Anuj Rathi: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I think that's a very interesting question, and I think about this all the time. When I look at product management in India, and I do have a lot of friends comparing product management versus in US or even in Europe versus even in China, Southeast Asia, et cetera. I think India has had a very interesting journey of products in general and hence, product management also. I think till about 2010-ish, there were not really many products built for the Indian consumers in the first place. There were a lot of products being built, a lot of technology being built, but largely, because it was a back office, so you had a lot of great engineers working in companies which would build products for the American customer or even for the European customer and so on. So once these startups started coming in, which were thinking about building for the Indian consumers, I think we did not really have that talent which we could directly tap into. We're trained into product building. Forget product management as a field in the first place. There were no colleges which were teaching anything about this. There was no playbooks, and so on, and so forth. We would go to the internet, and look at YouTube, and look at SVPG and all of that, but what we would understand would not... you could not put directly to the Indian startups. The way that they shaped up I think also shaped up the way product management field would evolve in India. So it's taken a bunch of iterations, and I think there are two or three different waves that have come in, and we are way closer to how good product management should be done in India. We still have a little bit way to go compared to, say, US. I also think of it along... For example, in US, the product building culture probably started in 1970s, the modern software product building culture, and you didn't only have product manager, but the entire ecosystem... If you think about a company, who is the VP of business, and who is the VP of supply, and sales, and ops, and technology, and all of that? That group knew how to work with each other to build software products. They understood how that would be built and what to expect. I think in India, when we were in 2010, et cetera, even those different people who needed to come together to build, say, e-commerce, they would come from, say, FMCG, or they would come from manufacturing and so on. What they would have seen in their journeys in terms of what we expect is a very request response kind of understanding which is, "Here's machinery. If I give this X resources, I expect, with a little bit of variability, why predictable output will come," and that mentality also moved on to what I expect from product managers or product building journeys and so on. So I think over a period of time, a lot of those cycles have happened, and a lot more other leaders in companies have now seen those cycles and understood, "All right. Now, I understand software is not machinery. ver a period of time, a lot of those cycles have happened, and a lot more other leaders in companies have now seen those cycles and understood, "All right. Now, I understand software is not machinery. Consumers are not predictable as much as we thought." That has led to, now, finally, I think, product management coming of age. You said that, I guess, in the Bay Area, things started 1970s, something like that. When would you say things started to really ramp up in modern product thinking in India?…

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