International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA) Summit

I attended the Indian Software Product Management Summit 2020 at IIMB on the Jan 17th and 18th. The summit was very well planned and there were some very interesting panel discussions and presentations from Professors and experience Product Management professionals. There were a lot of important takeaways, as well as rehashing of Product Management concepts.

Day 1

There were some very familiar faces – Prof. S. Sadagopan (Director, IIT Bangalore) kicked off the proceedings on Friday morning in his usual, inimitable hyper-active style, with a captivating talk about how the journey of software product building started from the late sixties in India and how Product Management has evolved into a discipline now, and he took several examples of Indian failures and successes. He ended the talk with a promising prognosis that India will be a strong product building nation in the coming 10-20 years, as all ingredients are in place now.

Professor Payal Arora of Erasmus University, Rotterdam followed with an interesting talk on “Tech Design for the next Billion”, indicating how Marslow’s pyramid of needs has or needs to be overturned, and how to build products and market for the growth niches that are in plain sight, but largely ignored through bad design and marketing. She stressed on design with empathy as a way to target this audience. She also played an interesting video on the “Build trap” concept of Melissa Peri, and well known Product Management professional, where companies in their growth phase often get into the cycle of building out everything asked for by high ranking stakeholders, without questioning them, version after version, leading into unsustainability in 5-10 years. She stressed on taking a step back and thinking about what to build and why.

Next up was a Panel Discussion on Innovation and Product Management, moderated by Prof Rishikesha.T.Krishnan, Professor of Strategy at IIMB. The panelists were Product Management professionals and startup founders. There was not a lot of insights, however, the general consensus was that Product Management and innovation disciplines were not orthogonal in purpose, on the contrary, Product Management can channel innovation to be more impactful.

In the afternoon, there was a keynote by Sindhu Gangadharan, SVP and MD of SAP Labs, India. She started her professional journey as a Product Manager, now she is a hugely respected and influential presence in SAP global . Sindhu talked about the well known product management concepts – underlying confluence of Maximizing CLV, minimizing Customer Acquisition cost, and the maintaining Agility to stay ahead of competition.

Later in the day, we had presentations from finalists of Product excellence awards. The most interesting ones were from Citrix, SAP and Intuit teams.

Citrix gave a presentation on Citrix ADM and how they achieved transformative double digit growth in a mature product by focusing on the following tenets –

The set yearly achievement OKRs on:

A. Quality focus – E-brake on new feature releases, early maintenance launches, Weekly WAR meetings

B. Focus on Business goals – Tracked weekly growth, Identify deviations, Course corrections

C. Adoption – Freemium tier (very interesting), White glove service, Sales enablement focus

D. Licensing enhancements – Hybrid licensing and License bundling (with other Citrix synergy products)

SAP’s Divya Sharma gave an interesting presentation on how they went about building the RASD (Release Assessment and Scope Dependency tools). This was a completely home grown (India) initiative, where the idea came out of an ideation competition, and was then supported through by the Innovation department in SAP, and finally released in August 19, and customer can’t have enough of it, according to Divya.

Intuit Quickbooks product management team gave a presentation on how they have put the customer front and center. Intuit founder Scott Cook, is a well-known advocate of customer driven innovation. The team narrated and anecdote how Scott stalked customers from the TurboTax retail stores to their houses to see how they were using the product. Intuit takes customer interviews to the extreme, with all Product Managers making customer visits mandatory especially during PM initiation, with on guy visiting over 800 customers in a year. They have a simple validation process, for product ideas

A) Find an important unsolved customer problem

B) That we and those we enable can solve well

C) and build durable competitive advantage

followed by D4D – Design for Delight which are as follows (hopefully self-explanatory)

1) Deep customer empathy 2) Go broad to go narrow 3) Rapid experimentation with customer

Professor Georg Herzwurm, from University of Stuttgart, gave a very interesting lecture on the importance of Platform, and how Products and Services are now replaced by Platform, and how Product teams need to understand and embrace this new reality. He explained how Platforms beget communities, and how products need to be more open and optimized for external servicing.

Day 2

The morning session was kicked off by Professor Greg Coticchia, Dean of M.S Program in Product Management at Carnegie Mellon University, a one of its kind program. He gave an engaging lecture on How and Why it is important for Product people to continue to learn. He explained that >57% of Product Managers do not have a formal Product Management training, and PM’s learn through the struggle (it’s like ‘Self-taught doctor’), when there are easier options – formal training, books, online free programs, blogs, etc. He also said that he believes, that for Product Managers, Product Management process knowledge is far more important than domain knowledge, and that’s what he stresses on while interviewing prospects. There was quite a bit of dissent on this last statement from practicing Product Managers in the room.

The final interesting session of the day was by Prof. Hans Bernard Kittlaus, Chairman of ISPMA, who gave a great lecture on Product models for Product Managers, especially for MVP definition. He introduced the concept of Vendor Controlled (usually B2C) and customer controlled (usually B2B) release models, and Product release models – Powerboat, Speedboat, Icebreaker and Cruise Ship. Keeping it short – in the B2B environment

For New products, follow the Icebreaker mode, where initial few customers (and regulations) will dictate all the requirements, and we have to build them out in as generic a manner as possible, even though it may take longer to build. This step ensures the success of the product in years to come. Its important that these customer are taken into confidence, and fully understands the long terms perspective.

For existing products enhancements, follow the Cruise ship model, where the focus is on expanding the target market. In cruise ship mode, the number of releases per year are 1 or maximum 2, since customers don’t want to test and install often.

Key learnings –

1) Empathy with end users in product design and user experience is extremely important for product success today, whether B2B or B2C. We have to wear the users hat.

2) Most startups moves from engineering led to sales led to product management led stages in their discovery journey even today. However, Product Management diligence brings long term benefits to the product organization, such as not getting into the “Build Trap”

3) Platform can be ignored at your own peril

4) Product Management practices can reduce product and market risks for a startup as well as established products, by following the right model.