People of OST: Ankit Yadav, Technical Product Manager
Ankit Yadav is a product developer turned into a product manager. Ankit has 3 years of experience building new B2B SaaS products. He is also a computer science graduate from PICT. In his free time, he likes to listen to music and play badminton.
Tell us about yourself!
Hi everyone, I’m Ankit and I’m working as a technical product manager at OST. I am based out of OST’s Pune office. I did my undergrad in computer science from Pune Institute of Computer Technology. I had started my career a while I was in college. I started a business for one and a half years working on backend and frontend development. I was basically working as a full stack developer. After that I had joined Wingify, working again as a full stack developer. I worked very closely with product managers and I later worked as an associate product manager.
My early experience has been in web development. When I started my business, I just started it for fun, just for pocket money, who don’t like pocket money when you’re a student? When I expanded my team, that’s when I realized that making an impact on the users’ life was not happening through services. I thought of building a product but then it didn’t work out because I didn’t have experience in building products. That’s when I realized that if I want to have that sort of experience, that impact on the user’s life, then I either create a product or work on a product. That’s when I decided that I would work on product
Prior to OST, I was working at Wingify on their new products team. I gained tons of product experience there. It was very evident for me to make the jump from web development to product and it was the right time.
OST senior software engineer Sarvesh Jain and I had a common friend. He referred me to OST when I was looking for opportunities in product management. That’s how I first learned about OST. There was a lot of content around OST and I already knew about Jason and Fab, so I joined OST in January 2019.
Can you tell us about your work on OST Platform and the developer resources?
When I first joined, we were working on releasing version 2 of the OST Platform. We needed new developer resources and guides because there was a lot of restructuring and changes in the APIs and SDKs. I started working on it, which includes our developer resources. We released version two in March 2019 and at that time we were ready with the developer resources. Because the implementation is more of a continuous process, we are continuously working on improving the developer resources.
How can businesses leverage OST Platform to create loyalty 2.0?
Businesses can create their economy based on either OST or USDC, which is a stable coin. OST Platform provides dashboards to manage your economy. We have SDKs and APIs that can be integrated into our mobile or web application so businesses can control everything from one dashboard. You can use our developer resources for integrating APIs and SDKs. Business doesn’t need to worry about building their own blockchain infrastructure, OST Platform takes care of that. There are different layers, the bottom one being the blockchain layer and then there is the SaaS layer. Our offering is a developer-friendly platform with APIs and SDKs.
How does OST compare to other existing products?
There are a couple of differences and then there are some similarities as well. The first difference is the transaction fee. Since the OST Platform is based on blockchain and we are a layer 2 solution, there is no central authority to pay fees to. Transaction fees are very low in this decentralized environment. This opens up new possibilities in microtransactions. The other similarity I would say is the developer experience.
In order to use the OST Platform, you do not need to understand all aspects of blockchain nor do you need to be a blockchain developer. The developer experience is very smooth. If you have a basic understanding of APIs and SDKs, you can start using the OST Platform. Since we are on a layer 2 solution, our transactions are faster than Ethereum mainnet, so it doesn’t even feel like you are using blockchain.
What is your team working on this quarter?
This quarter we are working on a consumer application, Pepo. Pepo is an application for creators and consumers who want to stay closer and be up to date with the creators.
Users send Pepos to their favorite creators with a tap of a button. So users just tap on it and bam, within a few seconds the crypto is transferred from the user to the creator. It’s a consumer application that we’re working on and we are releasing our private beta very soon.
Thank you, Ankit!
Be sure to check out last week’s interview with OST product owner Kevin Scallan. Subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen to the audio format anywhere you listen to podcasts, including iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. We’re also now available on Alexa! Simply add “OST LIVE” to your flash briefing.
About OST
OST powers the future of brand loyalty. Innovators use OST Platform to reward behaviours and increase engagement with Brand Currency. It’s a complete set of developer tools that any company can integrate without any in-house blockchain expertise. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users and we will be rolling out live implementations throughout 2019. OST currently has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune, and is expanding to other markets. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures and 500 Startups.
