iSPIRT’s Playbook roundtable at Chennai puts a perspective on the product manager

It was a secret cult meeting or resembled one. The OrangeScape office in Chennai on June 8, 2013 played host to iSPIRT’s Playbook Roundtable on product management attended by about 10 product entrepreneurs, some with their team. It is still difficult to find product managers with the right skill sets in India. Despite the evolution of the product ecosystem, talent remains a key challenge for product companies as Indian software services companies -- a majority, continue to train people in a services framework. Given this scenario, it would be difficult to sculpt a product manager out of a “project manager”.

iSPIRT, the think tank for product technology companies, is engaged in a playbook model to help entrepreneurs learn from each other’s successes as well as from experts. According to iSPIRT fellow Avinash Raghava, “We are doing Playbooks as of now in the following three areas: product management, sales, and positioning & messaging.” He adds, “Product companies need deep technologists rather than fungible engineers. These roundtables will be the platform for enabling crucial conversations around these issues amongst practitioners.”

In the Chennai meeting, Sridhar Ranganathan, a product manager formerly with Zoho, Yahoo!, and InMobi, gave a low down on what it takes to build products. Quoting anecdotes extensively from his experience as a product manager, he crisply articulated the necessary traits of a product manager. Sridhar could be termed an accidental product manager. He went through a gruelling time initially unable to understand the paradigms of product building. But now he has proved that it is the approach and thinking that defines a product manager rather than exquisite coding talent. Given that his three experiences a product manager are different, it is obvious that product management demands a wide array of skills including customer expectation management, product design and execution, and diplomatic skills to negotiate with various stakeholders.

Suresh Sambandam of OrangeScape faces a crucial challenge now felt by almost all growing product companies. They need a good product manager or a bunch of them to manage their expanding product portfolio or focus on existing products. In most cases like OrangeScape, the founders play the role of product mangers. How do they pass on the baton to the new product managers, who need to be groomed as they are not readily available?

Sridhar gave defining characteristics of product managers. He said that the fundamental role of the product manager is to identify the product that has the maximum probability of success. He feels the right product manager aligns with the vision of the company and has the potential to grow with the company. The product manager has an unenviable task of earning the trust of the founders to be effective in his job. Negotiating with customers and managing the team of developers, designers, and engineers in creative ways is another part of the job. In most organizations, as participants themselves knew and Sridhar emphasized, the team members are not direct reports of the product manager. “Influence without authority” is another key attribute required of a product manager in managing a team over which he or she has no hierarchical authority.

He emphasized on the importance of data in providing direction to building a good or great product. The business model of an organization is dependent upon “the core data model and the technology stack used to build the product,” Sridhar pointed out. Then it takes discipline to build a vibrant product culture. Sridhar went through three different experiences as a product manager. Build time targets, customer complaint resolution, and right coding were practiced at Zoho. Strategically thinking on where to invest and where to provide value proved to be the clinching factor at InMobi. At Yahoo!, building user base was the focus.

Then discussions revolved around various queries from participants such as finding the right product manager, how to pass the baton from founders to product managers, product managers at different levels of the product lifecycle, what should be the product manager’s focus, how should discipline of build and release built in, adding features to a product, and even on two-way markets (such as when there are one set of users who pay and another free set of users whose feedback could be used to enhance the features).

George Vettah quoted a study that said product managers have “middle brain” thinking. Usually people are identified by their creative (right brain) or analytical thinking (left brain) capabilities. But a product manager should have a balance of both. Sridhar concluded by saying that a product manager’s job is cerebral as it involves a lot of thinking and analysis. Suresh felt the Playbook roundtable should have case study discussions to enhance its effectiveness.

Participating organizations: OrangeScape (Suresh Sambandam and team), Fresh Desk (Smrithi, product manager), Kallos (George Vettah), LPCube (Lakshman Pillai), Array Shield (Vasanthan Kumar), ContractIQ (Ashwin), Twenty19.com (Karthikeyan Vijayakumar), RailsFactory (Mahendran), Fix Nix (Shanmugavel and team), Social Beat (Suneil Chawla), and Humble Paper (Vivek Durai).