I got this idea while I was on my way to office today and thought to write it down before it wipes of my RAM.

India has a significant contributions to IT services. However when it comes to Software product Development we need to still prove our mettle. I am sure a lot of discussion must have already gone into this topic and is still happening. Here are my thoughts on the same.

Everybody knows that there is a significant difference in the way an IT services company is executed and
a product development organization. However what is happening is since majority of the Indian IT professionals
have a services mindset, they unconsiously tend to bend towards executing a product development company also on lines of a services company.

One needs to understand that the gestation period of a product is always much more than an services. The time it takes to build a steady product is significantly higher than developing a piece of customized software for a client. Hence it is essential to plan the gestation journey to start with meticulosly. This is the first hurdle that one needs to pass.

Another important aspect to understand is that the product always goes to various iterative cycles over the time to improve.As against customized software which will not vary much unless doing further enhancements whenever required. Product instead will get refined increasing its footprint, defining more features and so on.

Apart from engineering, marketing and sales of a product is totally different than what happens in a services domain. India in my opinion needs to significantly improve in this area if they need to build successful products. I am sure Indian talent is capable of developing world class products (For that matter many of the world class products are engineered in India, although they are for global companies). The need is to understand the other areas which are required for a product company which are totally different than the services organization.

Here, I would wish to move towards Indian Manufacturing or India pharma. If you observe
over the years, once India started opening up, Indian manufacturers have indeed shown the world that they can create world class products can necessarily also execute world class organizations.Manufacturing or pharma were tradionally into product making and not services. Hence they have mastered the art of product making.

Firstly, they focus on the very minute details of engineering before building things. The concept of a very detailed design is quite clearly visible in manufacturing while it is lacking to an extent in software product.

The plan for profitability is again laid out considering all the factors in quite details. The risk taking appetite is much more and the margins are calculated very carefully. One of the advantage that IT comapnies had over the years was the margins due to export. Most of the IT services companies worked for clients outside India and hence they are used to deduce huge margins owning to currency difference. This IMO,does not allow
them to take significant risks. They always want to break-even as early as they engineer a product.

I think the Indian software product development, needs to follow Indian manufacturing in terms of risk apetite, planning and finer level execution to be globally successful in terms of product development and needs to change the services mentality.