Product Managers — Domain-specific or agnostic. ProductTank Meetup at Intuit India.

Intuit Product Management team had the opportunity to host the ProductTank Bangalore Meetup group at our India office on a pleasant Friday afternoon, 3rd Aug. We had 52 PMs from more than 30 companies visiting us and sharing their experiences with PM leaders from Intuit, Target and SAP India. Aditya Trivedi from SAP and Anuj Pruthi from Target joined Sundar Balasubramanian, Vivek Raghavan, Nishant Choudhary from Intuit and gave our guests a peek into their professional journeys as Product Managers and leaders.
The topic of this edition of the Meetup was “Product Managers — Domain-specific or agnostic?”.
Are Product Manager skills specific to domain or industry? If yes, in what way? Are there common Product Manager skills that can span across industries?
Event highlights and feedback
This was the published event agenda, going from 3PM to 6PM, following which we had dinner and networking event with the Intuit PMs and our guest speakers.
· Speaker Session — “Preparing for a new PM domain — Learning, unlearning and reinforcing skills” Sundar Balasubramanian, Dir PM (Intuit)
· Panel Discussion “Converging on Product Management as a Career from across roles”. Panelists — Aditya Trivedi, Dir PM (SAP), Anuj Pruthi, Dir Engg (Target), Vivek Raghavan, Group Mgr, PM (Intuit)
· Workshop: “Learning Customer Empathy”, the #1 skill across all the domains and the industries. Nishant Choudhary, Group Mgr, PM (Intuit).

Sundar kicked it off with an awesome take on the topic. If PMs were to be painters, our skills would be the colors and our PM Craft would be the tools and brushes. Then, on the canvases of various domains, what would change is how we mix the colors and what brush do we use. The skills & the craft do remain fungible nevertheless across the industries and domains.

Next up, Aditya, Anuj and Vivek joined in the panel discussion soon after sharing their life journeys especially focusing on the pivotal points where they made the switch first into Product Management and also switch into various domains and industry verticals in their PM leadership journey. Net-net, we took away that deep customer empathy is the #1 skill that helps PMs across any and all domains.

That was a great Segway to our Design4Delight Customer Empathy workshop by Nishant, which focused on sharpening this most critical skillset. Even as the sun was setting outside, the workshop was so interesting that the PMs kept on at it, practicing their D4D customer interview skills way beyond the bell. A thrilling review of this workshop is captured by Suhas Motwani in his post here. (Thanks, Suhas Motwani)!
Three hours of learning and sharing and brain-feeding, and then over a well-earned party for all hosts and guests with dinner and mocktails, we got to know and network with our friends from across dozens of different companies.

The feedback on the day in a nutshell was just AWESOME. The quotes that I took away as the most memorable ones were “Awesome arrangement. One of the best meetups attended” and “I am in love with the Intuit culture already” And our NPS was… 88! The event was a success due to serious active engagement and participation from each of the audience members before during & after the speaking and workshop events. So hats off to all ProductTank PMs.

I heard the echoes of the Intuit way of doing Product Management from my discussions with the visiting dignitaries and fellow PMs and we all went away believing in Design4Delight (D4D) and Customer Driven Innovation (CDI), Intuit’s Design Thinking paradigms.
That ends the post … BUT,
You can read on for the back story and the lead up to the event if you want to …
Product Management in Bangalore and the ProductTank Meetup group.
Product Management as a career choice in Bangalore and other Indian tech-hub cities has taken off in the current decade. It picked up pace from 2010, as India’s tech startups started building products in India for India, AsiaPac and the World. Around the same time, the multi-national giants realized that they could ideate and innovate here, in addition to ‘execute’. The other catalyst has been extremely short and reducing development and product life cycles. As products got developed in weeks, launched in months and sunset in quarters, it made sense to co-locate of Product Management and Design teams with development teams.
At a rough estimate, there are 15K-20K Product Managers in Bangalore’s IT corridors across more than 1500 companies. Some 2500 of us are signed up together on a relatively-new Meetup group called ProductTank Bangalore, which is co-organized by Manish Solanki and Anuj Pruthi in Bangalore with the guidance of the ProductTank and Mind The Product founder, Martin Eriksson.
ProductTank was founded in 2010 in London and today spans over 150 cities with over 100,000 members. It is an informal meetup that brings together the local product community in each of those cities — whether they’re Product Managers, Designers, or Developers — to share their experience and knowledge. ProductTank meetups are always free to attend, organized by volunteers from the local product community, and supported by our generous sponsors.
Lead up to the Meetup

I first met Manish and Anuj, the ProductTank Bangalore organizers, on the previous Meetup at Target India, doing the presentation on “Design Thinking — Challenges and Lessons from Ikea, Ideo, Intuit”. The Meetup group visiting Target India was a really engaging bunch of inquisitive and smart product managers. I was particularly impressed by the Target team for their commitment to helping PMs come together by taking time on a Saturday morning and setting up the stage for a great get together.
Before long, I had made up my mind to bring the next ProductTank Meetup to Intuit and proposed it to my fellow PM Community @ Intuit, who were all excited about getting to meet and network with fellow PMs from industry diverse as FinTech, eCommerce, Telecom, Travel, etc.
We also got tremendous support from the Intuit India central teams that converted our humble meet-in-a-corner-hall-with-coffee event to a world-class mini-conference. Trust Intuit to always do things in style and go the extra mile in making our guests feel absolutely at home!

