When I talk of Product Management, I am focused on product managers in technology companies, even though product managers are found in all types of non-technology companies. While some of the discussion here applies to them, I do not claim to know enough about those product managers and their education needs.

In India, almost every management school claims to train their graduates to be product managers. Usually, students who have a prior engineering work experience (which a large number of management aspirants in India have) want to go for product management roles.

There are also specialized courses to produce product managers, either by these same schools, or other specialized schools. Most of the IIMs and a lot of other management schools offer expensive short-term courses to working professionals (usually 3-6 months) to train them to be a product manager.

Some specialized courses like IIITH PDM share good details about what they teach but they are an exception in the industry (their course is a 2-year MTech course and is heavy on technology). Most other schools do not share enough details about what they teach, and the courses vary a lot across these schools. There does not seem to be a standard on what should be taught in a product management specialization during MBA, or in a short-term course for working professionals. It is also not clear whether there is a pre-requisite knowledge required for any of these courses.

Essentially, there is no standardized, open-sourced curriculum for what product management education should look like. What is worse is that it doesn’t seem to be a topic worth discussing, there aren’t any discussions on the subject that I can find.

Compare this with Computer Science Education. ACM (with IEEE) has been putting out CS (and allied disciplines) curricula for over last 25 years. There is a standard curriculum which is presented as a guideline for those who teach CS and its various flavors. AICTE (Indian body for technical education) too has a curriculum.

These can be used as-is, or used as a framework within which curriculum innovation is done.

Of course, the downside of such standardized curricula for such a broad set of stakeholders is that they can become a product that tries to solve for too many use cases and ends up being mediocre for everyone and useful for none.

I believe the most important contribution such curricula make is that they are publicly available for debates and criticism and can align multiple perspectives on what education should be imparted. This is very important when we evolve a discipline.

Product Management discipline is critical for the product movement to be successful in India. It is time we build something like this for India if not the world.