Bharat’s New Product Playbook: Unveiling The First Preview Of TMS2021 Agenda

This article is part of Inc42 Plus’ upcoming conference — The Makers Summit India’s largest product conference scheduled for 12th-14th March, supported by Netcore, Amplitude and HPE. Click here to know more.

For the past few decades, the US has been the fountainhead of the biggest consumer internet companies. The American experience of product-building has been lauded and followed across the world, and India is no exception. We have adopted the U.S. frameworks and styles irrespective of a reality fit at home. In some cases, this approach has worked, and in many others, it has not. 

It is now time to create an exclusive product playbook for Bharat. 

We have to outgrow the Silicon Valley playbook that has guided our product startups for a couple of decades and must usher in an all-new product era. But to verify the accuracy of any hypothesis or new model, the biggest challenge is to gather enough data that can be put through the litmus test of experiments. Of course, data is not in short supply here with more than 750 Mn internet users in the country and a third of them shopping online. So, what’s stopping us from creating a Bharat playbook?

As the Indian startup ecosystem grows, triggering mass adoption, a new, updated and localised paradigm for product-building must be in place. That is why Inc42 is bringing together the crème de la crème of the startup world and the makers’ community to address the dearth of product insights, essential to fulfilling the requirements of India’s vast and diverse market. We will meet at The Makers Summit 2021, a three-day online conference to be held on March 12-14.

The Makers Summit: What We Have In Store For You

The Makers Summit 2021, India’s largest product conference, will bring together 10,000+ makers from the product, marketing and design functions of India’s top product startups to share knowledge and understand each other’s best practices.

But why are we talking about marketing and design in a product conference? You may well ask. 

The reason: Over the years, product functions have evolved dramatically and become excruciatingly complex. It is no longer a standalone monolith, carefully crafted and sanctified by product managers. Product, design and marketing functions cannot operate in isolation in a connected world like ours. The three functions are intertwined with each other in a helix of sorts to deliver the superior experience that a user seeks. Hence, The Makers Summit has been conceptualised as the grandest event and THE gathering of ‘Everything Product’.

TMS will witness veterans from all three domains layout their playbooks and reveal their personal experience of being a ‘Maker’. They will explain their theories with specific growth models and market examples in Masterclasses, debate the frameworks best fitted for the Bharat context in star-studded Panels, take a dialectical approach for product creation in Fireside Chats and track the most exciting trends emerging from the product horizon in Keynotes. 

These will not be monotonous monologues preached from the podium. They will be crafted and delivered in an interactive manner so that ideas will be exchanged, talks will be supported by data and, most importantly, actionable insights will be explored.

It will be the go-to place for makers like YOU to gain from practical experiences, personal playbooks and trade secrets of some of the brightest minds and prominent companies of the country’s tech startup ecosystem.

At every juncture, it will be our aim that The Makers Summit be the most insight-rich conference of its kind.

Browse All Sessions Here

Fireside Chats With The Movers And Shakers

How do you use experiments as a moat to build a product unicorn? How to resolve the build-versus-buy matrix when hyperscaling? What is the future of edtech (or other hot sectors, for that matter)? These are just a few of the vast bouquet of questions which will be asked and explained in fireside chats with the founders of India’s two edtech unicorns — Byju Raveendran of BYJU’S and Gaurav Munjal of Unacademy. 

The fireside chats are designed to help the makers get a sneak peek into the minds of the top founders from the Indian tech ecosystem and obtain actionable insights into solving the next billion-dollar problem.

Take, for instance, the session with ShareChat’s cofounder and CEO, Ankush Sachdeva. The vernacular social media company is billed as a soonicorn after capitalising on the forced exit of Chinese short video apps by launching a platform of its own called Moj. Now, the audience will be able to mine the answers to difficult questions like the threat of product cannibalisation, building a vernacular moat beyond UX, monetisation of hyperlocal content and more.

Fireside chats with Dream11 cofounder Harsh Jain and Mobile Premier League cofounder Sai Srinivas will focus on increasing product stickiness for Bharat users, how gamification principles can be used to drive engagement metrics, how smartphone demographics influence critical product decisions and more.

In sync with the above sessions, we will bring you a star-studded line-up of 12 fireside speakers at the helm of India’s startup ecosystem. They will lay out very clearly the frameworks they use on a day-to-day basis and reveal their game plans for the future that is unfolding.

Panels To Decode Product Themes For 100x Growth

Speaking of the future, let us acknowledge that the biggest catalyst in India’s transformation into a product nation will be the digital leap of the country’s 63 Mn+ MSMEs. To gain an insight into the nitty-gritty of MSME operations, right from building an appropriate value proposition to knowing the acquisition channels which yield the best returns in the MSME segment and product co-creation despite a frequently broken feedback loop, we will bring together a power-packed panel of B2B founders and product leaders.

The Inc42 Plus team will curate 25 such panels to help product managers, designers and marketing professionals decode specific themes which have already taken root in the country’s product landscape. 

These will be of two kinds. A chunk of them will deal with specific sectors such as The Product Playbook For India’s Rising D2C Brands, Reshaping The Future Of India’s Financial Services, and the likes. They will offer a rare route map, helping people understand the product architecture of niche segments and how they can leverage these learnings to develop their own products.

The other set of panels will be more functional. Here, makers can master the essentials of attaining product-market fit in India, explore how to put together product teams at various stages of growth, get the hang of VC math that should be kept in mind while building and scaling subscription products and learn other ground realities of business.

Browse All Sessions Here

40 Masterclasses For Step-By-Step Hand-Holding 

A classic problem faced by many functional conferences is that they only offer macro points of view but fail to bring actionable takeaways which participants can implement the next morning. Experts wax eloquent about their playbooks but do not demonstrate how the equations behave when the variables are tweaked.

That is why we have carefully crafted a series of masterclasses with top product leaders, design heads and marketing honchos from storied companies like Microsoft, Swiggy, Dunzo, Bounce and Mixpanel. This is the category the audience loves — after all, who doesn’t want to learn winning strategies and use them straightaway — and we are hustling to make sure that attendees can derive maximum benefit from the 40 masterclasses to be hosted during The Makers Summit.

For instance, Dunzo’s director of product management, Brijesh Bharadwaj, will hold a session on taming the retention beast. He will delve into how Dunzo worked on its retention engine to build a strong customer base and put forth a detailed case study on analysing user behaviour and creating a retention funnel, among other things. 

But user loyalty cannot be built upon behavioural patterns alone or by providing random incentives. To help makers decode the secrets of building products that users get attached to for the long haul, we will bring Sruthi Sivakumar, head of design at Bounce, who will host a masterclass on emotional design. 

But That’s Not All!!

Overall, if you belong to the product function, expect deep dives into metrics and frameworks which help with operational experiments, measure outcomes of growth models and identify pools of value in the market. From the secrets of finding product-market fit in India and leveraging data to get a 360° view of your users to the dynamics of gamification to drive up engagement, we will go the whole hog.

Design professionals will benefit from sessions which will exclusively focus on the untold secrets of wireframing, creating 100x user experiences, translating the ethos of Bharat from intuition to the interface and much more. For product marketers, we have stitched together a host of sessions  that would help you understand the nitty gritty of data-driven campaigns, measuring what matters in influencer marketing, the marketing playbooks of top D2C startups, decoding audience fits for your campaigns et al.

How do we know about all the pain points of makers? It’s a fair question for you to ask. In October last year, we brought together over 5,000 product managers and 42 speakers for The Product Summit. The product community’s response to the first-of-its-kind virtual conference was so overwhelming that we had to make it a 2-day summit from a daylong one — and of course #TheProductSummit2020 became a Twitter trend.

While we designed last year’s extravaganza from first principles, this time around we are building on the foundation of feedback from young product professionals and data insights gleaned from that experience. As we strive hard to outdo ourselves in the run-up to India’s biggest product conference, it will be great to know what you are looking forward to most and what your biggest takeaway will be from the product leader/s of your choice.

If you are a maker, it is time to block the dates and book your seat. The show is beginning shortly.

Browse All Sessions Here

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.