At the heart of most startups is the effort around building a product that will stand out in a sea of products and grab the attention of the target audience. Naturally, the maturity of the tech startup ecosystem has seen some world-class products being made in India, but the need now is to move beyond vanity metrics of installs and downloads, and see how products are playing a role in the sustainability of the business.
With the Covid pandemic having stung startups and traditional businesses alike in the past 6-7 months, products have not only become the focal point of innovation but also directly linked to the survival of a company.
That’s why Inc42 and The Product Folks are bringing The Product Summit on October 10 and 11, 2020, with sessions geared around building world-class high-growth products in India for the Indian and the global market. We will be joined by some of the best minds in India’s tech startup ecosystem to figure out the intricacies of product development during the two days of intense discussions, illuminating talks and brainstorming sessions.
Here’s an overview of what you can expect on Day 1 of The Product Summit and what we have planned keeping in mind the needs of entrepreneurs and product owners.
The Growth Mindset
The Product Summit will be opened with a fireside chat with Nithin Kamath — cofounder and CEO of investment tech unicorn Zerodha — on what it takes to engineer hypergrowth in a fast-moving and diverse market like India. The first barrier to engineering hypergrowth is a growth mindset over the typical iteration-led attitude that product managers have.
Kamath will take us through how to cultivate this growth-first mindset in product teams while navigating the complex challenges every startup faces in the Indian market and the art of building world class products.
Defining, Finding, Measuring Product-market Fit And Beyond
Building a great product isn’t enough though — it’s also important to see if it serves the core requirements of the target group and this is where most startups fail. The product-market fit is undoubtedly one of the most important factors that founders and product managers labour to get right and it determines the success or failure of a product at a broader level.
With a rich product background behind them, our speakers will share their journey and talk about the mantras of finding and measuring product-market fit.
Delving into all things about product-market fit will be panellists such as Rahul Ganjoo, Zomato’s product management head, Harsha Kumar, former product head at Ola, and now a VC with Lightspeed India Partners; and BigBasket product head Tejas Vyas.
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Engineering High Growth Product Teams
To continuously iterate on a product and find the right formula to boost engagement, product managers need a high-performance team that’s not only updated on the latest product-building principles but also intensely focussed on changing the status quo.
The Product Summit will bring leaders from some of the most successful products ever to share detailed insights on building the right product teams. Is there a secret to engineering product teams with a growth mindset? What does it take to inculcate a culture of growth hacking and what are the common pitfalls in scaling up the product team?
This panel will have Khilan Haria, the head of payments product at Razorpay; Snehal Patel, who leads the product function in Browserstack; and serial entrepreneur Pallav Nadhani whose startup Fusioncharts was recently acquired by Idera.
Building A Category Shifting Product Against “Edtech Giants”
Defining and crafting value for the users are just two aspects of the product function. Every successful product leader spends considerable time and effort to focus on a third aspect too — packaging and delivering value to users.
For uncovering the strategies that help a startup scale its product at lightning speed, who better to listen to than the startup founder who executed a $300 Mn exit in 17 months from the company’s launch? The fireside chat with WhiteHat Jr founder Karan Bajaj will delve into this and more. Moderated by angel investor and Times Internet strategy head Miten Sampat, who is credited for steering the storied media brand into the digital age, the fireside chat will unveil how some of the most well-thought-out products trigger a positive user experience and how that can be used to grow a startup multifold.
The attendees will also get an insider’s perspective on why user experience matters and what it takes to design brilliant user experiences. We will cover the first principles of user psychology and how successful product folks can leverage UX design to pull the product growth lever.
Building Products For The Next Billion
While we are talking about creating products for businesses going digital, it’s also important to see the future of consumer-facing products, especially for the millions of new users who are discovering the power of the internet for the first time.
The internet has been a constant presence in Tier 1 India for over two decades, but the rest of India has only come online in the past four-five years. So how can product builders approach the so-called ‘next billion users’ from India’s hinterlands and small towns? Will this require going back to the drawing board, or simple tweaks enough to capture this less sophisticated audience?
Our final panel for the day will talk about the business models, opportunities, and challenges when it comes to building products for India’s next billion. With Myntra product head Lalitha Ramani, Sheroes founder Sairee Chahal and Chingari founder Sumit Ghosh being the panelists, expect a heady mix of ideas that would be as diverse as the product building experience in India.
With the onset of liberalisation in the early 90s, India’s IT companies catapulted themselves to the huge services opportunity in the developed world — the nascent sector went on to become one of the biggest contributors to the nation’s economy in the next couple of decades.
In this keynote address, Zoho founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu will speak on how India can transform itself to a product hub — the policies and reforms required to achieve the goal and what should be the role of ecosystem stakeholders such as entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, engineers and the government be.
That’s all for now, stay tuned for Day 2 Agenda! 🙂
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This article is part of The Product Summit 2020, India’s largest virtual product conference which took place on October 10 & October 11, supported by Amplitude, AWS, Dell Technologies, and DigitalOcean.
Missed TPS 2020? To access the exclusive TPS Session recordings, PPTs and upcoming sessions on products, click here!
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