Product Engineer · Ex-Founder

Aarav
Khanduja

PM Intern at Phia. Building consumer and enterprise AI products by combining user research, product design, and hands-on engineering.

Experience

Across startups, internships, and side projects, I've focused on building products people actually want — and validating that with data and usage.

Product Management Intern

Phia

Sept 2025 - Present

UX Research

  • Built a structured, automated research system, interviewing 70+ users and running cohort-based outreach across active, churned, and new users, driving product decisions that led to 10+ shipped experiments and contributing to 100K+ retargeted clicks.

Engineering

  • Working with ML and engineering to translate messy feedback on search relevance into ranking improvements, reducing latency by 80% and increasing product clicks by 45%.
  • Built an analytics MCP server and unified OAuth gateway (1k+ LOC, 18 commits), enabling Claude integrations to query product analytics that are actively used across the product team.
  • Rebuilt internal cron workflows to summarize Intercom support tickets into a weekly product channel, improving visibility into user issues across the team.

Product Design

  • Designed LLM summary states and price drop experiences in the Safari extension, and scoped features like coupons, LLM summaries, and price drops on product pages using user insights to inform engineering decisions as the product scaled to 1M+ users.
Activation & Onboarding
Funnel Analysis
Experimentation (A/B & Feature Gates)
Product Design
Product Engineering
Internal Tooling

Product Management Intern

Penseum

July - Aug 2025

Doubled engagement on the core “Learn Mode” feature by reducing time-to-activation through onboarding UX, CTAs, upload performance, and AI-generated content.

Used Mixpanel and session replays to analyze onboarding funnels and inform product design.

Activation & Onboarding
Funnel Analysis
Experimentation
Product Analytics

Cofounder

ProperlyAI

Jan 2024 - Mar 2025
  • Partnered with 5 real estate teams across Compass, Coldwell Banker, and Douglas Elliman to validate workflows and product direction.
  • Placed 2nd at Techstars Startup Weekend and joined the NYU Sprint Accelerator, securing $6k in grant funding.
  • Ran 70+ user interviews and onboarded 5+ beta teams, driving 3 major product pivots.
  • Owned product, GTM (cold outreach), and execution across a 5-person team.
  • Built and shipped an AI CRM for realtors, turning inbox data into structured client summaries.
Zero → One Product
Customer Discovery
Product Strategy
GTM & Distribution
Applied AI

Product Marketing Intern

Penseum

Dec 2023 - Jan 2024

Integrated Mixpanel into the frontend and designed a UTM strategy analyzing 10K+ visits across 1M+ impressions.

Helped drive early adoption of an AI lecture notes → quizzes product across student communities in Harvard, Columbia, NYU, UCLA, and UCSD.

Growth & Distribution
Analytics Infrastructure
Attribution & Tracking
Early User Acquisition

Built a gamified rewards system with a leaderboard that awarded points for event participation and enabled members to redeem points for merchandise, increasing engagement across a 40+ member community.

Increased event attendance through incentive-driven engagement loops.

Incentive Design
Gamification Systems
Community Growth
Full-Stack Development

Featured Projects

Open-source projects I've contributed to.

text0 screenshot
Contributor
🏆 Next.js Global Hackathon 2025 Winner

Built local-first LLM support for a context-aware text editor, removing dependency on cloud APIs and enabling offline usage.

Contribution

Implemented local inference using Ollama with a non-edge API route
Designed environment-based fallback for switching between local and cloud providers
+298 / −116 LOC

Impact

Removed mandatory API key requirement and reduced vendor lock-in

Tech

Next.js
Trigger.dev
Ollama
CineScreen screenshot
Contributor
22★ on GitHub

Improved editing workflows for a cursor-free screen recorder focused on power users.

Contribution

Built a keyboard shortcut system with input focus guards and modifier handling
Implemented animated click indicators with Sharp-based rendering controls
+465 / −35 LOC across 2 PRs

Impact

Enabled fully keyboard-driven workflows
Improved visual clarity of exported recordings

Tech

Electron
TypeScript
Sharp

Skills & Expertise

Product

Onboarding & Activation
Retention
Experiments (A/B, feature gating)
User Research
Cohort & Funnel Analysis

Technical

Full-stack (Next.js, React, FastAPI)
Data & Analytics (Mixpanel, Postgres)
AI (LLMs, inference workflows)

Get in Touch

Happy to chat about product, early-stage building, or applied AI.