Keynotes, Fireside Chats, Workshops And More: A Sneak Peek Into The Product Summit

This article is part of The Product Summit 2020, India’s largest virtual product conference which took place on October 10 & October 11. 

Missed TPS 2020? To access the exclusive TPS Session recordings, PPTs and upcoming sessions on products, click here!

While there is a lot of gyaan on product management in books and online forums and blogs, most of this is centred around the Western world. But as many product builders and founders have claimed the Indian market is a different beast altogether, given the microcosmic market segments and demographic variances. There is a dearth of product and marketing insights for India’s rapidly expanding tech startup landscape. 

To plug this gap, Inc42 and The Product Folks conceptualised The Product Summit (scheduled for October 10 and 11, 2020), which will see founders, product leaders and VCs congregate to brainstorm on everything product-related — right from the ideation stage, through achieving product-market fit and the go-to-market strategy, and most importantly how to iterate and grow a product during its entire life cycle, especially as the user base matures. 

Through the planning stage, The Product Summit has evolved into a multifaceted virtual event. It started out as an idea for a one-day summit, but the overwhelming response — over 1,500 registrations in 3 weeks — has turned it into a two-day conference for India’s budding product ecosystem.

On an exciting first day of the TPS, the stellar list of speakers will include the likes of Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath, WhiteHat Jr’s Karan Bajaj, Lightspeed’s Harsha Kumar, BigBasket’s Tejas Vyas and Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu.

The sessions on the first day will help you understand how to design your products — with intense discussions around defining and measuring product-market fit, inculcating the growth mindset in a product team and building products for the next billion users i.e India’s newly-online consumers and businesses.

And on Day 2, the Product Summit will feature luminaries such as OYO’s Ritesh Agarwal, Times Internet’s Satyan Gajwani, Blume Ventures’ Sajith Pai, Stellaris Venture Partners’ Ritesh Banglani, 100x.VC’s Sanjay Mehta among others leading the discussions and debates.

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Never before has such a constellation of startup stars come together for India’s product community. We have planned a slew of keynote addresses and workshops that will not only help the audience decipher the secret of building great products but also challenge them into thinking about how to apply the principles learned during the summit. All this from the people who have been there and done it. 

Being an authority on tech startups in India, we have curated a slew of keynotes, fireside chats and panel discussions with the country’s most prominent product leaders. This extravaganza wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our presenting partner Amplitude and associate sponsors Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, DigitalOcean.

“We are excited to partner with Inc42 for The Product Summit. Inc42 has played a vital role in the Indian startup ecosystem over the last few years, bringing tech knowledge from around the world to this market. They’ve continuously pushed to add real value for all their customers. We are proud to be a part of this event and join them at the forefront of industry insights around Product led growth,” said Julio Bermudez, vice president of APAC and LATAM for Amplitude.

Peer Into The Minds Of Product Veterans

Day two will kick off with an address by OYO founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal. Recapping his journey of building a $10 Bn company, Agarwal will speak about scaling an integrated online and offline experience, cross learnings from different markets, the evolution of product UX and catering to diverse user cohorts in a particular geography.

The Product Summit will be wrapped up by the one personality that every product owner needs to closely follow: Times Internet vice-chairman Satyan Gajwani. The idea of this closing session is to understand the role of experimentation in product development and the growth levers to achieve scale. 

Insightful Panels On Building Scalable Products 

Having the right technical knowhow to build a product is not enough — it’s also important to see if it serves the core requirements of the target group and this is where most startups fail. 

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.

Of course, no product manager can go the distance alone. To 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.

This second 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.

A lot of tech startups in India today are building products for the SMB segment, which contributes to 30% of the overall GDP of the country. To decode how best to cater to this space that’s on the throes of a digital revolution, we have invited Deskera founder Shashank Dixit, BharatPe founder Ashneer Grover, Posist founder Sakshi Tulsian, MyDukaan founder Suumit Shah. The session will be moderated by Monica Jasuja, a product leader with experience in companies such as Mastercard and PayPal.

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Our final panel for Day 1 will talk about the business models, opportunities and challenges when it comes to building products for India’s next billion. It will feature 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.

On Day 2, a power-packed VC panel consisting of Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures, Angel investor Sweta Aggarwal, Amit Somani of Prime Ventures, Sanjay Mehta of 100X.VC and Ritesh Banglani of Stellaris Venture Partners will share the investor perspective on the growth metrics that matter and why startups need to shed vanity metrics.

Fireside Chat And Workshops To Uncover Product Secrets

The Product Summit will kick off 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. 

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. 

The TPS 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 with leading the media giant’s foray into the digital age.

In a fireside chat, Zoho founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu will speak on how India can transform itself into a product hub — the policies and reforms required to achieve the goal — and the role of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, engineers, and the government.

A critical step in scaling up a product is building a growth model that can be extrapolated to 10X, 100X and beyond — product managers should not be going back to the drawing board each time there is a big spurt in users. Anirban Das, the head of products at Dunzo will take us through the best practices for creating growth and scale models and illustrate his theories with real-world examples.

Product teams at early-stage startups may not be aware of the tools and tricks that seasoned companies use to crack their product puzzles. To plug this gap, we have designed a workshop in association with app and web intelligence platform Amplitude to demonstrate how analytics can help define your product strategy. 

In the course of the workshop, participants will see how raw data from an ecommerce platform can be put through an analytics platform to find metrics and insights within the structured data.  

Register For The Product Summit

By the end of The Product Summit, those who have been through this two-day product conference will be able to get a crystal clear picture of what makes a successful product, how to build a team, figuring out the competitive edge, and how to make products for billions of users. 

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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