery, mapped workflows, created prototypes for complex nested row patterns and validated feasibility with curators and partner teams. Tool shipped within 3 quarters, accelerating curation cycles without increasing headcount. Strategic Impact Improved core throughput drivers across submission, moderation, and curation, directly increasing overall content velocity, boosted downstream content discovery (e.g., search CTR ~2X) ### Senior Product Lead (Product Design) @ Adobe Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Senior Product Lead (Product Design) @ Adobe Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area I owned the SMB growth track for Adobe Stock, covering checkout, renewal, and retention levers. Within this charter, I delivered a marquee multi-asset engagement initiative that surfaced adjacent-category value and drove a 10X CTR lift and 61% growth in multi-asset downloads, significantly improving downstream retention. Partnered across GTM, product, engineering, and UX research teams. 1. Multi-Asset Engagement - I improved Adobe Stock’s video asset engagement for photo plan subscribers. - Diagnosed that customers ignored multi-asset value messaging because it appeared as an upsell in wrong moment; - Legacy UI surface allowed for a single messaging slot that customers skipped - I conducted product discovery and prototyped the value message as a next-best-action in underserved journey moments on surfaces where customers were already paying attention such as download confirmations - Shipped a reusable cross-category discovery pattern delivering the 10× CTR and 61% multi-asset download lift. Impact - Shifted GTM and product toward behavior-based engagement and away from static awareness-only surfaces - Supported downstream revenue goals by enabling customers to realize more value from their subscriptions Improved checkout clarity and upsell patterns across the SMB and retail tracks, providing a foundation that Adobe later extended to GenAI offerings in 2024 ### Senior Product Designer (Shopping Experience) @ Amazon Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area I led multimodal shopping experiences for the Alexa Shopping organization with a mandate to validate whether Echo screen devices could serve as viable top-of-funnel shopping channels. I built research-backed shopping frameworks and launched smart-home and gifting shopping betas that reached ~2M MAU across the US, UK, and Germany. - Discovered and abstracted customer journey archetypes for high-traffic categories. Eg: Smart home devices = “I don’t understand how this fits my home or solves a need”, Gifting = “I need something great right now but don’t know what’s appropriate”, Appliances = “I need functional, technical certainty before I buy” - Built guided shopping forward experiences under constraint that conversational flows on Echo devices weren’t designed for deep product exploration. - Created voice prototypes with guided “Q&A-based” decision flows that spotlighted the exact information modality customers needed at the right step. - Drove ~2M MAU across US/UK/DE during beta and validated Echo screen devices as a promising top-of-funnel shopping channel. Introduced the decision-archetype model (exploratory, urgency-driven, technical assurance) that now informs Amazon’s AI shopping workflows. Q&A patterns developed in my pod became the building blocks for Rufus, Amazon’s current AI product advisor. Example: • Smart home → exploratory starter questions (“What do other customers say?”) • Gifting → constraint-based prompts (“Will it fit?”, “Is this good for a 10-year-old?”) • Appliances → ownership-oriented filters (“How often do I replace filters?”) ### Head of Product and Design (Payments & Lending) @ Qwil Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area I led product discovery and redesigned Qwil’s core experience to focus on a tightly defined bullseye audience, shifting the product from a broad early-pay tool serving fragmented audiences to a targeted value proposition aligned with real customer motivations. By simplifying key workflows, and redefining the product's target B2B user, I helped Qwill sharpen its strategic narrative which contributed directly to the company’s eventual acquisition. I worked directly with the CEO and CPO to align product decisions. ### Principal Product Strategist (UX Lead) @ Gap Inc. Jan 2012 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco I drove product strategy and user experience across Gap Inc.’s digital commerce ecosystem including browse, cart, checkout, loyalty, omni-channel flows, integration of new acquisitions (Intermix), launching of international franchises and in-store technology for five global apparel brands. My work supported Gap’s annual digital-growth targets and delivered several enterprise-scale initiatives that unlocked revenue, reduced operating costs, and modernized the customer journey across channels. Impact Highlights - Delivered Gap Inc.’s first mobile-first responsive web experience across all brands, saving $1.5M in platform costs. - Led the launch of apparel retail’s first “Try Before You Buy” omni-channel program, catalyzing ~$500M in growth. - Piloted and rolled out on-device in-store checkout nationwide, reducing POS bottlenecks and improving store conversion. - Contributed to loyalty program design and sign-up flows that helped reach 25M+ loyalty members by 2021. ### Senior User Experience Designer @ Gap Inc. Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Founder, Producer, Product Owner- For Here or To Go? (Feature Film) @ Many Cups of Chai Jan 2011 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Wrote, produced and released "For Here or To Go?" feature film available on NetflixI built a multi-year 0→1 product; from story to capital raise to distribution because the U.S. legal immigrant quality of life crisis needed cultural visibility, which led to a Netflix sale, two Congressional screenings, three Indian consulate screenings, world wide press coverage and an Extraordinary Ability visa. ### Senior Information Architect @ Walmart Global eCommerce Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | South San Francisco I redesigned Walmart.ca and SamsClub.com’s search and browse experiences because findability and conversion were underperforming, which led to improved navigation, discovery, and checkout performance ### Product Designer @ SAP Labs Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 I built prototypes and workflows for SAP’s mobile, CRM cloud, and developer tools because enterprise customers needed modernized workflows, which led to validated concepts adopted by engineering teams ## Education ### Masters in Interactive Media Design Indiana University Bloomington Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 ### BE in Computer Engineering University of Mumbai Jan 2001 – Jan 2005 ### Georgia Institute of Technology ### naval public school ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rishi-bhilawadikar --- Source: https://flows.cv/rishibhilawadikar JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/rishibhilawadikar/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-30