Unpacking SPM Summit 2025 – Product Management with Excellence and Scale

I had the great fortune of attending yet another Software Product Management Summit at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore this year. Conducted by ISPMA — INDIA , this annual event is a must attend for every product manager that is passionate of building amazing products, and scaling them.

Let’s start with dictionary meaning of Excellence and Scale

Excellence – The quality of being outstanding or extremely good

Scale – Size, extent or level of something , especially in comparison to something else

Let’s now explore these in context of software product management.

Excellence:

• Excellence in product management means building high-quality, user-centric software that solves real customer problems effectively.
• It also includes process excellence—ensuring agile development, cross-functional collaboration, embracing new technology and seamless execution of product roadmaps.
• Excellence in decision-making, influencing, communication, and strategic thinking helps a product thrive in competitive markets

Scaling:

• Scaling a product means growing it efficiently—expanding user adoption, handling increased load, and entering new markets without compromising performance.
• Scaling operations involves optimizing infrastructure, automating workflows, and ensuring a smooth customer experience at high volumes.
• A PM needs to think beyond initial product-market fit and plan for growth strategies like pricing models, partnerships, and distribution channels.

SPM Summit 2025, covered a plethora of sessions, discussions, key notes and informal chats that helped every one who attended to take back more on Excellence and Scale. Let me summarize them below:

Deep dive master class – good to great product managers

On the pre event (which we call day 0), we go through in a class room setting few detailed sessions at this summit. This year we had sessions ranging from service to product in B2B, AI in product management, how to grow and scale your products, as well as soft skill of influencing as a key skill for product management. These deep dive sessions are my favorites, as it covers a specific facet of product management in detail, and you always takeaway important learnings.

Hans-Bernd Kittlaus covered the service to product mindset – the differences, the transition and how not get into the trap of servicing specific customers, eventhough it maybe attractive from a short term revenue perspective.

Couple of Product Management leaders covered how AI is now going to be the 4th dimension for product manager in addition to viability, feasibility and desirability (user experience). We had a nice handson exercise where we could identify how to fit AI into existing process, rather than thinking about it as a separate standalone element. Both Vignesh Kumar and Vibhuti Ranjan Singh covered the aspects of soft AI into everything we do very well.

Abhijeet Bendigiri and Deepak Chauhan (both my favorites), covered a nice compelling framework for growth of Products.

Known as 3P framework covering Product, Process and People – they nicely explained how this framework can be applied when you want to expand your product from core, the actual and then augmented product.

Product managers have an unique role of responsibility without authority – a challenge in any management. Which skill is most important for this – Janet Rajan did an outstanding session on “Influence” as key skill, where in she explained 4 influencing styles – across Pull and Push – that can be adopted for different situations – when asserting, when rationalizing, when attracting or when bridging. She also dwelled into stakeholder prioritization across interest and influence matrix.

The day’s summary was shared by Anuj Magazine, which in itself was almost equally engaging as it gave a quick glance into all sessions in the day. One of the important takeaway from the summit that he shared was how we are “moving to an era of intelligence from an era of information”.

Inspiration from non tech leaders for software product managers

I am a great believer that software product managers have to learn from different products, business models and operational excellence, if we have to understand excellence and scale. SPM Summit got some enterprising non tech leaders who covered inspirational talks and shared their journey, which we could draw a parallel from.

“Scale nahi to khel nahi” (no game without scale) – Dr Velumani, who scaled his Thyrocare services to great heights gave several tips on how he scaled and innovated business models that helped him scale – whether operating from one lab for across all India, doing home collection much ahead of the times, or offering a buffet of tests instead of one – were all good examples of innovation at scale.

When we develop software products, we always joke – “it’s not rocket science”. So, we really mean that we live in a more simpler world. But, in the summit, we experienced listening to two space stalwarts – Wn Cdr Rakesh Sharma – who was the first to land in space from India, as well as Dr S Somnath, the chairman of ISRO, and the man behind the Chandrayan 3, which landed in south side of moon. Both of them shared the preparation, the process, the minute details, the team work, the mission and vision, the benefits of doing the space programs and it’s relevance to the citizens. Now all of these are very valuable tips for product managers who are managing different stakeholders expectations to build and scale product. The mere journey of space missions gave the enormity and scale of operations – which is key to how product managers should think. This was inspirational, and I had the pleasure of interacting with them closely and offcourse meeting them was huge. There was also the goosebump movement, when the software engineer turned musician Sunil Koshy was on stage with Wn Cdr Rakesh Sharma to sing “saare jahan se acha” (best among all nations) – a line he used when he spoke to the then PM answering to the question – “how does India look from space? “

Vande Bharat is an epitome of branding, cool looks and a pride for many Indians, who have lived with old railway trains. The man who made that happen, Dr Sudhanshu Mani, walked us through the ‘sense of urgency’ that he promoted within Integral coach factory (ICF), the hurdles he crossed and the important mission he wanted to accomplish, which is that of getting a great looking as well as fast train. Good lessons learnt from the resilience and the influence that product managers need to get a great product made, marketed and released.

We also had Havell’s leader sharing how Havell , an Indian consumer electrical brand made waves taking up market share from others, through great focus on quality, distribution scale and many other small initiatives.

Engaging panels to discuss different facets of scaling and excellence

Another highlight of SPM Summit are the panel discussions with different leaders on common themes that are helpful for product management. I had a pleasure of moderating one of the panel, on building at scale from India for Globe. We had the honour of listening from product management leader Rajalakshmi Srinivasan from Zoho, Dr Dr. (Inv) Prof Vishal U S Rao to bring a different perspective on designing from India in healthcare and two other startup product leaders Chethan K R and Paddy Raghavan . We discussed on starting from India, importance of domain knowledge, unique India advantage of building products, scaling products for its relevance to globe, and deep problem definition.

The other panel that was moderated by Vibuthi Ranjan Singh dwelt into the importance of how ISPMA certification has helped both industry and academia.

Deepak H Padmanabha moderated a panel of great product leaders, investor on Disruptive Innovations’ impact on traditional industries. The discussion was very engaging on why disruptive innovations is needed, can meaningful use of data turn it into wisdom, risk vs reward on investing into innovations and also covered ‘adopt fast, fail early, learn faster’.

Ankita P. moderated a panel on GTM and pricing, which was again very engaging, especially as it dwelt into aspect of scaling.

Unique practitioner perspectives from grounded product managers

Summit was not about the big and famous, but also real valuable sessions by grounded , handson product managers such as Ramkumar from Swiggy, Vijay Sharma from Silver Oak Health and Srinivasu Chakravarthula from Freshworks

Ramkumar Arumugam nicely covered what does scaling means at Swiggy. Move fast, iterate and optimize for scale – but never compromise user experience. He shared how AI helps in improving efficiency and is a force multiplier in different facets of product scaling. Liked his takeaway “Building for scale isn’t just about handling millions of users—it’s about delivering the right experience, at the right time, with the right efficiency."

Vijay Sharma covered the essence of scaling of products – from 1 to 100, from 100 to 500 and beyond 500+ customers. He highlighted the difference between configuration and customization – scaling beyond a point meant better documentation for adoption, switchable feature flags, and modular customization without compromising core product.

Rtn. Srinivasu Chakravarthula stressed the importance of accessibilty and inclusivity when building a product at scale. He highlighted that these are not just for certain users, but all users as everyone has some challenges - its all about great user experience.

Excellence awards to celebrate product management

Big highlight of SPM Summit is always celebrating success of product management excellence with awards. This year, I was privileged to be one of the jury and enjoyed the whole process across submission,interviews and the final pitch in the event. All the finalist presented their product and we had products across B2B, B2C, very deep domain products such as in Aeronautic and Energy industries. Congrats to all the winners!

Future entrepreneurs and product managers from student case competition

This year we saw students from different management colleges participate in student case competition. They were tasked to present product management life cycle pitch for an idea they would like to pursue. All the 3 finalist presentations were amazing, detailed and should say that they all are geared up to become future entrepreneurs and product leaders.

Coffee, lunch and dinner chats with photo sessions

One of the best part of the summit is innumerable interactions during coffee breaks, lunch, dinner coming together chatting about product management, career, life, Bangalore traffic (can never miss that) and more…that was real fun, to network and collaborate, make new acquittances, and rekindling old memories when meeting peers.  

 Another highlight of this fun experience, was to hear from Sunil Koshy , who turned into a musician /startup entrepreneur from an engineer. He made us all sing along and was so much relaxing on a day of heavy content.

Kudos to the volunteer team that put together such an outstanding event under great guidance from Prof Sowmya Narayanan Sadagopan , and Venkatesh Mahadevan - FBCS - thank you Subhashini Dhandapani Priya Subbukutti Abhijeet Bendigiri Deepak H Padmanabha Kartik Suryanarayan Prof Merlin Nandy Ankita P. Anuj Magazine VENKATESH BALAKRISHNAN and many more who supported before and during the event.

For me, this is an annual professional retreat with loaded energy, idea exchange, volunteering with purpose that moves us towards the next level of happiness every year.