Nasscom to train up to 50,000 product managers by 2025: Narayanan

Nasscom plans to create a talent base of 50,000 product managers by 2025 as the ecosystem lacks talent at all levels, Ramkumar Narayanan, chair, Nasscom Product Council, told Business Standard.

“We have a good install base for engineers, with almost 1 million passing out every year, but we are lacking a lot of people for functions like product managers, designers, analysts, and top-class product marketers. As more and more product companies start to emerge from India, we need a large number of people in these roles,” he said.

Speaking with Business Standard as the Nasscom Product Conclave kicks-off on October 18th, which will see a participation from around 2000 stakeholders, Narayanan said filling gaps in the workforce was crucial for Indian product and SaaS companies to be globally relevant.

He added that there was a shortage of people at every level. “At the top level, we need chief product officers, we need VP-level executives for product management at par with the global companies,” he said.

Nasscom's Product Council estimates the sector to be valued at $7 billion and growing at 9.5 per cent year-on-year. Apart from skilling, the committee has also formed a deep-tech club – a group of 300 deep-tech companies surrounded by mentors.

The industry body recently released a study on the rapidly growing number of deep-tech start-ups. As per the report, India had over 3,000 deep-tech start-ups, implementing new-age technologies like Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, quantum computing, Big Data, Machine Learning, and robotics, at the end of 2021. Narayanan said this would continue to increase as the adoption of deep-tech among the product companies was expected to grow to70-80 per cent by 2030.

Nasscom Product Council is a community to cater the needs of 3,720 product companies based in India in both domestic and global contexts.

“To be globally relevant in product and SaaS the country needs at least 50,000 product managers at different levels in the country, which do not exist today. We are focused on bringing together people, up levelling them, and creating programs around them. These programs are already present in the market; we are bringing them together under our product skills umbrella,” he added.

Narayanan said other areas that the industry lobby was also focused on providing a global stage for Indian product companies to connect them with the market. The senior official added that the product council was collaborating with the government, especially in the areas like drone policy, as it advocates that the restrictions on the import of spare parts should be relaxed.