Wanted alive and kicking: The new-age product manager

: At the annual campus hiring ritual at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) this year, the rather ubiquitous profile of product manager stood out but with a more evolved job definition. Software companies, consultancies, consumer firms and startups prowled engineering and business schools for potential product managers who can go beyond the traditional requirements of the role. New product manager hires from the IITs are being offered annual salaries of 25-45 lakh, according to their placement officers.

Companies hiring senior PMs from rivals or other sectors pay 1. 5 crore, or even more, said executives at recruitment firms. What’s driving the increasing demand is that over the past co e of years, companies have been pushed to come up with niche product lines that can help them stand apart in clogged markets, say recruiters.

What this means for a new generation of product managers is that they are also required to be data mining experts, able to evaluate social-economic trends and behaviour patterns of consumers, and estimate likely changes in purchasing power. The role’s demand has amplified as companies now need managers who can work around how consumption patterns in India are changing with exposure to global products and availability, said recruiters. Product managers also need to have AI and full-stack domain knowledge.

“Depending upon the sector they are picking up, innovative approach and domain knowledge with a fair understanding of operational processes are important skills that firms are looking for,” said Brajesh Singh, president at consulting firm Arthur D Little India, which was among the companies that beelined to the IITs this year to recruit product managers. In a consulting company, a product manager would have to focus on developing solutions and services that can be customised for different kinds of clients in the same sector, Singh said. He didn’t provide details on how many PMs the firm has so far recruited from the IITs this year.

E-commerce firm Flipkart and Ola Group, which houses electric two-wheeler company Ola Electric and a ride-hailing app, and several other large companies have been scouting for product managers this year, according to placement officers across the IITs. “They are coming up with a line of new products and have very clear differentiation needs. They want students who can use digital skill sets to analyse the data and come up with a plan,” said a placement officer at a leading IIT.

“There are separate business channels now for B2C (business to consumer) and B2B (business to business) markets for the same product,” said Kamal Karanth, co-founder of Xpheno, a recruitment firm focused on tech and startup hiring. “We are placing product heads for 80 lakh- 1 crore. ” As per Xpheno’s data, the talent pool for product managers in Indian firms registered the highest annual growth as compared with other countries.

India, standing at third position after the US and China in terms of size of active and accessible managers, has seen a 6% growth over the past 12 months, according to data from Xpheno. “The product managers’ talent pool in software product cohorts has grown by 25%, followed by the IT services cohort at 17%,” Karanth said. “The growth in the startups cohort has remained relatively low at 2% over the year.

” Even in sectors such as agriculture, demand for specialist product managers is on the rise. “There are too many me-too products in the market and we need a differentiator. Instead of hiring generalists, we look at candidates who understand crops, climatic requirements and farmer prosperity,” said Sanjay S Singh, chief human resources officer at UPL Ltd, a producer of agrochemicals and industrial chemicals.

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