Do we even need Product Managers?

Oct 10, 2024

Chandrashekhar Vattikuti, Chief Product Officer at InMobi with a rich background at Yahoo and Microsoft, joins Shreyas Srinivasan, Chief Product Officer at Paytm and founder of Paytm Insider. They delve into the evolving identity crisis facing Product Managers in India, sparked by funding cuts and AI rise. They question the necessity of Product Managers, tracing their transformation from ambiguous roles to structured disciplines. The discussion highlights the balance between data-driven strategies and genuine user experiences in product development.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

Exploring the Essential Role of Product Managers

01:37 • 2min

The Evolving Role of Product Managers

03:11 • 18min

Analyzing Career Satisfaction in Product Management through NPS

21:30 • 2min

Evolving Product Management: Emphasizing User-Centric Design

23:11 • 7min

The Changing Role of Product Management in a Tech-Driven World

30:06 • 4min

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, PMs struggled to explain to people what they actually did. Think about all the people you’d imagine who work at a software company. Marketing. Engineering. Sales. Analytics. Design.

You can explain what they do to your grandmother. However, 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 parents what they 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, more and more leaders are asking the question: Do we even need Product Managers?

In today’s episode of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan interview two accomplished product leaders in India. First, there’s Chandrashekhar Vattikuti (CPO and SVP at InMobi, ex-Yahoo, Microsoft) and Shreyas Srinivasan, Chief Product Officer at Paytm*, and also founder of Paytm Insider. During the discussion, they trace the origin, the evolution and the crisis that Product Management as a career faces in India. They try to figure out why and how Product Management became a science and stopped being an art.

They try to answer what makes a great product manager and how to find one.

And they also ask the question that CEOs and Founders are asking themselves — do we even need Product Managers at all?

Welcome to Episode 13 of Two by Two.

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