| Friday, 11 October 2024 |
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
If you are a Product Manager, especially in India, you’re probably going through a crisis of faith and existence.
As a career, Product Management in India has gone through multiple eras—in the early days, Product Managers (PMs) struggled to explain to people what they actually did. Think about all the people you can imagine who work at a software company. Marketing. Engineering. Sales. Analytics. Design. You can explain what they do to your grandmother. But the one exception to the rule is Product Management. It’s the only function where the people who do it struggle to explain to their family what they actually do.
Then suddenly, there was a gold rush when everyone wanted to become a Product Manager. And now, there’s an existential crisis—partly driven by the reduced funding and attrition, the rise of AI, and the changing nature of products themselves.
In this week’s episode of Two by Two, my co-host Rohin Dharmakumar and I interview two accomplished product leaders in India. First, there’s Chandrasekhar Vattikutti (Chief Product Officer and SVP at Inmobi; ex-Yahoo, Microsoft) and Shreyas Srinivasan (Chief Product Officer at Paytm* and founder of Paytm Insider). Over our conversation, we trace the origin, the evolution, and the crisis that Product Management faces as a career in India. We try to figure out why and how Product Management became a science and stopped being an art.
And we try to answer what makes for a great Product Manager, and how to find them.
We also ask ourselves the question that CEOs and founders are asking themselves—do we even need Product Managers at all?
If you have The Ken’s Premium subscription plan, you can listen to the full episode on our app here.
If you are a free or basic subscriber, you can:
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You can also listen to the 30-minute version of this episode here if you want to get a sense of what we discussed:
Product Managers began as the tech version of brand managers
The brand manager of the past was in many ways the product manager of the present. And not long after we began our discussion, Shreyas brought up the rather famous example of Procter and Gamble’s ‘Brand Man’ memo.
(There’s) this very famous memo by Procter and Gamble called Brand Man. This is the first time any organisation brought together a role called brand manager.
Before this memo by this guy called (Neil) McElroy, there was no concept of brand manager. Procter and Gamble had a bunch of brands—a person running a soap brand not only competed with all the other soap brands in the market, but also competed with all the soap brands of Procter and Gamble. Because all they cared about was the product, which is soap, and cared about sales, which is distribution.
The reason why Brand Man, the memo, got so much traction and brand managers became a consistent role in every big brand… Brand managers are the product managers of the non-tech world.
[…]
You need one person who constantly thinks about something—in this case, a product or a brand—and tries to embody what that needs to do and be and make sure there’s not enough internal conflict about that within the company.
Because we always care a lot about competition. But as scale goes up, you have a lot of internal conflict to manage as well, right? That’s the reason some of these internal functions exist.
Why we are drowning in data and not getting any wiser
And then, as tech gave businesses the ability to slice and dice consumer categories and cohorts and track multiple data points, the more ‘artistic’ PMs—those who made decisions based on intuition and taste—had to find patterns that would align with what the data suggested.
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