The session started with the definition of product which, as described by Harshit, is something that solves a customer problem. He emphasized that, in industry, product management is very loosely used to refer other works like project & program management.

A formal definition of a product could be:

“A term used to describe all goods, services, and knowledge sold. Products are bundles of attributes (features, functions, benefits, and uses) and can either be tangible, as in the case of physical goods; intangible as in the case of those associated with service benefits; or can be a combination of the two.”

During the discussions, he also explained that Products and Services can also be bundled together. For example, iPhone as a physical product and iStore as a service work together to form an Apple product. Product can also be categorized, at a high level, as B2B (business to business) products, where customers are companies who are much more informed and can define what they want or B2C (business to customers) products, where customers sometimes may not know what they exactly want.

Harshit also touched about why Apple had so much success with iPhone products. One of the reasons he cited that Apple had a lot of features in one device, including music, email and other basic essentials, all on the go and by doing this, it focused on the latent need of the customers. One more innovation which worked for them was their emphasis on finger being the stylus.