Job Opportunity for Product Leader at Udhyam Learning Foundation in Bengaluru

About Udhyam: 

At Udhyam Learning Foundation (Udhyam), our vision is to “Co-create a caring world, where people fearlessly pursue their potential.” We believe that entrepreneurship is a powerful way to channelize an individual’s potential. Entrepreneurship enables agency and allows an individual to work on their strengths while creating value for the world.

Our programs:

• Udhyam Shiksha works on developing entrepreneurial mindsets among the youth and enabling them to achieve their potential, having impacted ~16,00,000 learners across 10 Indian states.

• Udhyam Vyapaar focuses on nano businesses in India, and solving large problems faced by them, at scale; having already enabled upto a 27% income uplift for 5000+ entrepreneurs.

The goal for Udhyam is to build a thriving and supportive ecosystem, where every individual feels empowered to define their own path.

About Udhyam Shiksha:

Over the last 6 years, Udhyam Shiksha has been able to successfully create, launch & scale experiential curricula & ambitious student projects – leading to significant change across state government institutions we work with. This year we are likely to work with 10 states & hope to impact the lives of 10 lakh young people.

We intend to focus on productising our work as well as building some products ground up.

Mekin Maheshwari, our founder, built technology for large scale internet products. Having seen the damage a lot of social media products had done to the youth, he didn’t want to jump in using technology, till he was confident of the principles on which we need to build. Now after 6 years of working with the education system intimately, we feel ready to start investing significantly more in using technology.

This role will report to Mekin & work closely with him.

Why is Udhyam’s mission of Making Bharat Entrepreneurial important :

State of Education in India:

● Last 25 years, huge success in getting kids into school 25 crore children enrolled in 15 lakh schools, 54% in govt schools
● A fantastic selection system: our Top 2% do really well globally! Global CEOs, Deans went through the Indian education system

● But Academic Learning Levels at scale remain extremely poor >50% of 5th graders can not do 2nd grade math & language; academic achievements later near impossible

● College GER at 27% => 73% kids leave education ~30% leave after 10th & 12th each; Education to Work – an even bigger challenge

● Our demographic dividend meter is ON but we aren’t prepared Over 1.2Cr youth turn 18 every year

● Good Jobs are few & hence highly competitive 7.22 lakh got govt. jobs out of 22 crore applicants between 2014-2022

● 93% of our workforce is in informal jobs with low/ no career growth 415 million informal sector workers excluded from basic social security – APU

● Skilling efforts haven’t scaled / led to a differentiated skilled work force Skilling no longer has a jobs goal; Youth Aspiration, Quality of Skilling are challenges. Nursing & IT exemplars

● Near Impossible to predict jobs of the future Technology is changing & will continue to rapidly change the future of work

To go from a Developing nation to a Developed nation:

• India’s Human Capital needs to become its largest asset
• To thrive in a rapidly changing world:
• Our youth needs to have higher agency & capability – a lot of them need to be entrepreneurial :solving problems

We need to achieve this at scale, and soon!

What kind of Products?

Highly engaging & loved products that enable building entrepreneurial mindsets, 21st century skills amongst youth, especially those coming from difficult backgrounds. The average youth in Bharat, especially one from underprivileged backgrounds, is woefully unskilled and underprepared for the future. We are building products that enable building EMs and skills that will help them take charge of their future.

The products we build will amplify & manifest the 3 learning pillars of Udhyam:

a. Real world experiences and not just content

b. Learner autonomy & choice

c. Learning by doing

Products that spread because they are so good – primarily by Word of Mouth, with little marketing & distribution efforts. Think Wikipedia!

Experience, Skills and Mindsets:

● Customer centric, experimental, high ownership, open-minded, collaborative, highly data driven & insightful will be must-haves for the role.

● Experience of having built & led product teams in the past, ideally with experience of building large scale(10M+ users) products.

● Knows when to build, and when to borrow existing products & technologies

● A hands-on product leader, willing to do what it takes, with a passion for the mission

● Hire & build a small & lean product team that works closely with technology, operations.

● You care about Impact, Learning & Youth growing their potential

● Wealth creation is not (or no longer) a goal for you.