Charan Tadepally · Researcher · Strategist · Leader
I started by learning how to find evidence. Then how to tell its story, influence with it, grow people through it, build partnerships with it, and turn it into action. Somewhere along the way, I took “craft” quite literally. Then technology changed — and so did the questions I was asking.
I grew up around a rural sociologist. Long before I knew there was a profession called research, I was already travelling, watching, listening and learning that behaviour only makes sense in context.
2010–2018
Before research became strategy, leadership or product building, I had to learn the fundamentals: how to listen, how to make sense of what I heard, and how to make somebody else care.
I learnt the craft on the ground — moderating groups, conducting interviews and ethnographies, observing people in context and learning to separate what was interesting from what was actually evidence.
Listen before you explain.
Advertising taught me that a good insight does not travel on evidence alone. It needs a point of view, a story and a reason for someone to remember it.
Evidence needs a story before it can move people.
Working across markets, brands and shopper contexts pushed me beyond reporting what I had learnt. Research had to help clients see the problem differently and make a better decision.
Insight earns its keep when it changes the conversation.
2018–2022
I stopped thinking only about doing good research. I began using the craft to grow researchers, build a business, earn trust — and eventually drive action from inside the organisation I had spent years studying.
Built the qualitative research team from 3 to 10, combining junior and senior talent and creating hands-on ways to strengthen judgement: recruitment puzzles to sharpen screener logic, movie-analysis workshops to practise concise storytelling, and group critiques of past work.
The craft scales when you stop being the only person practising it well.
Flipkart became much more than an account. I worked across most of its major categories — mobiles, furniture, baby care and toys, grocery, large and small appliances — and grew from research supplier to trusted partner.
That work included category Usage & Attitude studies, research into the influencer economy in 2019–20, mobile gaming and gamification, and a major brand equity and positioning programme that helped shape Flipkart's focus on “Bharat.”
The clearest proof of the partnership? Flipkart eventually hired me to join the organisation.
Once inside, the research study stopped being the centre of the universe. I could combine primary research with internal analytics, category data, behavioural signals, stakeholder knowledge and market evidence. There was no hierarchy to where insight came from; the question was what combination of evidence would get us closer to the right action.
Led large-scale segmentation programmes across Mobiles, Large Appliances and Small Appliances. In Mobiles, I challenged a segmentation that was difficult to activate, reframed it around price and Tech Quotient, mapped the external segments to Flipkart's own shopper database, and worked with analytics and product teams to turn those segments into experiments and personalised interventions.
Research into premium mobile shoppers moved beyond describing the audience to shaping the shopping experience for them. The work informed a dedicated premium-store proposition and the content, information and experience cues needed to make Flipkart more credible for high-value mobile purchases.
Studied what physical retail gave shoppers that online commerce did not and translated those gaps into product opportunities. This body of work fed into FSUP and related interventions spanning assisted shopping, vernacular voice, product comparison, AR/Flipkart Camera and richer premium-shopping experiences.
Launched periodic brand tracks across Mobiles, Large Appliances, Small Appliances, Furniture, Beauty, Grooming and General Merchandise, evaluating the purchase funnel against key competitors and giving teams a recurring view of category health.
Worked with analytics and product teams to cluster the last six months of Flipkart mobile shoppers using variables from the external segmentation, map the two worlds, and validate the mapping through experiments such as personalised communication and feature highlighting.
Ran workshops with category, brand and design teams to prioritise what should be actioned, turning a large research programme into usable segment frameworks, ready reckoners, product concepts and business decisions rather than leaving it as a report.
One mobile programme moved from segmentation → concepts → evaluation → launch.
Research became less about delivering the answer and more about creating the conditions for something to happen.
2022
After twelve years of researching people, brands and products, I took a sabbatical because I simply wanted to learn how to make furniture.
I could picture what I wanted to create. But carpenters worked in materials, joints, dimensions and mechanics, a language I did not understand. To translate an idea into something buildable, I had to understand enough of their world to collaborate with them — without pretending to become the expert.
I thought I was learning to make furniture. I was also learning how to work meaningfully in a world whose technical language was not mine. A few months later, that lesson became unexpectedly useful.
2022–Present
I moved into product building just as technology itself was changing. Research became a way to explore experiences that did not yet exist — while keeping human needs, trust and value at the centre of increasingly intelligent systems.
I entered a world of engineers speaking CSS, Java, Python, APIs and ALM. The furniture lesson returned: I did not need to become an engineer, but I needed enough technical fluency to ask better questions and collaborate credibly.
I built the Power Pages research function at IDC and helped lead the product into AI — from low-code/no-code towards Copilot, vibe coding, smart-code and agentic experiences — across makers, professional developers, admins and end-browsers.
ALM · Security mindset among low-code/no-code makers · AI in security management · Tech inertia through COM-B · Pro-code → low-code · Continuous Power Pages diagnostics across onboarding, adoption blockers, Copilot, Design Studio and feature discovery.
Created ResearCharan to demystify research for PMs, EMs and Designers; founded the UXR Chaat Room to connect researchers across Microsoft India; experimented with creative participant recruitment; and brought behavioural frameworks such as COM-B, Maslow, AIDA and TAM into product conversations.
The question evolved again. Once organisations can build AI, how do they know it matters?
My work examines how partners and customers move AI from ambition to implementation: AI value, ROI and baselines; adoption and measurement; AI Control Tower; Agent Studio; POC-to-production economics; governance; trust; evaluation signals and the metrics that make an AI investment defensible.
“Can we build it?” eventually becomes: “Should we build it this way, on this platform, at this cost — and how will we know it worked?”
I’ve always enjoyed taking what I learn in practice back into the classroom — making research less abstract and sharing the things the work teaches you that textbooks often cannot.
Over the years, I’ve been invited to give guest lectures and talks at Christ University, St. Joseph’s, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) and IIM Bangalore, across classrooms, student groups, panels and larger-stage sessions.
The subjects have evolved with my own career — from research craft and consumer understanding to storytelling, influence, product research and AI.
One of the best ways to sharpen your own thinking is to explain it to someone encountering it for the first time.
Ask the journey
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The spine
The methods changed. The problems changed. The technology changed. The job remained remarkably consistent: understand people well enough to make better decisions.