Product Management in Indian Cities: An Observational Humor

#hiring market is really tough for #productmanagement. You now need 1420 years to become a senior #productmanager. Also they want 'visionary' folks who probably will be asked to make #prd based on requirements coming from senior management. Why is there such a huge difference in experience in product management in India compared to what happens in Silicon Valley as we read in books like Marty Cagan's book 'Inspired' ? Obviously if you make a 'visionary' #productmanager role like a #productowner or #programmanager role it can get replaced by AI. Proper senior product management roles can never get replaced because there is no right or wrong answer when you are building 'solution space' from 'problem space'. But then if you look for someone with an exact domain match in your B2C or B2B company (who has already built 'features' you want to build) with a super high years of experience, then you will have to either spend 1420 years finding that 'match' or hire a 1420 years old vampire PM or ultimately follow the generative AI trends. It's time to merge the gap between a #productmanagement interview expectations and real-life product management experience. Will you ever let a PM implement any moonshot idea even if he/she can validate that ? Then why do you expect moonshot solutions to gauge a candidate's 'visionary' thinking process during #interview ??

I recently met a person in Bangalore earning 1.5 Cr as VP of Product Management. 5 things which will help you if you are a aspiring Product Manager 5. Learn to say “No.” As a new PM, you will get many feature suggestions from different stakeholders. Understand the requirement and Product vision, then prioritize accordingly. 4. Great Product Managers believe in not putting many features in a Product because adding them will make your product complex (Only for B2C business). End goal of the product is to give a great experience to the user. 3. Communication is a very very important thing for Product Managers because you have to present the work of your developers to senior management. 2. Great Product managers always use their Product Like a user so that they can understand the pain points of their users and then solve accordingly. 1. If you are an aspiring product Manager, you must have a good grasp of software testing and Documentation at the start, which will help you a lot when entering this field. What challenges are you facing in moving back to India?

The Product Manager role hiring scene in India feels off. I was scrolling through PM's JDs on Linkedin recently. And honestly, it's wild. ~ 80% expect you to 'own product strategy', even for entry level roles. ~30% want PMs who can code. ~ 95% say 'data driven decision making'. but ... only ~15% mention 'user empathy'. We PMs are meant to understand people and ship products that make a difference. but... somewhere along the way, we stopped hiring PROBLEM SOLVERS. And started hiring CHECKLISTS. What do you think? 👀 #ProductManagement

The biggest lie told to aspiring Product Managers. "You don't need technical skills to be a great PM." 80% Aspiring PMs believe this myth. Then they get into real PM roles and struggle for 6-12 months before getting fired or quitting. A Senior PM at Flipkart told me: "Non-technical PMs spend 70% of their time asking developers to explain things instead of solving user problems." 5 Technical Skills Every PM Must Learn: 5️. AI Agents :You must know how to build AI agents using no-code tools. 4️. API Understanding: Know how your product talks to other systems. Critical for integrations, partnerships, and technical product decisions. 3️. System Design Fundamentals: Understand scalability, databases, and architecture. Helps you make better product decisions that won't break at scale. 2️. Analytics Implementation: Know how tracking works, what events to capture, and how to set up proper measurement frameworks. 1️. Basic Coding Logic: Don't need to code, but understand if-then logic, loops, and data structures. Helps you think like engineers and communicate better. 𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿, 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗺𝗲. 𝗜’𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗼𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆.

Scrolling through Product Manager job descriptions in India lately has been… eye-opening. 👀 It’s wild out there: ~80% expect you to own product strategy — even for entry-level roles. ~30% want PMs who can code. ~95% ask for data-driven decision-making. But only ~15% mention user empathy. Somewhere along the way, we stopped hiring problem solvers… and started hiring checklists. PMs aren’t supposed to just crunch dashboards or write PRDs. We’re meant to understand people. To solve real pain points. To build products that actually matter. The role hasn’t gone off track — the hiring philosophy has. #ProductManagement #Hiring #UserEmpathy #TechCareers

💭 A question for every Product Manager in India — across every industry. Imagine this 👇 Every Indian citizen aged 18 and above — all 1 billion+ of us — step out on the same day, with one simple mission: 🧹 Clean the roads of India. Now think about it — How long would it actually take to clean the entire nation? A few hours? A day? A week? Or would it become another coordination and execution nightmare? Because this question isn’t really about cleaning roads. It’s about scale, system design, and human behaviour — the same fundamentals every Product Manager faces daily. As PMs, we know: Awareness ≠ Action Ownership ≠ Execution Motivation without systems → chaos So, if this were your product challenge, how would you approach it? 🔹 How do you design for 1 billion+ users? 🔹 What would your onboarding journey look like? 🔹 What incentives or triggers would you use to drive consistent action? 🔹 What would be your metrics of success? 🔹 And most importantly — how do you turn a one-day event into a long-term movement? For context: India’s adult (18+) population is now estimated at around 1 billion people — nearly 70% of our total 1.4B citizens. That’s the largest potential “user base” any product or movement could ever dream of. 🇮🇳 So I’m throwing this question open to the PM community: 👉 If you were to design “Clean India” as a scalable product, how would you do it? Drop your frameworks, ideas, and wild thoughts below 👇 Let’s make this the biggest product thought experiment on civic transformation this year. #ProductManagement #SystemDesign #BehaviourChange #India #Leadership #CivicTech #DesignThinking #Innovation

“India is no longer a back office — it’s a product powerhouse.” Over the past few years, global companies have realized that India isn’t just a place to execute tasks — it’s a place to build products that impact the world. Here are five companies that are expanding their Product Management teams in India right now: Google – Investing billions in India, building teams that focus on cutting-edge infrastructure and global product strategy. Salesforce – Growing its footprint across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurgaon, working on cloud solutions and enterprise products. Apple – Bengaluru and Hyderabad offices are central to software engineering, operations, and product testing for global launches. Meta – Expanding PM and engineering teams in India, shaping global features and experiences. Flipkart – Homegrown but global-minded, offering PM roles that directly impact millions of users every day. These companies aren’t just outsourcing work — they’re trusting India to lead product innovation for global markets.                                                                                                                           

I recently attended a Product Management session Product Design and Management, IIIT Hyderabad, and it really helped me understand more about what being a PM truly means. I realized that Product Management isn’t just about building features — it’s about finding the right problems, understanding who faces them, and solving them in ways that create real impact. Some key frameworks that stood out to me: * RICE – Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort * MoSCoW – Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have * Kano Model and Value vs Effort We also explored case studies like: 1) Improving retention in a student learning app (10K active users) 2) Measuring success for a food delivery app using AARRR, HEART, and North Star Metrics This session made me appreciate how structured thinking and empathy come together in Product Management. Thank you so much Isha Aishwarya for such an insightful session! #ProductManagement #Preptales #IIITHyderabad #LearningByDoing #PMJourney Tejeswara Rao Paila Chandra kanth Reddy Kishore Naidu SanapathiShada Praneeth Reddy Satya Pavan ↗️

Looking for your next Product Manager role and not sure how to stand out? 😰 This is basic but bear with me: Be specific 🤓 If your resume or LinkedIn headline just says “Product Manager,” you’re blending in with thousands of others who do the same 🫣 What will actually get the right eyes on your resume or profile? 🤨 Clarity about what you’ve owned and delivered 😌 When reviewing candidates for PM roles, hiring teams want to know: ✅ What type of product or feature you’ve led (internal tools, mobile, web, etc) ✅Customer or user group you built for (SMBs, enterprise, developers) ✅Scope and outcomes (Revenue driven? Churn reduced? Launch 0-1?) ✅Squad structure (like cross-functional partners, engineers, designers, data, marketing, etc) Instead of this 👇🏻 “Responsible for driving growth across multiple products” Try this 👇🏻 “Lead a 5 person squad (eng, design, data) focused on onboarding flows for our B2B SaaS platform, reduced drop-off by 25%, and improved activation rate by 10%” The first sentence reads like a job description 📝 The second sentence tells a whole story that shows *how* you align with the job description 📖 Specificity is your best differentiator 🫵🏻 It helps recruiters find you, hiring managers see the impact you could have on their team, and your peers see you as a valuable addition 🤝 #ProductManagement #CareerTips #JobSearch #Hiring #ProductManager

✨ 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 — 𝐁𝐞𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐑𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐀𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 Over the past few weeks at Product Space, I got to work on one of the most important parts of PM interview preparation — solving Product Thinking Assignments that test how you think, not just what you know. These typically fall into three buckets every aspiring Product Manager should master 👇 𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬 (𝐑𝐂𝐀) Example: Netflix sees a 10% drop in Average View Duration — find out why. Here, it’s not about guessing one reason — it’s about breaking the problem down systematically: * Clarify the product & metric definition * Analyze external vs internal causes * Validate with data and user behavior  Every RCA question tests how deeply you can reason through ambiguity and isolate signal from noise. 𝐆𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 Example: Estimate the number of quick commerce orders in Bangalore (2025). It’s a logic + structure test — not math. By segmenting the population, applying adoption assumptions, and modeling user frequency, I arrived at ~134M annual orders. The goal isn’t accuracy — it’s to demonstrate how you can think in systems and defend assumptions clearly. 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 Example: Design an on-demand home service product. Here, the goal is to translate user pain points into a clear, focused MVP. I designed a mobile-first “60-Minute Fix” platform focusing on: * Verified professionals (trust) * Transparent pricing * Real-time ETA tracking These mirror how real PMs balance desirability, feasibility, and viability. 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫: They test the full spectrum of product thinking — problem understanding, prioritization, data reasoning, and user empathy. A big thanks to Product Space and our mentor Akhil Yash Tiwari and to my incredible cohort for the collaboration and energy throughout Ayush Tiwari ,AYUSH JAIN ,Ayush Thakur , Pranav Joshi , Aditi Sati ,Keerthana K ,Kashish Bhatnagar ,Brita Shah ,Preetish S. ,Uditi Deepa Arora ,Hithesh Cariappa. #ProductManagement #ProductThinking #PMInterviewPrep #RootCauseAnalysis #Guesstimates #ProductDesign #ProductSpace