Senior Product Manager – ShuruKar | The Bharat Project

Build a product that helps Bharat start up.

There are millions of aspiring entrepreneurs across Tier 2, Tier 3 and rural India with the ambition to build something of their own.

What They Often Don't Have Is Access To The Right Mentor, The Right Information, The Right Network, Or Simply Someone Who Can Tell Them

“You have an idea. Hereʼs what you should do next.”

That is what we are building with ShuruKar.

ShuruKar is YourStoryʼs AI-powered entrepreneurship platform under The Bharat Project designed to become a digital co-pilot for aspiring and early stage entrepreneurs across India.

From helping someone validate their first business idea to discovering government schemes, understanding their market, creating a pitch, finding mentorship and taking the first steps towards building, ShuruKar is being built for the entrepreneur who may never have had access to a startup ecosystem before.

And weʼre looking for a Senior Product Manager to help build it.

About The Bharat Project

The Bharat Project is YourStoryʼs mission to enable 1 million entrepreneurs across Tier 2, Tier 3, and rural India.

We work at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, storytelling and grassroots ecosystems partnering with governments, institutions, universities, incubators and communities across India.

Through initiatives spanning idea discovery, AI-led mentorship, skilling, funding access, market linkages and storytelling, we want to make entrepreneurship more accessible to anyone with the ambition to build.

ShuruKar is the technology layer powering that mission.

About The Role

As Senior Product Manager – ShuruKar, you won't inherit a mature product with a neatly defined roadmap.

You'll help build one.

You will own critical parts of ShuruKar's journey, understanding entrepreneurs on the ground, identifying their biggest problems, translating those problems into product experiences, shipping quickly, measuring behaviour, and continuously improving the product.

You'll work across AI, product, growth, content and community to build experiences for a very different kind of internet user often mobile-first, vernacular-first and interacting with entrepreneurship for the first time.

This is a 0→1 + 1→10 product role with significant ownership.

What You'll Build

ShuruKar AI Co-Pilot

Build a personalised AI mentor that understands where an entrepreneur is in their journey and helps them figure out what to do next from idea to execution.

Not another chatbot.

A product that can genuinely become an entrepreneur's 24x7 digital guide.

Idea → Business Journey

Design Experiences That Help Users Move From

“Mere paas ek idea hai” → “Mujhe pata hai ab kya karna hai.”

Think idea validation, market research, business planning, MVP guidance, pricing, pitch creation and actionable next steps.

Access to Opportunities

Make hundreds of government schemes, grants, mentorship programs, funding opportunities and ecosystem resources actually discoverable and useful for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship at Bharat Scale

Build for users beyond India's startup bubbles.

That means thinking deeply about WhatsApp, vernacular experiences, voice, low-friction onboarding, trust, assisted journeys, and AI interfaces that work for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

What You'll Own

Product Strategy & Roadmap: Define what we build, why we build it and what success looks like for ShuruKar. User Discovery: Spend time with aspiring entrepreneurs, founders, students and ecosystem partners to understand real problems rather than relying only on dashboards. 0→1 Product Development: Take ideas from messy problem statements to prototypes, MVPs and shipped products. AI Product Experiences: Work closely with engineering and AI teams to design useful, contextual and trustworthy AI-led journeys. Product Growth: Own activation, engagement and retention loops. Shipping is only half the job getting people to repeatedly derive value is the other half. Experimentation: Run fast experiments across onboarding, AI interactions, content, notifications, WhatsApp and product journeys. Data & Insights: Define funnels and product metrics, identify drop-offs and turn behaviour into product decisions. Cross-functional Execution: Work across engineering, design, content, growth, editorial, partnerships and Bharat Project teams to take products from idea to market. Field → Product Feedback Loop: Translate insights coming from Bharat Project programs, state chapters and grassroots activations into scalable technology.

What We're Looking For

You probably have 5 to 8 years of product experience, with meaningful experience owning consumer or platform products end-to-end.

But years alone aren't what we're hiring for.

We're Looking For Someone Who

Has built and shipped products rather than only managed roadmaps. Is comfortable operating with ambiguity and creating structure where none exists. Thinks deeply about users, funnels, behaviour and product metrics. Can move comfortably between strategy, UX conversations, data and execution. Has strong product intuition but is willing to kill their own hypothesis when the data says otherwise. Understands experimentation, activation, engagement and retention. Can work closely with engineers and designers without turning product management into ticket management. Is genuinely curious about AI-native products and conversational interfaces. Wants to build for users outside the traditional English-speaking, metro startup ecosystem.

Experience with consumer internet, AI products, fintech, edtech, marketplaces, vernacular products or products built for India's next 500 million users would be especially relevant.

Why Join Us?

Build for a million entrepreneurs

Your work won't just optimise another funnel. The ambition is to help create and enable 1 million entrepreneurs across Bharat.

Build AI for the real world

Explore what AI looks like when designed for first-time entrepreneurs, vernacular users and people outside traditional startup ecosystems.

Founder-like ownership

You'll have significant freedom to shape the product, roadmap, experiments and eventually the larger ShuruKar ecosystem.

Access to India's entrepreneurial ecosystem

YourStory sits at the intersection of founders, investors, governments, institutions and emerging startup communities across the country.

See your users in the real world

The Bharat Project operates across states, colleges, communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems giving you something most product teams don't have:

A direct line between the people you're building for and the product you're building.

The Mandate Is Simple.

Can we use technology and AI to make starting a business easier for anyone in India?

If that's the kind of product problem you want to spend the next few years solving, we'd love to hear from you.

Send us your profile along with one product you've built that you're genuinely proud of and tell us why.

Skills: ai,ux design,data analysis