Spotlight On: Deepika Manglani
Deepika Manglani, VP of Product & Program Management at the Los Angeles Times, brings experience across IT, product and program management, technology transformation, and business strategy. In this member spotlight, she shares her career journey, leadership experience, perspective on AI, and advice for the next generation of technology leaders.
What Drew Her to Innovate@UCLA
“Innovate@UCLA had been on my radar for over a year before I joined, mostly through my peer group of Technology Executives and the marketing at Gartner CIO conference. I was invited to several events along the way: ELAD, the end-of-year board dinner in 2024, and one time I had accepted but couldn’t make it. So the organization got my attention well before I became part of it.
What ultimately convinced me to join was a conversation with Bhupesh Arora, who was chair at the time. He walked me through the value proposition of being affiliated with UCLA specifically, and how that’s genuinely different from other professional networking organizations: it’s not networking for its own sake; it’s a direct line to UCLA’s researchers and faculty, and a real opportunity to mentor students, alongside building relationships with other members. That’s exactly what I have come to value most. Since joining, that’s translated into action too. I now serve on several committees within Innovate@UCLA, which has been the best way I’ve found to actually live out what convinced me to join in the first place.
And if I’m being honest about what I value most: somewhere on that list is the hope that being a UCLA-affiliated member eventually earns me a tour of that Quantum Innovation Hub I keep hearing about. :)”
The Experiences and Turning Points That Shaped Her Leadership
“During my early career, I made a few pivots within IT before landing at what I enjoy the most – and each one shaped how I lead today.
My years at Tribune were themselves a string of turning points. Over 6-7 years there, I worked on several high-stakes, short-turnaround Transition Services Agreements tied to M&A activity; the kind of work where you’re integrating or separating systems on a hard deadline, with real business continuity on the line and very little room for error. Those projects taught me how to operate under pressure and compress timelines without cutting corners.
Beyond the individual projects, the cultural shift in the experience of moving and working in a new country as a young professional has shaped me just as much, along with a discipline of watching and learning from the mentors I’ve had, both within the organizations I’ve worked at and outside of them.
The defining turning point was 2018, when the Los Angeles Times was divested from Tribune Publishing. I joined the newly independent company to help build our IT and product organization from the ground up, including standing up our own IT infrastructure, acquiring licenses for everything that was needed to run our systems, hiring staff, and migrating over 360 applications, which we completed in about 18 months against an original two-year plan. There was no playbook for that kind of work; it felt more like a start-up. I was making high-stakes calls against the clock, all while continuing to support day-to-day operations, since in our industry every single day is production-critical. That experience is where my leadership philosophy crystallized: a leader is only as successful as their team. It made me far more deliberate about building strong teams, bringing stakeholders in early, and staying focused on the bigger picture when execution gets messy – which it always does.”
Bringing Technology and Business Teams Together
“Alignment isn’t a kickoff meeting or any number of regular meetings; it’s a discipline you reinforce continuously. When I built our Product & Program Management Office at the L.A. Times, we introduced standardized intake requests, resource capacity planning, roadmapping, ROI scorecards, and cross-team release coordination across more than 250+ active applications. That structure did something beyond organizing the work: it gave business stakeholders visibility and a shared vocabulary with technology teams, which is usually where trust breaks down.
Technology teams earn credibility with the business by speaking in outcomes – revenue impact, cost avoidance, risk reduction, operational efficiency – rather than systems and sprints. Business teams, in turn, engage far more meaningfully with technology decisions when they’re brought in early rather than handed a well-drafted plan. Getting that partnership right and the adoption of product-centric Agile practices has led to 20–40% improvements in delivery velocity, faster time-to-market, and higher quality releases across globally distributed teams.”
Where Technology Leaders Can Create Real Business Value with AI
“Most organizations are stuck in what’s being called the “trough of disillusionment” with AI, a huge share of generative AI pilots never reach production, largely because the use case was chosen for the hype rather than the ROI. The leaders pulling ahead aren’t running more pilots; they’re being far more disciplined about which problems they point AI at, and how fast they move from prototype to production.
A good example is a project I led this year with the Google News Initiative and the News Product Alliance: a nine-month collaboration to build a new product for next-gen audiences, which we launched in June, right before Los Angeles hosted the FIFA World Cup. The Times has an existing subscriber-exclusive product of highly curated Guides to local activities and dining. In total, there are over 800 published Guides and 10,000 Points of Interest (restaurants, beaches, bars, hikes, etc.). Each one is visited and vetted by The Times’ food, lifestyle, and travel writers and editors, rather than an anonymous crowd of reviewers. We set out to build an itinerary builder around that content so our next-gen users could easily use and share it: a Save feature to bookmark places to a personal list, and navigation tools with Metro line integration that show transit stops and routes directly alongside each recommendation on the map. NPA coaches trained the newsrooms in our cohort on applying AI, and we used it end-to-end: to generate an interactive prototype we could put in front of college grads for direct feedback before committing engineering resources, to stress-test the technical architecture, and through agentic coding during development. That let us go from concept to launch in under three months. It’s still an MVP, but it proved both the product thesis and a faster, AI-augmented way of building.
The second area where I see real value is applying AI to assets organizations already own but can’t use. We’re using LLMs to digitize and make searchable The Times’ editorial archive, every edition since our first on December 4, 1881, turning 144+ years of reporting into something searchable, connected, and ultimately monetizable.
Looking ahead, we’re now piloting agentic AI for our business users, automating internal business processes, and actively working through what MCPs and connectors we’ll need to build to make that possible. I think that’s where the next real wave of value sits: not just AI-assisted products for readers, but AI that quietly makes the business itself faster to run.”
Advice for Women Looking to Grow and Lead in Technology
“Build sponsors, not just mentors. A mentor gives you advice; a sponsor advocates for you in the room when you’re not there. I’m intentional about this with the women on my teams: putting them up for stretch assignments and leadership programs, not just offering feedback. Structurally, I’ve also found things like “first-voice meetings,” where junior or quieter team members speak before senior leaders weigh in, make a measurable difference in whether women’s ideas actually get heard and credited.
My advice to women earlier in their careers: don’t wait until you feel fully ready to raise your hand for that challenging assignment; very few people ever feel fully ready, and that project is often exactly where you’ll grow the most. Invest in your technical and business credibility in equal measure, because leadership in this field increasingly requires both. And build your community deliberately. Organizations like Innovate@UCLA and SCSIM, where I now serve on the board, have been genuinely valuable to me, not just for the network, but for having people who understand the specific challenges of building a leadership career in technology.”
AI Trailblazer Recognition and the Qualities of Effective Technology Leadership
“It means a great deal – that recognition was specifically for work that holds two things in tension: preserving something irreplaceable about The Times’ history while modernizing how we operate and build products day to day. Seeing that dual approach recognized is validation that you don’t have to choose between innovation and institutional values. It’s recognition that belongs as much to the teams who built this with me as it does to me individually.
As for what makes a technology leader effective today: genuine comfort with ambiguity, because the tools and the “right” answers are shifting every few months; the ability to translate technical complexity into business value that non-technical stakeholders actually act on; and a human-centered instinct, especially with AI, where the leaders who get it right are asking not just “can we automate this” but “should we, and how do we do it responsibly.” I’d add speed paired with discipline: the ability to move from concept to production fast without skipping the rigor that makes something trustworthy. And mentorship and community-building belong on that list too. The leaders I respect most are the ones investing in the next generation of talent, not just their own roadmap.”