People of OST: Junisha Malkani, Product Manager
Junisha Malkani is a Product Manager at OST and she owns the complete produce development cycle from ideation to implementation. Junisha works well with managing teams, is entrepreneurial and understands technology well.
Tell Us About Yourself
I am based in the Pune office. Originally, I am from Amravati, which is in the state of Maharashtra, India. This year makes my 17th year in Pune. Pune is now a hometown to me. I have been working with Jason and Sunil for almost 7 years. I started as a QA lead here. I love pulling people together for special projects and figuring out who should work together. That’s how I built and guided a 20 person team at fab.com. Now, I’m working as a product manager, I am pretty much a technology and product researcher. Each new thing you learn is a raw material and you create a new congregation of products and ideas.
What led you to blockchain technology?
It goes back to 2017 when I was working as a product manager at Pepo with Jason. Eventually, we were working towards user engagement, growth, and monetization. We learned that content creators wanted ways to monetize and users were willing to pay for exclusive and rare content. We studied and researched a lot about blockchain those days. Micro-payments and the immutability of blockchain really caught our attention. We started to think of opportunities that blockchain could bring to Pepo’s end users. This was my first actual experience with blockchain and the journey since then has been really intriguing.
What does your role as Product Manager entail?
A product manager solves problems. There are no fixed boundaries to product management at OST. There are no set of things that a product manager does. If there is a problem in on-boarding, the product manager is there, if there is an issue in support experience, the product manager is there, if there is a scaling issue, a legal issue, if there is an issue, the product manager has to be there.
We are currently working on scaling solutions. We have a complete stack from OpenST Protocol to OpenST Mosaic, to OpenST KIT and API’s. The scaling has to be addressed at each part of the stack. The most exciting thing is seeing these smart people figuring out solutions and learning things in the process. We figure out how to keep things moving forward, get people to trust one another, work together, and create something that is really valued.
If you could choose one hobby that now seems out of your reach either financially or time-wise, what would it be?
I’m a mother of two lovely daughters and I’m really fascinated by people’s strengths and guilts. I see this huge gap on how education is imparted today in a very utilitarian kind of way. There is another way of imparting education which is more personalized, where you understand a person’s strength and then impart education. This gap troubles me. Most of my free time goes into bridging these gaps, understanding the strengths of children, helping mothers understand the strengths of children and just imparting education in a better way.
THANK YOU, JUNISHA!
Don’t forget to check last week’s interview with Mohit Anand, Director of Blockchain Strategy Consulting at OST. Tune in to our weekly People of OST segment on OST LIVE! Subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen to the audio format on anywhere you listen to podcasts, including iTunes, Spotify, and TuneIn.
About OST
OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies. OST is a public blockchain platform designed for the needs of businesses with millions of users. Launch your own Branded Tokens with OST technology and turn your business into a dynamic ecosystem. OST is built on the OpenST Protocol, a framework for building highly scalable blockchain token economies. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. For more information, please visit: https://ost.com.
