Dubai · Open to remote product roles

Product manager, ten years at Gojek and Prodigy Finance.

At Gojek I built the in-app chat that customers and drivers used to sort out pickups and deliveries, and later headed the communications platform. At Prodigy Finance I worked on how international students find, apply for and repay their loans.

See the work Download résumé
Product work at Gojek 2016–2022 Prodigy Finance 2022–2024
A few things I've built

GoChat / Gojek

20M

messages a day at peak, across five countries.

CustomersDrivers
Zero-downtime migrationExplore the work
  • $4–5Mestimated annual savings from bringing chat in-house
  • $1B+loan book under the servicing remit I owned
  • 5.7Mdaily active users on the communications platform I headed

Selected work

Three pieces of work I'd point to first.

Chat at Gojek, school expansion at Prodigy Finance, and the platform strategy I wrote before leaving Gojek.

Build & scale

20M

messages a day at peak

Across five countries

GoChat · 2018–2021

Moving driver–customer calls and SMS into the app

Drivers were texting and calling customers from their own phones, and paying for it. We launched in-app chat in 2018 and adoption hit 75% within a month. I later made the case to bring chat in-house and ran the migration with no downtime. We then adapted it country by country, including quick messages worded for local etiquette and translation for tourists.

  • 75% adoption in month one
  • $4–5M saved a year
  • 17% fewer cancellations
Read the story
Own & grow

School expansion

22%

of 2024
loan volume

from schools added in the expansion

Before6.3%
After10%

Visits → application starts, drawn to scale

Community → Servicing → Growth · 2022–2024

Fix the leak before you grow.
Then expand access.

By late 2023, only 6.3% of site visits turned into application starts. More schools would have sent more people into a form that wasn't working, so we redesigned the application first, and conversion was back to 10% by peak season. We then more than doubled the partner-school list, and those new schools brought in 22% of 2024's loans.

  • +27% application completion
  • ~900 → 2,100+ schools
  • Onboarding time −70%
Read the story
Set direction

5×

higher conversion than push and inbox, at best, with Jeklin

Head of Product · 2021–2022

Turning chat and notifications into an ad channel

I led four PMs across roughly nine products, including chat, notifications and in-app banners. My plan was to make them the base for merchant advertising. Along the way I argued for chat to get a place in the middle of the Home screen, which other teams also wanted, and we won it.

  • Push CTR ~1% → 2.5–4%
  • ~90% chat adoption in Indonesia
Read the strategy

How the plan was staged

  1. 1

    Get chat used

    ~90% chat adoption in Indonesia

  2. 2

    Make messages worth opening

    Preference tools, Snippets, Shuffle Cards and Jeklin

  3. 3

    Put a price on reach

    Governance, notification billing and Home placement

Where it was heading: ads for Gojek's merchants

GoHail · Gojek · 2017

The feature I talked us out of building

GoHail was a new ride-hailing feature the team was keen on. It had a roadmap slot and engineering wanted to start. I asked for four weeks first, to build a prototype and compare it against Uber's booking numbers for a similar product.

The numbers came in well short, so I recommended we stop before any production code was written. Engineering spent those months on other roadmap work.

  1. Weeks 1–4Prototype and benchmark against Uber
  2. Recommendation: stopDemand didn't justify the build
  3. OutcomeEngineering time went to other roadmap work
  • Look past the headline number.At Prodigy, fast repayments looked like good news. Many were borrowers refinancing with competitors.
  • Diagnose first.I work from Rumelt's Good Strategy Bad Strategy: name the problem, choose an approach, then act on it consistently.
  • Keep measuring after launch.With chat, the number I watched was cancellations. They fell 17% in the first year.

Experience

Where I've worked

Parental career break

Dubai · Dec 2024 – present

Full-time parenting, and mentoring product managers on ADPList.

Prodigy Finance

Remote · 2022–2024
Lender to international master's students

Growth PM, Loan Originations

Lifted visits-to-application-start conversion from 6.3% to 10%, then led school expansion that drove 22% of 2024 loan volume.

Group PM, Loan Servicing

Three PMs across a $1B+ loan book. Secured $800K for the roadmap; in-app payment share rose from 62% to 68% and document handling time fell ~95%.

Senior PM, Community

Built a borrower community programme that accounted for 6.8% of 2022 loan volume.

Gojek

Bengaluru · 2016–2022
One of Gojek India's first five PMs

Head of Product, Communications Platform

Four PMs across ~9 products serving 5.7M daily active users (~20M monthly). Push click-through rose from ~1% to 2.5–4%.

Principal PM, Chat

Built GoChat to 20M messages a day at peak and brought it in-house, saving an estimated $4–5M a year.

Product Manager, Ride Hailing

Launched Go-Bluebird with a 23,000-car taxi fleet, and rebuilt the backend through ~900x order growth without downtime.

Earlier Product Manager, Adsolv Digital / Zwibe · Sep 2015 – May 2016 Business Analyst, nanobi analytics · Jun 2013 – Aug 2015

About

I'm Jacintha.

I've been a product manager for about ten years. Before that I was a business analyst.

At Gojek I went from ride hailing to heading the communications platform. At Prodigy Finance I moved from community to loan servicing and then growth. At both, I helped design the PM interview process and sat on hiring panels, and I still mentor PMs, mostly on interviews.

I live in Dubai. I've been on a parental career break since December 2024 and I'm now looking for my next product role.

B.Tech, Electrical EngineeringNIT Raipur · 2008–2012

From people I've worked with

“One of those rare people who understands a solution from the technical side, as well as the product side.”
Soham KamaniEngineering, CRED (ex-Google)
“Not only able to deliver and walk the talk, but also kind and empathetic.”
Kiranmai BhamidiReported to Jacintha, Gojek
“I can't fathom how fortunate I am to have found a dedicated mentor like Jacintha.”
Kenneth TennyPM, Bolt/Hopp (ex-Careem, ex-Gojek)

What are you building?

If you're hiring a product manager for platform or growth work, I'd love to hear about it.

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