As India sees a surge in innovation and product-based companies, there is an acute skills shortage that needs to be bridged to grow the product ecosystem at scale.
“Product management is a fairly new skill with more and more product companies getting developed in India. Many product companies in the US and other parts of the world are also setting up their offshore development centres in India. Hence, there is a surge in demand for product management specialists, which was earlier not there in the typical model of IT services setup,” said Aditya Narayan Mishra, managing director and CEO, CIEL HR Services.
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According to Nasscom, India has about 12,000 tech startups, of which 3,000 are deep tech startups. By 2026, Nasscom projects that Indian product companies will touch $30 billion in revenue from $13 billion today. In the last few years, a lot of successful SaaS-based product firms have emerged from India. Product startups such as Zoho, Freshworks, Khatabook, Talview and CloudConnect are already building global products from India.
“We have a huge talent gap when it comes to products. This includes areas like product management, design, analytics, product marketing, and product sales. These are the skillsets we need to develop. Our ambition is to have 50,000 product managers from India by 2025,” said Ramkumar Narayanan, chair, Nasscom Product Council.
SaaS unicorn Zoho Corp has an array of more than 100 products under its four divisions: ManageEngine, Zoho.com, Qntrl, and TrainerCentral. Each has a dedicated team of developers, quality assurance professionals, product managers, and product marketers besides sales and support teams.
“Zoho’s hiring is predominantly focused on product-based roles, including developers, designers, product marketers, support engineers, tech writers, product management associates, and sales engineers,” said Rajendran Dandapani, director of Technology, Zoho, and president at Zoho Schools of Learning.
At Neeyamo, a Chennai-based payroll solutions provider, product management skills are paramount as they are delivering services through products built by its own technology arm NeeyamoWorks.
Despite the need for product experts, there is a huge dearth of such skills in the industry for various reasons. “Traditionally, Indian IT ecosystem is driven by project-based services; hence, our talent base built over the years is of one kind. For example, we have developed sufficient talent in project/program management, but product management/development is a different ballgame altogether. It requires lots of research on the product domain, creating a product vision, strategic planning, and managing the product roadmap,” said YY Narayanan, CEO, NeeyamoWorks.
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Dandapani of Zoho agrees that during the IT revolution, India smoothly slipped into being the “back office” of the world of business. “We only groomed such skillsets. It took contrarian thinkers like our CEO Sridhar Vembu to buck that trend and boldly claim that ‘One needn’t be in Silicon Valley to conceive and launch high-tech software products’,” he said.
Training employees on the latest technology and market trends and industry-academia partnerships will be crucial in bridging the skills gap.
Zoho Schools of Learning (ZSL) was started with an objective to bridge the growing gap between industry expectations and readiness of graduate talent. “The idea was to provide a meaningful alternative to conventional education. At ZSL, we have weekly deep-dive sessions where we invite practicing product managers from across the length and breadth of Zoho Corp., to share hard-earned expertise from their product adventures,” said Dandapani.
