Do we even need Product Managers? (Highlights only)

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. But 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.

And they try to answer what makes for a great Product Manager, and how to find them.

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.

Two by Two is also a newsletter, where every Friday short storified version of the latest episode is sent out to subscribers for free. You can sign up for the Two by Two Newsletter here.

(Listen to the free highlights only episode on Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts)

Further reading:

Product Managers used to be creators. Now they are mostly bureaucrats

Who killed the art of Product Management in India?

Who made the Frauduct Manager?

Episode referenced:

Google Pay: Big. Successful. Vulnerable

This episode of Two by Two was researched and produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode. This is a shorter version which contains some of the most interesting part of the close to 90 minute full episode available only to the Premium subscribers of The Ken and on Apple podcasts with a separate monthly subscription.

New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and tell us what you think of the show. You can write to us at [email protected].

*Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an investor in The Ken.