SHAILESH BHARDWAJ

Senior Product Leader with 16+ years of experience building and scaling enterprise and platform products in highly regulated environments (audit, compliance, quality). Proven track record leading 0→1 and 1→scale initiatives for mission-critical global workflow platforms, modernizing legacy ecosystems into standardized, governable capabilities that drive adoption, release confidence, data quality, and practitioner efficiency. Known for outcome-based strategy, continuous discovery, and empowering cross-functional teams to improve flow from concept to value.

Additional Focus: Platform Products | Bridgeway Accelerators | AI-Enabled Workflow Automation

• Designed and operationalized the Innovation & Talent Hub (ITH), a product transformation engine to shift teams from traditional delivery to modern product and engineering ways of working, establishing shared habits and execution consistency.
• Coached 100+ practitioners as an ITH Product Coach across 10+ teams, and coached 100+ additional practitioners through bootcamps spanning 8 teams to accelerate adoption of new ways of working.
• Championed a Train-the-Trainer model to scale coaching capacity and sustain transformation beyond a small set of coaches.
• Co-created and launched a hackathon-based, work-sample hiring program, improving candidate signal beyond traditional interviews; delivered 9 hires from ~80 participants across 3 events.

• Product Charter Agent (Concept & Discovery): Led discovery and experimentation on AI agents to generate and evolve product charters for brownfield products, improving efficiency and context retention when using AI enablement tools.
• External Communication Review Agent: Product Manager for an AI-driven governance system to transform authoring, review, and approval of external communications. Target outcomes include ~30% reduction in review cycle time, ~20% improvement in first-pass compliance, and ~30% capacity release for reviewers through intelligent insights, automation, and risk-based decisioning.
• In-Sprint Automation Agent: Product Manager for an AI-powered in-sprint automation accelerator generating Playwright scaffolding (feature files, step definitions, POMs) using story context and RAG inputs, lowering first-time automation barriers and increasing sprint-level automation coverage.

• Scaled a mission-critical audit workflow platform serving ~80K practitioners across 150+ countries, driving 70%+ active usage globally and ~95% adoption in U.S. Member Firm practices.
• Delivered portfolio setup accelerators (rollforward, engagement cloning, bulk upload), reducing annual setup and administrative effort by ~38–40%, validated through time-on-task sampling, WBS aggregation, and journey analytics.
• Modernized PCAOB Form AP workflows (including amendments digitization), achieving 100% reconciliation of filings and reducing offline filing volume by ~2x.
• Improved quality and release readiness, increasing regression automation from ~20% to ~60% and reducing release validation cycle time by ~30%.
• Built and scaled 3 India-based empowered pods within a 6-pod global model, delivering ~50% of released epic scope while improving predictability and release confidence.
• Drove AI productivity enablement to 100% GitHub Copilot adoption through targeted enablement, adoption measurement, and feedback loops.

• $3M+ product portfolio ownership
• 6 cross-functional teams / pods (~80 engineers; ~100 total contributors)
• Platforms serving ~80K practitioners globally across 150+ countries, including ~8K in U.S. Member Firms

• Designed and operationalized the Innovation & Talent Hub (ITH), a product transformation engine to shift teams from traditional delivery to modern product and engineering ways of working, establishing shared habits and execution consistency.
• Coached 100+ practitioners as an ITH Product Coach across 10+ teams, and coached 100+ additional practitioners through bootcamps spanning 8 teams to accelerate adoption of new ways of working.
• Championed a Train-the-Trainer model to scale coaching capacity and sustain transformation beyond a small set of coaches.
• Co-created and launched a hackathon-based, work-sample hiring program, improving candidate signal beyond traditional interviews; delivered 9 hires from ~80 participants across 3 events.

• Product Charter Agent (Concept & Discovery): Led discovery and experimentation on AI agents to generate and evolve product charters for brownfield products, improving efficiency and context retention when using AI enablement tools.
• External Communication Review Agent: Product Manager for an AI-driven governance system to transform authoring, review, and approval of external communications. Target outcomes include ~30% reduction in review cycle time, ~20% improvement in first-pass compliance, and ~30% capacity release for reviewers through intelligent insights, automation, and risk-based decisioning.
• In-Sprint Automation Agent: Product Manager for an AI-powered in-sprint automation accelerator generating Playwright scaffolding (feature files, step definitions, POMs) using story context and RAG inputs, lowering first-time automation barriers and increasing sprint-level automation coverage.

• Scaled a mission-critical audit workflow platform serving ~80K practitioners across 150+ countries, driving 70%+ active usage globally and ~95% adoption in U.S. Member Firm practices.
• Delivered portfolio setup accelerators (rollforward, engagement cloning, bulk upload), reducing annual setup and administrative effort by ~38–40%, validated through time-on-task sampling, WBS aggregation, and journey analytics.
• Modernized PCAOB Form AP workflows (including amendments digitization), achieving 100% reconciliation of filings and reducing offline filing volume by ~2x.
• Improved quality and release readiness, increasing regression automation from ~20% to ~60% and reducing release validation cycle time by ~30%.
• Built and scaled 3 India-based empowered pods within a 6-pod global model, delivering ~50% of released epic scope while improving predictability and release confidence.
• Drove AI productivity enablement to 100% GitHub Copilot adoption through targeted enablement, adoption measurement, and feedback loops.

• $3.5 M+ product portfolio
• 6 cross-functional teams / pods (~80 engineers; ~100 total contributors)
• Platforms serving ~80K practitioners globally across 150+ countries, including ~8K in U.S. Member Firms