Rahul Bala
Product manager for AI products & content systems — built at consumer-India scale and in enterprise SaaS.
I've put AI into an eight-language newsroom without moving the editor's publish call, taken an enterprise visual builder from zero to one, and run my own eval-gated LLM content operation.
- 6+
- years in product
- 3×
- editorial output via AI newsroom
- 0→1
- enterprise visual builder shipped
- 3M
- monthly users, bootstrapped
01 — Work
Selected work
Case studies with real numbers — what shipped, what it did, what broke.
live
motomotar: an eval-gated AI content operation
The product decisions behind a one-person AI content business: who it serves, where the quality bar sits, what I killed, and the honest numbers.
BriefDraft7-dim judgeQA gatesPublish
- 204,649
- search impressions
- 4,278
- top-10 queries
- 1,040
- URLs, run by one person
Asianet News: AI workflows for an eight-language newsroom
How I sequenced a CMS rebuild and AI workflows for desk editors in eight languages, kept the publish decision with each editor, and advised against funding an AI debate platform.
Read the case study →02 — Where I'm useful
Bring me in when…
The problems where product judgment, content systems, and model behaviour have to be handled together.
someone has to own the quality bar for an AI feature
I set the publish bands for my own production LLM pipeline and decided which failures block outright. A seven-dimension judge and QA gates enforce it.
motomotar case study →the product has to work across languages, not just in English
Field research with Tier 2/3 users at Lokal, then an AI newsroom across eight languages where each language’s editor kept the publish call.
Language is product, not localization →something has to go from zero to one inside an enterprise
Took Contentstack Studio from concept to Early Access go-to-market, shipped Drafts & Auto Save across the suite, and built the first adoption baseline.
Résumé →
03 — Writing
Recent writing
- Let the field overrule the roadmapWhen observed user behaviour should change what you build, and how to make field research cheap enough to run every cycle, from Lokal to a newsroom.
- Killing a content cluster on evidenceA question-page cluster built on a sound theory, then deindexed by Google. When to stop a reasonable bet, what counts as a verdict, and what to keep.
- Running a one-person product portfolioHow I split one person's evenings across several live products: what gets built, what gets automated, what gets killed, and the metric that decides.
- Shipping native apps as a PM, with AI writing the codeWhen a PM should build the product themselves, and what changes about scope, quality and ownership once AI writes the code and the release is yours.
- Hybrid LLM Evaluation: Let Code Count, Let Models JudgeWhich parts of 'good' to give code and which to an LLM judge: per-dimension weights, hard caps, and publish bands as product decisions.
Let’s talk.
Hiring for AI product roles — or want to compare notes on evals and content systems?