About Me
Eight years building the operating system for restaurants at scale.
I'm Sandeep — Senior PM at Petpooja, India's largest restaurant tech platform. Over 8 years I've ended up owning the full stack: the POS that processes orders during the lunch rush, the catalog system keeping 15,000 outlets in sync across every aggregator, the integration platform wiring third-party systems together, and the backend architecture underpinning all of it.
Most restaurant tech is built as disconnected tools. A menu update in the POS doesn't reach the aggregator. A price change at brand HQ takes three days to reach outlet 47. The problems aren't product problems — they're integration problems disguised as product problems. I build the connections, not just the surfaces.
I've built software for single-outlet independents and franchise operators managing 200 locations from one dashboard. Both need reliability above everything else. An owner during a Friday night rush doesn't want features — they want the system to stay on and not lose an order. That constraint shapes every design decision I make.
I've also been wrong in ways that mattered. A permission model I designed was technically elegant — roles, scopes, clean separation. Then three pilot operators rejected it because an outlet manager couldn't mark an item out of stock without brand-level approval. I rebuilt it around the actual operational decision. I'm faster at questioning my own first drafts now.
At a glance
- Role
- Senior Product Manager
- Company
- Petpooja — India's largest restaurant tech platform
- Scale
- 1,00,000+ restaurant outlets across India
- Domain
- Restaurant Technology · Commerce · Platform Architecture
- Specialisms
- POS · Catalog · Multi-brand · Integration · Android
- Years at Petpooja
- 8+ years
- Location
- India · Open to remote and relocation
- Target Role
- Group PM · Head of Product · Senior PM
Leadership
How I lead product teams
Context over instructions.
I share the why behind every prioritisation call. When I pulled QR menu customisation from scope three weeks before go-live, I sent the full operator research to the engineering squad — two engineers flagged a data model edge case I hadn't caught, because they understood the reasoning, not just the decision.
Roadmaps are hypotheses, not commitments.
I've shelved roadmap items four weeks from shipping. When pilot data showed QR ordering shifted server workload rather than reducing it, I re-scoped and defended that call with data. Shipping something we knew wouldn't move the metric was harder to justify than the delay.
The spec is the last artefact, not the first.
The POS redesign spec was 18 pages — written after two weeks in restaurants during service, six months of support ticket analysis, and an architecture session with engineering. It came back with zero scope reworks. The pre-spec process is what buys that ratio.
Experience
What I built and what it moved
Senior Product Manager — Restaurant Technology
April 2024 – PresentPetpooja
India's largest restaurant tech platform · 1,00,000+ outlets
- Own product strategy and execution across the full restaurant tech stack — POS, catalog, online ordering, dine-in, multi-brand operations, integration platform, and backend architecture. Operating as de facto Head of Product for the restaurant technology division.
- Designed the unified order data model that reduced checkout time from 47s to 18s across 4,200 restaurants — eliminating re-keying between kitchen and billing.
- Built catalog infrastructure that propagates menu changes across POS, aggregators, and QR menus in under 4 hours for 200-outlet chains (down from 3 days). Serves 15,000+ outlets.
- Defined backend platform service decomposition — six independently deployable domains. Platform uptime 99.7% (from 98.1%); cascading failures −82%; new capability build time −40%.
Product Manager
July 2020 – March 2024Petpooja
India's largest restaurant tech platform
- Built integration platform connecting POS and catalog to Swiggy, Zomato, and 40+ aggregators — onboarding from 6 weeks to 9 days.
- Built GST standardization product and finance enablement layer — compliance errors −67% across 10,000+ merchants; settlement support tickets −41%.
- Owned Android restaurant application product line across 8,500+ devices — 99.1% crash-free session rate.
BDE → Operations Manager
February 2018 – June 2020Petpooja
India's largest restaurant tech platform
- Progressed from sales to operations leadership before transitioning into product management, building strong commercial understanding and execution discipline.
- Led operational execution, onboarding systems, and cross-team coordination.
- Monitored staff performance and developed improvement plans.
Skills
Where I'm strong
Expert = own the decision, defend the trade-off, ship it. Practitioner = drive it with the right technical partner.
Restaurant & Operational Systems
Catalog & Commerce
Platform & Architecture
Finance, Compliance & Payments
Product Leadership
Tools
See the thinking behind the products
Nine case studies covering the problem, strategy, technical architecture, and what I got wrong.