Bangalore: The 10th chapter of ‘Product Leaders Forum’ (PLF) kicked off in Bangalore on 14th and 15th December at SterlingsMac Hotel. The two day event saw a stellar turnout of 250+ product rockstars and industry leaders from Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi and Singapore. Title sponsors and partners included biggies like Intuit, Nasscom, PMI(Project Management Institute), 
The Product Leaders Forum (PLF) is the biggest annual meet up for tech and product leaders in India. It is a volunteer-driven non-profit initiative with the goal of institutionalizing product leadership in India and to create an ecosystem of quality networking and unlimited learning. PLF’s mission to engage 1 Million Product Leaders across India by 2022 who will help transform India into a digital nation touching the lives of 1.3 billion people positively.
Day 1 of PLF focused on CEO and CPO panel discussions exploring the new role of a product leader in an innovative organisation and what the C-suite product leader role looks at. The panel was moderated by Prof. Pinkesh Shah; Co-Founder (Institute of Product Leadership), Ex-VP Global Product, McAfee. Industry stalwarts like Sharath Bulusu of Myntra; Saran Chatterjee of Housejoy; Rajesh Bysani of Zoomcar and Ranjit Radhakrishnan of Byjus’ shared insights, trends and expectations from their leadership experience. This was followed by panel discussions and individual talks that touched on the following themes- ‘Evolving the Product Strategy while scaling the Company’; ‘AI as a future of marketing’ ; ‘Key to get and survive to the top – How to survive corporate politics’ and ‘ A Day in the Life of Data Science Manager at corporates’.
A key highlight of PLF was the launch of the much-awaited ‘Product Management Survey 2018 Report’ – this report highlights the state of the product industry, the challenges faced by product managers and leaders and the future trends in the industry.
Day 2 was a landmark day – PLF introduced ‘Masterclass Certificate Workshops’ for the very first time to give back to the product community. The workshops focused on new age skills that mid-career professionals are looking at. Lokesh Tripathy and his team from Intuit led the unique workshop on developing customer empathy. Other popular workshop topics were around the following themes – ‘10X Product – Growth Hacking’; ‘AI & Machine Learning for Business Leaders’; ‘Hacking Your Product Leader Career’; ‘Data Science for Decision Making’; Design Thinking & Prototyping; ‘Finance For Non Finance’; ‘Influencing Cross Functional Stakeholders’ and ‘Innovating in a Large Company (Product or Services) as an Intrapreneur’.
The day wrapped up with two exciting product hackathons, led by Intuit and Digital Harbor respectively. These ‘open – to – all’ hackathons started off on Day 1 with the teams of Intuit and Digital Harbor throwing out a problem statement. Participants presented their innovative solutions on Day 2 – it was a great show of resourcefulness and design thinking.
Knowledge sharing, peer learning, networking, heated discussions, fruitful debate and a dose of inspiration that will keep everyone going till next year – ‘Product Leaders Forum’ promised to come back next year bigger and better.