Kevin Thakkar
Principal Product Manager | AdTech & AI | Builder
Product leader with 13 years building AI-driven advertising platforms and 0→1 products. Now exploring technology, investing, and building new things.
About
I'm a product leader specializing in 0→1 growth initiatives and AI/ML-powered products. Over the past 13 years, I've built products at scale for companies like Cash App, Adobe/TubeMogul, and Liftoff/Vungle.
I specialize in taking products from zero to one—spotting growth opportunities, validating them quickly, and building the AI/ML-powered systems that scale them. I lead with data: every roadmap decision traces back to a metric, and every launch is instrumented before it ships. Whether I'm setting strategy for a team of PMs, negotiating architecture trade-offs with engineering, or getting hands-on with a model or API integration myself, I bring the same rigor—structured, quantitative, and comfortable operating in ambiguity.
Today, as Fractional Head of Product at K3 Consulting, I'm focused on building agentic AI systems that automate customer workflows—and the eval frameworks needed to validate their output and earn trust in them. This site is a space to share what I'm learning and explore new ideas through building.
Experience
Fractional Head of Product
2023 - Present
K3 Consulting
- Embedded fractional product leadership for growth-stage and enterprise teams
- Build production AI agents and LLM eval infrastructure to ship gen AI features without quality drift
Product Lead, Growth
2022
Cash App (Block Inc.)
- Grew Cash App's retail media line by 1.65M active users and $45M quarterly gross profit
- Managed a 12-vendor identity, CDP, and attribution stack under CCPA/GDPR compliance
Director of Product Management
2019 - 2021
Liftoff (formerly Vungle)
- Held 95% ROAS through an industry-wide collapse of deterministic identity
- Led 8 PMs across bidding, attribution, and measurement supporting $750M+ in revenue
Head of Product
2016 - 2018
Chocolate Platform Inc.
- Launched a new 0→1 publisher product that grew to $23M+ in revenue within its first year
- Grew SSP exchange revenue 40% via The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and MediaMath demand
Senior Product Manager, BrandPoint CTV
2013 - 2016
Adobe (formerly TubeMogul)
- Grew BrandPoint, a 0→1 CTV programmatic product, to $60M+ in annual ad spend
- Named inventor on a U.S. real-time bidding patent
Education & Credentials
- MBA - Entrepreneurship, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
- B.S. - Mathematics/Economics (Computing), UCLA
- AI in Product Management - Duke University
Writing & Musings
Thoughts on technology, investing, and parenting.
Ad Tech vs Non Ad Tech Product Management
TechnologyExploring the key differences between managing products in ad tech versus other industries.
Read more →Unleashing Potential: Continuous Learning - Part I
LeadershipHow continuous learning drives product team success and individual growth.
Read more →Unleashing Potential: Continuous Learning - Part II
LeadershipContinuing the exploration of building high-performing teams through learning culture.
Read more →Projects
Building in public. Exploring ideas through code.
Daily Digest - AI Content Curator
CompleteAI-powered personal assistant that scans Gmail daily, categorizes newsletters and content into 6 topics (AdTech, Fintech, Investing, Parenting, Mental Health, Product Management), and delivers a curated digest with summaries and key insights. Automated to run every morning.
Brokerage API Integration & ETL Reporting Dashboard
CompleteA logging and analytics pipeline for options trading. Extracts trade data via a major brokerage's API, transforms it into structured reporting on realized P&L, strategy classification, and complex multi-leg roll sequences, then feeds a dashboard that benchmarks performance against daily/monthly/yearly goals, calculates return on capital, and surfaces trends to drive better trading decisions.
Kids Rewards App
In ProgressA React Native app that replaces nagging with a points-and-rewards loop kids actually respond to. Parent Mode manages tasks, rewards, and redemption approvals; Kid View is a big-type, read-only celebration screen gated behind a PIN. Points land the instant a task is tapped, with local persistence and a passing test suite — no backend yet, Firebase sync is next on the roadmap.
Try the clickable prototype →