Placement season
Everyone lines up for campus interviews. He doesn’t want to. Instead he sends hundreds of cold emails to founders, investors and CEOs, asking for advice and a chance.
One comes back with an internship.
Night over the Kochi backwaters, in the rain. A refinery flare burns past the container cranes, a Chinese fishing net and a lone canoe sit on the dark water, crows wait on the power lines, and a single bulb sways under a tea shop roof.
A Kochi mystery in five cases
The Rough Book Cases
The cases are dramatised from real work. The dialogue is invented. What actually happened, and everything in the case file, is real. Sound is off unless you turn it on.
The evidence board
Kochi, monsoon. Five cases from five years at Entri, in the order they happened. In each one, follow at least two leads, then make your deduction. As you go, his skills speak up: each line of dialogue is tagged with the skill talking. A case takes about a minute, and you can skip to the verdict whenever you like.
← BoardOff duty
The apartment
Switching the lamps on…
Move around. Click anything that catches your eye.
Kochi, after work
Look around
Click anything that catches your eye.
In the room
← BoardOrigin file
How it started
Three companies in a year
LeapFinance, in study-abroad fintech. Shiprocket, in e-commerce logistics. Then Entri, as a product intern. The first job came the same way as the first internship: by reaching out, with no interview.
Intern to Director
Product intern, product manager, senior product manager, Director of Product. One company, five years, and a product team he built from the ground up.
What’s the worst that can happen?
Still the first sentence in his head when he makes a decision.
The interview that didn’t land
He applied for Zomato’s Chief of Staff role out of curiosity, didn’t make the final cut, and called it one of the best interview experiences of his career. His post about it was picked up by national press.
The rough book
In school, every idea, sketch and joke went into a rough book. His public wiki is the grown-up version.
Case file
Sanjay Krishna
Director of Product, Entri · Kochi, Kerala
Five years at Entri, a vernacular edtech company in Kochi, from product intern to Director of Product. Builds AI learning products and growth systems for first-time internet users who learn in their own language, often on low-end Android phones. Works by looking under the metric: at what learners actually do, and at how the number is being measured.
Experience
Director of Product, Entri
Mar 2026 – present- Leads product across two pillars, Learning and Impact, and Growth and Monetization. Built Entri’s product team from the ground up.
- Owns creation rate and retention as the app’s two core metrics. Ran the funnel baseline that showed signup-to-lead, not acquisition, was the larger leak, and fixed the event and cohort definitions hiding it. Case 4
- Built the company’s experimentation system and is redesigning its cross-squad operating model: powering, variable isolation, and scaling wins beyond the squad that found them. Case 5
- Leads the Organic Growth squad across referral, reactivation and lifecycle programmes.
- Entri Jobs, built 0 to 1: a two-sided marketplace with recruiter and candidate workflows, and a preference-based matching experiment for placements.
Senior Product Manager, Entri
Jan 2024 – Mar 2026- Interview Coach, an AI mock interview product, with near-universal adoption among eligible learners and much stronger long-term retention. Case 3
- AI Video Copilot: turned static lectures into interactive video with AI summaries and an in-video doubt copilot. Showcased at Google Playtime and in an Android Developers case study. Case 2
- Shipped an AI teacher assistant, and AI evaluation and assessment features, including the production loop that scores model output quality.
- Built a behavioural lead scoring engine: defined the behavioural features, ranked users by conversion propensity, and evaluated it against downstream conversion rather than offline accuracy.
- Ran retention and cohort analysis across payment plans, community chat and course categories, and fed the findings into monetisation and roadmap decisions.
Product Manager, Entri
Aug 2021 – Jan 2024- Reworked signup, onboarding and category selection for new skilling verticals, lifting signups and activation. Designed the product structure for skilling courses, later carried into Elevate, Entri’s cohort model for live classes. Case 1
- Shipped a vernacular AI learning assistant for first-time internet users on low-end Android devices.
Product Intern, Entri
Mar 2021 – Jul 2021- Earlier: Shiprocket, e-commerce logistics (Oct – Dec 2020). LeapFinance, study-abroad fintech (Jul – Oct 2020).
Projects
- Recommend me something: a page where anyone can send him a film, book or article to try, at recs.sjaykh.in.
Writing
- Entri’s Adventures in AI: Trials, Errors, Lessons (The Entri Blueprint, 2024)
- The Product Leader’s Guide to AI-Powered Documentation Reviews (The Entri Blueprint, 2024)
- How the product team at Entri approaches speed vs quality (The Entri Blueprint, 2023)
- What is the worst that can happen? and Whatever happened to that kid? (2026)
Skills
- How he works: pattern recognition, first-principles thinking, user empathy, data rigour, and a bias to action.
- Analytics and experimentation: SQL, Mixpanel, Metabase, funnel instrumentation, event and metric definition, A/B test design and powering, variable isolation, cohort and retention analysis.
- Growth and lifecycle: activation, conversion, referral, reactivation, notification and lifecycle campaigns, lead scoring and lead quality.
- AI products: LLM product design, evaluation and assessment loops, building for vernacular, low-bandwidth users.
Education
- B.Tech, Computer Science and Engineering, APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University, 2017 – 2021