About

I’m Yatin Patel, Senior Director of Product Management, Customer Experience and Mobile App at Hertz. I lead Customer Care product, the Hertz app and Hertz Premier Curbside, with a team of four product managers across the US and India.

I own Hertz’s AI chat and voice program, built with Decagon, and Hertz’s strategy for AI assistants, starting with the Hertz app in ChatGPT. I built the first digital product for Hertz Premier Curbside from zero.

Before Hertz, I was a Principal Product Manager for last-mile gig delivery at Walmart. Before that, I spent more than six years at Allstate, first as a software engineer and then as a product manager on digital claims. Before any of it, I worked in retail sales at Walmart and AT&T while I studied computer science.

I build with AI every day, and I hand the tools to my team. I try to report results the way they happened, including the parts that didn’t work.

I live in the Chicago area. I speak English, Gujarati and Hindi.

All paths lead to Y.

Why people call me Tinman

My name is Ya-tin. In 2007, my high-school varsity volleyball coach, Keith Foster, started calling me “Tin”. I had a strong serve, and when I landed an ace he’d shout, “You the man, Tin man!”

The name stuck. Nearly 20 years later, people still call me Tinman, and it’s in my handles to this day. You can call me Tin.

Thanks, Coach Foster. He still coaches: he is head coach at Genoa-Kingston High School, which won the 2022 state title, and he runs Aggression VBC.

A business of my own

From 2020 to 2023, alongside my day job, I founded and ran Kiraana Delivery, an online Indian grocery delivery business in Atlanta.