Product Management in India is set to grow exponentially. Here’s why.
We are at the cusp of a new decade. What does the 2020–29 decade hold for Product Management in India? Let’s look at some of the macro trends that are driving the demand for Product Management roles in India.
Startups — In India for India
In the last decade, the valuation of Indian startups has grown from about $2 billion to $100 billion delivering handsome gains to angel investors and more importantly changing how Indians consume everyday products and services.
This transformation in the last decade isn’t surprising given that India has around 600 million internet users, the largest after China, and about 150 million of them transact online. These numbers are only expected to grow in the next decade driven by a large proportion of young population and less than 50% penetration.
There are about 9000 tech startups in India today with 1300 of them added in 2019 alone. These startups have created 60,000 direct jobs. While it will take time for these startups to mature to an optimal engineer to PM ratio of 7:1, the demand for Product Managers can only accelerate as these startups scale up. 27 of these startups have scaled to unicorn status ($1 billion valuation) in the last decade, where none existed before 2014.
Venture backed startups are quick to hire top talent including Product Managers who can bring know-how that connects the bottom line to specific product features. Investors often help startups in hiring the leadership team including product leaders who can institute the best practices to scale the business from 1x to 10x and beyond. Startups also offer the potential for Product Managers to climb the career ladder from segment P&L leadership all the way up to CEO roles.
SAAS Startups — From India to the world
Customers worldwide are increasingly adopting the best cloud services irrespective of their country of origin. This bodes well for Indian SAAS startups like Freshworks, Clevertap and HappyFox as they are able to capitalize on a rich talent base. In fact a Google and Accel report predicts Indian SAAS market to grow to $10 billion annual revenue by 2025. SAAS businesses earn annual recurring revenue and can be extremely profitable. With Google, Microsoft and Amazon competing with each other and offering incentives for SAAS startups in India to use their respective cloud services, the uptick of this segment is pretty much guaranteed. Here’s a list of some of the best SAAS startups in India.
SAAS startups are often B2B companies and Product Managers who can understand sales and Go-to-market strategies will do well in this space.
Multinationals — From the world to India
Many multinationals are now seeing customer uptick in the Indian market. The OTT boom in India has made AWS the de facto standard for media streaming in India. E-commerce has seen fierce battle between Walmart owned Flipkart and Amazon in India. Microsoft and Jio announced a long term partnership centered around Azure services for the Indian market. Many of these services need customization for Indian market and Indian languages. This is likely to see increased demand for Product Managers from these multinationals in India.
The unique nature of the Indian market and the multinationals’ HQ-centered org structures means that multinationals are likely to be fast-followers than leaders in India and will increasingly adopt the inorganic (M&A) route to gain market share here. We are also seeing corporate venture capital activity in India with Intel Capital, Cisco investments, Microsoft for Startups program and Google’s direct investment in Indian startups picking up.
Multinationals bring long-honed Product management structures from US to their Indian R&D centers, employing a large number of Product Managers in India who are increasingly building products and services for the Indian market.
Conclusion
The three macro trends outlined here point to a boom in Tech Product Industry in India which is likely to drive up the demand for Product Managers many-fold. The supply side is highly constrained as product management cannot be taught easily unlike some of the technical subjects. With exploding demand and constrained supply, Product Managers will likely see good times ahead.
Understanding how to rally cross functional teams to deliver customer value and being able to connect financial metrics to actual product features will help Product Managers be successful and leapfrog India to product technology leadership in the coming decade.
