The product management is a new entity in most Indian IT companies. As product management roles are getting created there is enough confusion in at the organizations to define the product management function. The other day I sat through a workshop on product management conducted by NASSCOM to discuss the same issue among a couple of business heads of various organizations. Shockingly the discussion was heading nowhere. Rightly, expected though... I am expressing my views on product management and why I feel it is designed to be challenging for Indian IT industry at large.
Product Management is a Business Role
The first and more most thing a product manager will find it challenging in India is everyone else knows what she needs to do other than she herself :-(. The organizational roles can be seen into two different classes - functional and business roles. The functional roles are defined on what a person needs to make it a success in his / her scope of activities. For example, the developers need to write code, testers should test it so that the quality objectives are to be met. But business roles are different. Business roles are aspects where the outcome is known but the means. Lets ask a simple question, what is the CEOs role in an organization. I will be very surprised if CEOs success formula can be written in functional 10 points. Rather the CEOs objectives are written on a business outcome basis. Similarly, a product manager is a mini-CEO for her product. The product success in its defined vision and goals is the single metric for a product manager success. Does your organization understand this concept? If not I guess it's not worth investing in product management as such.
Who should Product Management Report to?
This is typical of cost center oriented management in Indian IT industry is constantly struggling with this. In a production line it's natural the information has to flow down from a manager to the reportee. However, in a matrix structure like Product Management it's natural to have an entry level Product Manager have more business information than an engineering head. At some level in Indian IT industry is struggling in accepting these facts. Interestingly, customer and revenue information is expected for Product Management to be aware of but functional management positions need not be aware of such information. Some organizations in the Indian IT industry is not comfortable sharing these information with the product management function as the managers who they report to in the organizations are not party to such information. Ideally Product Management should functionally report to a business role and not to a functional manager to avoid such influences.
Should Product Management be there where the Customer is?
There was a time in production industry the belief was that the production base must be set up where raw material is to reduce material handling costs. Today the production centers are there where the cheapest labor is and not the raw material. Product Management is a decision making function. In today's fast communication world the decision making function can be anywhere where there is availability of business decision makers. Collection of customer intelligence can be a proxy operation. Conducting market research or direct interaction with the customer are not the only means to gather intelligence. Done effectively a network can be set up which can gather functional needs of the customers and provide inroads to customer expectations. When consumer product firms set up operations in countries like India and China, they need not have to set up large decision making units in these countries but hired mostly staff to run operations.
Overall, for product management to be successful in Indian IT industries the organizations have to bring in a bit of profit center orientation. Without that thought process the organizations will define a functional role like: Systems Analyst, Business Analyst, Technical Evangelist for a product manager.
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