CIOL: For whom do you think the product management is the most critical,
producer or consumer?
DK: It is for both.

The producer wants to limit their expenditure while
keeping the innovation going. They want to maintain quality & support
levels and want to enhance their reputation & brand, making product
management and engineering key to them.

Consumers want predictability, in terms of service offerings and
time-lines, which allow them to plan and reduce risk in their business.
Good product management by the supplier makes consumers business more
profitable and viable.

CIOL: Do you think the approaches for product enhancement and new
product should be different? If yes, what should be the differentiator?
DK: The approach has to be different because as they have more differences than similarities. Product enhancements are typically incremental and based on customer or market feedback. So emphasis goes on maintaining old functionalities, making sure they work well with new features, maintaining service levels despite new releases, and at the same time keeping the costs contained. It is hardly ever
possible to move products to new technology or environments without much
budget and considerations.

However, new products are around new ideas, sometime quite radical. This
allows radical approaches to be experimented with. At the least, a new product
can always make use of technology that is current. For example
any Internet based product can make use of Web 2.0 related technologies
without any additional effort, while doing the same for a product
written few years back may prove tricky.

CIOL: What is the main driver for product management, cost or quality?
DK: Many people in India try to define quality of a product using the
same parameters as software projects: e.g., conformance to the
requirements document, less number of bugs etc. However if we start
comparing with other products, from non-IT sector, that we use like a cell phone, a car, a spoon, soap, or a shirt; we would start figuring

out that quality of a product is a factor of quite a few additional
criteria. Making an adequate quality product, consummate to quality that
end consumer is expecting, is an absolute must and uncompromisable.
Cutting the level of quality for cost will typically push the product
out of the market.