# Taher Poonawala > Building @HappyRobot Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/taher ## Work Experience ### Senior Forward Deployed Engineer @ HappyRobot Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Forward Deployed Engineer @ HappyRobot Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area Building the the future of AI agents ### Product Management Specialist @ Cisco Jan 2023 – Present | San Jose, California, United States • Product Manager in the Customer Experience Organization at Cisco • Owned end-to-end product development for Cisco travel tool to be used by 30K+ employees, conducted user interviews, identified business and technical requirements • Led discussions with GTM & product teams and customers across America and Europe to resolve usability gaps in new service offering, carried out root cause analysis, developed closed loop case resolution process and created internal and external marketing material leading to 90% improvement in case resolution time • Facilitated seamless collaboration across 10+ PMs to drive the competitive analysis of embedded support offerings across all Cisco product architectures, thus developing unique product positioning strategy and enriching product features • Worked across legal, product, sales and operations teams at Cisco to simplify 12 policy & process bottlenecks that spanned 500+ deals and $250M in bookings leading to improved efficiency, collaboration between teams and customer satisfaction ### Engineering Program Manager @ Apple Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Cupertino, California, United States • EPM intern in Apple’s Hardware Technologies Division, Battery New Product Introduction (NPI) • Manage communication and collaboration across the entire internal and external cross functional teams maintaining Apple’s aggressive standards in quality, innovation, time to market, cost, and volume • Lead program activities to meet the overall program objectives focusing on improving efficiency and quality and meeting build targets, engineering/marketing release schedules • Manage, maintain, and update schedules of project releases at the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) to prepare for mass production, while leveraging engineering resources in Cupertino • Oversee changes in OEM factories required to support design changes, quality improvement initiatives, yield requirements ### Product Manager @ Anthro Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 • First employee at Anthro Energy, a battery startup developing next generation flexible batteries • Developed a comprehensive go-to-market strategy highlighting growth opportunities, potential markets, and entry barriers leading to funding by the Department of Defense • Created initial marketing material and worked on business development, customer interviews and developing relationships with inital cohort of customers • Set up communications with raw materials suppliers from China thereby securing channel for raw material procurement and reached out to contract manufacturing partners to enable the successful pilot scale manufacturing ### Trainee @ KPMG India Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Mumbai, Maharashtra • Carried out market research by identifying the key drivers, major players and analyzing the important trends pertaining to the Insurance Technology industry in India, and prepared an investor presentation for the client • Provided a detailed report of the Nepal Banking Sector, including the major players and avenues for growth for a client looking to foray into that particular sector • Carried out primary market research on the pervasiveness of OTT platforms in India ### Deputy Coordinator @ Saarang Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Chennai, Tamil Nadu ### Associate Manager @ E-Cell IIT Madras Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Chennai, Tamil Nadu Developed and deployed an online PR and brand awareness campaign for the Entrepreneurship Summit at IIT Madras ## Education ### Master of Science - MS in MSE Stanford University ### Bachelor of Technology - BTech in Materials Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Madras ### ICSE The Bombay International School ### Pre-University Education PACE Junior Science College ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/taher-poonawala --- Source: https://flows.cv/taher JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/taher/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01