Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer of Airtel has quit the company after 13 months of service. The official announcement of the Airtel is yet to be publicized.
Chandrasekaran, who is currently serving the notice period is a former Yahoo executive. His last day with Airtel will be on June 10th. He played significant roles in reviving My Airtel app and Wink. He was also a part of making Airtel a Google partner, enabling the company to sell Xiaomi smartphones at its retail outlets.
“Following a successful association with Airtel, I have decided to move on to pursue my entrepreneurial ambition, something that I always wanted to do. I would like to thank Airtel for the opportunity to work for this exciting brand, and to support my decision of starting something on my own.”
-Anand Chandrasekaran
The company was recently failing at most of its new product launches. In December, company announced its VoIP plan, which asserted the people to buy a pack to use the third party VoIP services on Airtel data. The company rolled back the plan after it received severe oppositions from the stakeholders.
“After leading the transformation of product portfolio function at Airtel, Anand has decided to move on to pursue his own business venture. He was instrumental in giving the function a new direction and has helped build products such as myAirtel App. We thank him for his valuable contribution and wish him success in his journey ahead”
-Airtel Spokesperson
Subsequently, Airtel announced Airtel Zero, a zero-rated marketing plan for apps. The plan triggered a huge debate across the country on ‘net neutrality’ and is now under the scrutiny of TRAI and DoT. Chandrasekaran’s decision to quit come at another crucial time for Airtel, when it began rolling out its 4LTE networks aggressively.
At Yahoo, Chandrasekaran was a senior director for mobile products. He worked on Yahoo search, Yahoo answers, content partnerships, local listing and maps. He holds a post graduate degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and also completed a global leadership and public policy program at Harvard University.
