Manisha Mahawar
Empowering teams to lead the AI revolution with agility, innovation, and purpose
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I am Head of Technical Program Management (TPM) at OpenTable, where she leads strategic initiatives that drive innovation, agility, and cross-functional alignment across the organization. With a proven track record of delivering complex, high-impact projects, she plays a pivotal role in shaping OpenTable’s AI-first vision—enabling both product innovation and workforce transformation.
Passionate about leveraging technology to solve real-world problems, I have spearheaded efforts to empower teams with advanced tools and frameworks to drive efficiency and collaboration. My leadership philosophy is rooted in fostering autonomy, breaking silos, and enabling teams to thrive in the fast-evolving landscape of AI.
Outside of work, I is an advocate for continuous learning and run agility@scale meetup group in Columbus. Ohio.
Embedding AI Across Products and Teams: A Journey to Becoming AI-Native
As the Agile community faces increasing pressure to deliver value faster, we saw an opportunity to revolutionize our practices by embedding AI across our organization—not just in our products but also in our workforce. This session will share our transformation journey, addressing the critical question: How can we leverage AI to thrive in the future while staying true to Agile principles?
We divided the challenge into two interconnected efforts:
AI-First Products: We focused on high-impact use cases like automatic review responses for restaurant workers and SEO-optimized content generation, ensuring immediate value for customers. By experimenting iteratively and training customized OpenAI models, we moved beyond external API reliance, delivering consistent performance and cost efficiency. Agility was at the heart of this process, with frameworks like “Date for Date” to balance confidence in delivery with leadership expectations. Today, we’re building advanced AI agents, such as a Restaurant Q&A bot, to provide interactive customer experiences.
AI-Enabled Workforce: Engineers were initially skeptical, viewing AI tools as a threat. We transformed this mindset by introducing tools like Glean, Clari, YMeadow, and GPT, supported by our custom framework ART (Autonomy, Removing Silos, and Tighter Feedback Loops). This approach empowered teams to embrace AI as a partner in boosting efficiency and innovation while addressing productivity concerns head-on.
In this session, we’ll share:
- Frameworks like "Date for Date" and ART to drive AI adoption across products and teams.
- Strategies for overcoming skepticism and fostering collaboration between humans and machines.
- Lessons learned, from balancing experimentation with agility to navigating resistance creatively.
- Attendees will leave with actionable insights to kickstart their own AI transformation journey, enabling them to leverage AI for continuous improvement and innovation within Agile practices.
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