Akshay Malavade
MBA candidate, Columbia Business School

I find broken processes and automate them away.

Industrial engineer by training. From forecasting at ZS to AI automations at Luminai, I've spent six years finding where work breaks down and building the fix, most recently as the product lead on 17 AI automations. I'm recruiting for Summer 2027 product management internships.

Selected work

Selected work

Clearing a 40,000 task backlog for a health system in three days

Luminai, sole product manager, 2026

40K+ backlog cleared in 3 days, $110K+ in annual savings.

Problem
A health system's front-line staff were buried under a growing queue of notifications that each needed manual handling, pulling time away from patient-facing work.
What I did
Ran user interviews with the staff doing the work, scoped two AI notification-clearing automations around what they actually needed, and pitched the client CIO to secure buy-in before building.
Shipped
Led both automations from design through go-live, defining launch KPIs and success criteria up front.
Bigger picture
These sat inside a portfolio of 17 automations I owned at the account, which held 99% uptime and drove $3.8M in annual impact (6x ROI). I also rebuilt a legacy workflow that was mismatching patient data via direct API integration, raising throughput 500%; that approach was later extended to Cleveland Clinic.

Building the company's first engineering capacity dashboard myself

Luminai, built with Claude Code, 2026

Better allocation decisions across 126+ workflows, ~$60K in annual labor savings.

Problem
More than 20 engineers across time zones were split across 126+ concurrent workflows, with no single view of who had capacity and where work was piling up.
What I did
Designed a capacity-scoring model and built the dashboard tool myself using Claude Code, alongside the company's first workflow registry.
Shipped
Used it to run weekly allocation syncs with the global engineering team, turning staffing from guesswork into a shared, data-backed conversation.

Making self-service billing rules usable during beta

Candid Health, Strategy & Operations, 2024 to 2025

Rules page usage up 15% after research-driven design changes.

Problem
Candid was rolling out a feature that let customers create their own billing rules, but early users were struggling with the rule creation flow.
What I did
Led user feedback sessions during the beta, mapped where people got stuck, and translated those findings into specific UI and UX changes with Product Design.
Related
Earlier, I unblocked a $300K ACV customer stalled for months by aligning Product and Engineering on a new approach and shipping their billing rule changes myself via GitHub, cutting their support tickets by 90%.
Play my career

The same story, as a two-minute game. Start on Rutgers' College Avenue campus, ride the train and fly cross-country, and meet the people I built for at each stop.

Rutgers
📐 🔮 💊 📜 🤖 🍕 🤸
LinkedIn

Akshay Malavade

Play my career

Short on time? Connect with me on LinkedIn. Curious? Take a two-minute walk from Rutgers to Columbia, by way of New York and California.

Connect on LinkedIn

Or email me

Arrow keys or WASD to move. Walk into people, doors, trains and planes to interact. Space or Enter to continue. Built with Claude.

Experience
  1. 2026 to 2028
    Columbia Business School MBA, Product Management

    Consortium Fellow. Chief of Staff, Student Government. AI Club and Technology Club.

  2. 2026
    Luminai Product Operations / AI Deployment Strategist

    Series B AI operations platform backed by General Catalyst and Y Combinator. Owned 17 AI automations at a health system.

  3. 2024 to 2025
    Candid Health Strategy & Operations Manager

    Series D billing platform. Managed a $1.5M+ ARR portfolio and turned around the company's most at-risk client in under a month.

  4. 2022 to 2023
    Truepill Customer Strategy & Growth Manager

    API-first digital pharmacy serving 10M+ patients. Redesigned pricing to take a key account from -5% to +9% margin.

  5. 2020 to 2022
    ZS Associates Decision Analytics Associate

    Market research and forecasting for a Fortune 50 pharmaceutical client.

  6. 2016 to 2020
    Rutgers University BS, Industrial Engineering

    Summa Cum Laude.

About

I'm an industrial engineer by training, which mostly means I can't look at a broken process without wanting to fix it. My career has been a series of those: forecasting at ZS, pricing and compliance calls at Truepill, billing data at Candid, and finally AI automations at Luminai, where I got to own the whole thing from user interview to launch.

Outside of work I train on gymnastic rings, have baked 50+ loaves of sourdough, keep a running ranking of NYC pizza, and have traveled to 20+ countries. I also fish, play tennis, and speak Marathi and Hindi.