Rishabh Gupta – Meet the Mentor

Why did you decide to become a mentor?

I became a mentor because ambitious people often get stuck not for lack of talent, but for lack of a map and a sparring partner who tells the truth kindly and directly. In Dubai and Lagos, I saw smart operators and engineers who could change markets if they had the right mental models and feedback loops. That felt personal. I signed up first to pay it forward, then stayed because it made me sharper. Mentoring forces clarity. It improves taste. It builds judgment. Over time, I built a playbook for emerging-market product careers, from transitioning into PM, to shipping 0 to 1, to scaling responsibly in regulated fintech. I have mentored 500+ PMs through upGrad, Master’s Union, and Seekho, and I advise founders at Techstars and Next Billion Advisors. The best part is watching someone ship, then suddenly see themselves as a builder.

How did you get your career start?

I began as a systems engineer at Infosys in Bengaluru, learning how production systems actually break and how to fix them under pressure for a Fortune 500 payments program. That stint taught me reliability, ownership, and respect for constraints. At souKare in Dubai, I wore every hat from growth to product and learned to love the craft of customer discovery. We grew fast, and when I ran experiments on checkout, conversion jumped 110%. That was the moment I realized product is earned through evidence. Later, at Alerzo, I led product for Nigeria’s MSMEs, building a B2B marketplace and fintech rails used by 180k monthly active users. We launched stock financing, tightened KYC, and learned to design for low-trust, low-bandwidth realities. Those markets taught me to prefer outcomes over rituals. Small teams. Tight loops. Real customer pain as the north star.

What do mentees usually come to you for?

Most mentees come to break into product from engineering, analytics, or operations, or to level up into senior PM and lead roles in e-commerce and fintech. They want a clear path, not fluff. I run structured sprints, usually 6 to 8 weeks. We set one audacious goal, unpack it into a KPI tree, and track progress weekly. Every session produces an artifact. PRD, problem framing, GTM plan, experiment design, or a metrics dashboard. We simulate exec reviews to sharpen narrative, tradeoffs, and decision quality. I am hands-on with resumes and portfolios, but we do not make them pretty until the work is real. Interview prep focuses on signal. Estimation with numbers, product sense with constraints, strategy with defensible bets. The promise is simple. Leave with proof of work and the judgment to use it.

What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?

A favorite story is A., an ops lead in Delhi who wanted to move into fintech product. We picked a problem that mattered. Increase approval rates for thin-file MSMEs without raising defaults. Over six weeks, A. mapped the underwriting flow, identified proxy signals in transaction history and repayment behavior, designed a lightweight risk tiering, and proposed a two-armed experiment with clear guardrails. She built a scrappy dashboard, wrote a crisp one-pager for leadership, and rehearsed an exec narrative that made the tradeoffs explicit. Approval rate up. Losses stable. More importantly, she learned to think like an owner. She landed a PM role at a Series A fintech, then shipped the MVP in her first quarter. The win was not the offer. It was the shift from tasks to outcomes, from noise to signal.

What are you getting out of being a mentor?

Mentoring makes me a better builder and leader. It keeps my judgment current because I am exposed to new problems, tools, and contexts every week. It forces me to compress ideas into simple language and stress test my frameworks in the wild. Coaching founders and PMs across India, the Middle East, and Africa has refined my models for 0 to 1, GTM, and credit risk, and it has raised my hiring bar. I also get something less measurable. The joy of watching someone ship their first real thing and feel that click in their head. The craft becomes contagious. And that compounding, over the years, is the most durable leverage there is.