Product & Commerce Leadership

Building products
and commerce at scale

Senior product and commerce leader with 25+ years driving digital channel performance, customer experience, and revenue growth across consumer, fintech, and travel.

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25
Sanjay Sudra
Sanjay Sudra
Senior Product & Commercial Leader
London, UK

I'm a senior product and commercial leader with 25+ years building digital products that scale - from founding-team days at Lastminute.com to leading platforms for Sky and Sky's product portfolio.

My career spans fintech, telecoms, consumer, and media - always at the intersection of complex technology and real human need. I build teams as carefully as I build products, and I believe the two are inseparable.

25+
Years in product
10+
Companies led
9
Apps built
01

About me

I'm Sanjay Sudra - a product and commerce leader who has spent 25 years at the intersection of technology, human behaviour, and business strategy. From founding-team days at Lastminute.com to owning digital platforms serving millions at Sky, I've consistently led in environments where the stakes were high and the problems genuinely hard.

My sweet spot is commercial and customer complexity at scale - digital channel strategy, ecommerce performance, consumer loyalty, and AI-driven personalisation. I care deeply about the teams I build and the commercial cultures I leave behind, not just the revenue lines we hit.

Right now I'm looking for my next VP Product, VP Ecommerce, CPO, or Director-level role in the UK - ideally somewhere ambitious about driving real commercial impact through digital.

"The best product decisions are made by people who understand both the user's world and the business's constraints - and are brave enough to hold both at once."

02

What I do well

◈

Digital Channel & Platform Leadership

Built and scaled customer platforms at Sky serving over thirty million users - owning digital channel strategy, product roadmap, and the personalisation infrastructure that drives acquisition, engagement, and retention across multiple brands.

◈

AI-Powered Product Strategy

Practitioner-level understanding of embedding AI into product - from occasion-aware recommendation engines to agentic pipelines. Not hype: working strategy with measurable outcomes.

◈

Ecommerce & Commercial Performance

End-to-end commercial ownership across Merlin Entertainments, Nando's, Barclays, and IG Group - driving revenue, conversion, and digital trading performance. Over £200M D2C digital revenue owned at Merlin, fraud reduced from £5M to under £1M annually.

◈

Product Organisation Building

Hired and developed high-performing product teams across multiple organisations. Strong instinct for structure, capability development, and creating cultures where product thinking thrives.

◈

Commercial Strategy to Execution

Comfortable setting revenue and conversion strategy in the boardroom and reviewing funnel performance in the detail. I translate commercial ambition into coherent digital roadmaps and stay close enough to make them real.

◈

P&L & Stakeholder Leadership

Board-level communication, P&L ownership, and cross-functional influence across product, engineering, data, design, content, and trading. Proven in large matrixed enterprise and lean high-growth environments alike.

03

Career highlights

Scroll to explore
Recent
Sky
Group Head of Product

Led product vision and strategy across Sky's digital platforms - personalisation, authentication, and customer experience infrastructure serving the Sky Group's product portfolio. Owned a large multi-disciplinary team spanning product, engineering, data, and design, driving measurable improvements in customer acquisition and engagement.

IdentityPlatformConsumerAI
Earlier
Merlin Entertainments
Senior Product Director

Owned £200M+ annual D2C digital revenue across Alton Towers, Legoland, Madame Tussauds, and more. Led end-to-end digital commerce from acquisition through to on-site experience, reducing fraud from £5M to under £1M and significantly improving conversion performance.

EcommerceD2C RevenueConversionGlobal
Earlier
Barclays / IG Group
Head of Product

Product leadership in regulated financial services - trading platforms, digital banking, and customer-facing investment tools. Deep fluency in compliance-constrained environments where user experience still has to win.

FintechTradingRegulated
Earlier
Nokia / Three / Nando's
Senior Product roles

Built some of the UK's first digital loyalty programmes across telecoms and restaurant brands - driving customer retention, lifetime value, and repeat digital engagement at scale. At Nando's, doubled loyalty penetration to 60%+ and delivered 1.2M+ app downloads in 15 months.

LoyaltyRetentionMobileConsumer
Early stage
Lastminute.com
Original Launch Team

Part of the original team at one of the UK's defining internet success stories. Built product and ecommerce instincts in a genuinely pioneering environment - fast, scrappy, and globally ambitious.

StartupEarly stageTravel
05

What I bring to a leadership role

01

A commercial builder's instinct

I've shipped digital commerce experiences used by millions and owned the P&L to prove it. I know the difference between a roadmap that looks good in a deck and one that actually moves revenue.

02

Genuine AI fluency

Not a spectator. I use AI tools daily, build AI-powered products, and have a nuanced view of where AI creates genuine value versus where it creates the appearance of it.

03

Insight-led decision making

I build analytics and insight capability into every team I lead. Commercial decisions at pace need evidence behind them - I've consistently embedded the data culture that makes that possible.

04

A writer's clarity

Published fiction and non-fiction author. That discipline of precise, clear, purposeful language shapes how I write strategy, communicate to boards, and frame product decisions.

05

Things I've built

Harbour screenshot
Wellbeing · Career
Harbour

A guided wellbeing app for professionals navigating career transitions - tracking progress, mood, and momentum through uncertainty.

SignalScope AI screenshot
Fintech · AI
SignalScope AI

An AI-powered trading and market intelligence platform that surfaces signals from market data, news, and congressional trading activity.

Media in a Box screenshot
Media · AI agent
Media in a Box

An AI agent that curates personalised media recommendations - films, shows, podcasts - based on your mood, taste, and viewing history.

Vegan Compass screenshot
Food · Consumer
Vegan Compass

A progressive web app helping people navigate vegan eating - ingredient checking, restaurant discovery, and recipe guidance in one place.

HabitBank screenshot
Productivity · Habits
HabitBank

A habit-tracking app that treats your daily routines like financial investments - visualising compound gains from small consistent actions over time.

Urban Eden screenshot
Sustainability · Urban
Urban Eden

An eco-living guide for city dwellers - connecting urban communities with green spaces, sustainable brands, and low-impact lifestyle choices.

WanderWise screenshot
Travel · AI
WanderWise

An AI-powered travel companion that builds personalised itineraries and surfaces local knowledge based on your travel style and interests.

Team Profile Analytics screenshot
People · Analytics
Team Profile Analytics

A people analytics tool giving product and engineering leaders a clear view of team composition, skills coverage, and capability gaps.

SERP Sentinel screenshot
AI · SEO
Signal Flow

Analyses your website and scores it for AI citation likelihood across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude - with structured fixes and competitor comparisons.

06

Beyond product

Non-fiction

Chasing Fireflies

A book on organisational shiny-object syndrome - why companies chase the new at the expense of the good, and how to break the pattern. Written for senior product and commercial leaders.

Coaching & mentoring

Executive coaching

I coach and mentor product leaders, drawing on 25 years of pattern recognition across organisations of every size. Practical, direct, and focused on what actually changes things.

Let's build something
commercially meaningful

I'm actively exploring VP Product, VP Ecommerce, CPO, and Director-level opportunities in the UK. If you're building a digital commerce or consumer product business and need someone who can own both the strategy and the commercial outcomes - I'd genuinely like to hear about it.

Send me a message
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/sanjaysudra
Email sanjay.sudra@live.co.uk