Sukriti Chadha - Product Developer of the Year

Company: Sukriti Chadha, Lookout Mountain, TN
Nomination Category: Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Product Developer of the Year

Nomination Title: Sukriti Chadha, Spotify

Sukriti Chadha is currently the accessibility product manager at Spotify where she works on making the product used by over 300 million global users more inclusive. She is working on ways to automatically test for regressions of accessibility as early as the development process in the product life cycle, so issues are caught before end users face them. This work was recently accepted at CSUN, the largest accessibility conference in the world.

She also serves on the product advisory board of Mozilla’s developer network, as an invited expert at the World Wide Web Consortium where she works on the accessibility guidelines for web and mobile applications used by governments and companies globally.

Before Spotify, Sukriti was a product manager at Yahoo Finance, where she invented, patented and launched an open sourced solution for making data visualizations accessible to people with visual impairment. She also oversaw the mobile app audience’s growth by 40% and an increase in revenue by over 80%. Sukriti also served as the lead for the Women’s inclusion network at Verizon Media Group (formerly Yahoo) and partnered with nonprofits to promote diversity in tech.

Sukriti graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.

Apart from achievements listed above, Sukriti was invited as a judge for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Innovation Awards (2021), and to various conference committees to review accessibility-related work - including Web for All, and the Australian HCI conference.

At Yahoo Finance, she also led the integration of financial brokers such as Fidelity, ETrade etc. to enable users to monitor all of their accounts in one place, thereby increasing the reach and creating a brand new user segment for the business, and a better product for the users.

She has given back to the community through her volunteering efforts with Pursuit, a nonprofit that helps people from nontraditional backgrounds break into tech careers. She also mentored a group of high school students in their projects to build technology solutions for their peers with autism, in an effort to develop awareness about accessibility early on.

1 billion people in the world have some form of disability. Accessibility in mainstream tech is still an afterthought in many cases. What sets Sukriti apart is her commitment to making sure that the minority perspective, and needs are taken care of, and embedded in the products she directly works on, and across the tech community through her involvement with W3C, public speaking and advocacy efforts. Her work on data visualizations combines aspects of product, user empathy, innovation and engineering in a way very few product managers are able to, especially at organizations of the scale she has worked at. This work should be recognized, and amplified so it can inspire others.

https://yahoodevelopers.tumblr.com/post/612790529269366784/introducing-accessible-audio-charts-an-open
https://www.forbesindia.com/article/brand-connect/accessible-data-visualisation-for-those-with-visual-impairment/64397/1
https://uspto.report/patent/app/20190205016
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/MDN_Product_Advisory_Board/Members
https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/list#C
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2020/dec/10/students-adaptive-tech/537633/
https://www.ces.tech/Innovation-Awards/Meet-the-CES-2021-Judges.aspx
http://www.w4a.info/2021/organization/
https://productledalliance.com/author/sukriti/
https://festival.productledalliance.com/speakers/