Akshay Jawharkar
Advance Your Career with a Product Leader Who's Built at Every Stage
Studied at Carnegie Mellon University
Works at Affirm
Successful clients at
Available tomorrow at 7:00 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Akshay's Offerings
Custom hourly · $175/hr
Get help with Career Planning and Resume Review.
Akshay’s Career Coaching Qualifications
Experience level: Director
Akshay has helped clients get into these companies:
Welcome to my profile! With over 15 years of experience in product management and technology leadership roles at top companies like Affirm, Meta, and PayPal, I bring a wealth of knowledge to help you advance your career. My journey from a Senior Software Engineer at FactSet to a Director of Product Management at Affirm has equipped me with the skills to guide you through complex career transitions and growth opportunities. I have successfully coached numerous individuals, helping them navigate the intricacies of career development, from mastering product strategy to enhancing cross-functional collaboration. Let's work together to unlock your potential and achieve your career goals. Feel free to reach out for a personalized coaching session!
Akshay can help with:
Career Planning
Resume Review
About Akshay
The gap isn't your skills. It's your confidence. That's what I help you build. Over 15+ years, I've built and scaled products across Affirm, Meta, PayPal, Slalom, and FactSet, working across fintech, e-commerce, and social, most recently at Affirm across personalization, merchant monetization, ads, and AI-powered search. That breadth has given me a front row seat to how different companies build, hire, and evaluate product talent. I'm a 0-to-1 product builder at heart. I've started things from a blank page and grown two-sided marketplaces, and I've learned that the hardest part is rarely the idea itself. It's convincing yourself and everyone around you that it's worth betting on. I've sat on both sides of the interview table across nearly every PM level, from IC to Director, so I know what separates a good answer from one that actually lands. Through my own experiences I've built repeatable frameworks that help you answer ANY question with confidence and help you land the interview.
Why do I coach?
I first started mentoring PMs on the side, mostly informally, and I noticed something. The people I worked with weren't lacking ability. They had done real work and built real things. What they lacked was the ability to trust themselves enough to tell that story clearly under pressure. That's what pulled me in. Watching someone go from stumbling through their own experience to speaking about it with conviction is genuinely one of the more rewarding things I've gotten to be part of. I've made a habit out of it since, and it's stuck with me longer than almost anything else outside my actual job. I coach because I believe the gap between a good candidate and one who gets the offer is rarely talent. It's whether they know their own story well enough to tell it like they mean it.
Work Experience
Director of Product Management
Affirm
July 2025 - Present
Leading product for the Affirm Marketplace, a large-scale consumer platform spanning personalization, consumer experiences, merchant monetization, and ads. Own end-to-end product strategy for the consumer app, driving engagement, monetization, and merchant value across the platform. Partner with engineering, data science, marketing, and executive stakeholders to align on strategy and deliver impact at scale.
Product Lead
Meta
January 2024 - July 2025
Drove product strategy for consumer Ads purchase journeys, monetization, and digital wallet, leading the launch of next-generation checkout and wallet features. Delivered AI-driven commerce solutions, accelerated merchant adoption, and partnered with executive stakeholders and cross-functional teams to drive large-scale business impact. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Checkout and +6 skills
Director of Product Management
PayPal
March 2022 - January 2024
Led PayPal’s personalization platform, boosting user engagement and revenue by delivering personalized experiences across app, web, and communications. Drove platform strategy that enabled building and deploying highly scalable systems for experimentation and rewards, enabling growth. Managed a high-performing product team and partnered with large cross functional engineering, marketing, and data science to drive alignment and impact. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Product Management and +3 skills
Platform Product Manager
PayPal
April 2021 - March 2022
Product Management, Strategy and +2 skills
Product Partnerships Lead
PayPal
August 2016 - April 2021
Led global financial partnerships, launching seamless account linking and driving user and revenue growth. Accelerated partner integrations by optimizing processes, scaling cross-functional collaboration, and delivering impactful experiences across multiple markets. Strategic Partnerships, Product Management and +2 skills
Manager, Product
Slalom
November 2012 - August 2016
Defined and executed enterprise mobility strategy, guiding project scope, budgets, and delivery while making key business decisions to support company goals. Coordinated executive communications, managed stakeholder alignment, and oversaw business requirements, technical architecture, and vendor management. Developed secure mobile SSO and BYOD solutions in collaboration with cross-functional teams, improving secure access to corporate data and optimizing user experience. Monitored industry trends and implemented process improvements to drive secure, scalable, and user-friendly enterprise mobile adoption. Product Management, Product Strategy and +1 skill
Software Engineering Professor
Slalom
September 2011 - November 2012
Designed and developed responsive, secure mobile applications for both web and native platforms (iOS/Android), including offline capability, client/server architecture, and optimized user experiences using modern frameworks and technologies. Delivered backend modernization and cloud migration projects for large enterprises, replacing legacy systems with scalable, service-oriented solutions and improving data transmission, integration, and accessibility.
Senior Software Engineer
FactSet
July 2007 - September 2011
Software developer building real-time financials application for major banks and institutions Designed and developed a robust real-time data analytics platform in C++ with custom alerting, advanced UI, client-server architecture, and multiuser modules—powering trading and analytics for over 20,000 financial professionals worldwide.
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
Masters, Information Networking & Computer Science
2005 - 2007
· Developed a distributed whiteboard and chat system using Java applets, beans and multi-threading · Hosted secure (https) web server with scalability and reliability for over 150 simultaneous clients
University of Mumbai
Bachelors, Information Technology
2000 - 2004
8 Reviews
Overall Rating
5.0
Akshay has helped clients get into these companies: