Centre for Software and IT Management at IIMB co-hosts 8th India Software Product Management Summit with International Software Product Management Association 

Bengaluru, February 24, 2026: The Centre for Software and IT Management (CSITM) at IIM Bangalore, in collaboration with the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA), successfully hosted the 8th India Software Product Management Summit from 20 - 22 February 2026, at the IIMB campus.
The summit was inaugurated by Prof. Dinesh Kumar, Director In-charge, IIMB, Prof. S. Sadagopan, Founder Director, IIIT Bangalore, and Summit Chair; Venkatesh Mahadevan, Fellow, ISPMA India, and Summit Co-chair; Prof. Haragopal Mangipudi, Chairman, ISPMA; Hans-Bernd Kittlaus, Former Chairman, ISPMA; Ravi Venkatesan, Social Entrepreneur, and Former Chairperson of Cummins India, Microsoft India & Bank of Baroda; Prof. Mayank Kumar, Chairperson, CSITM; and Prof. Merlin Nandy, Program Co-chair, Research Track. Ravi Venkatesan delivered the keynote address on the theme ‘Putting AI to work for People’.  
The three-day summit featured workshops, research paper presentations, panel discussions, and presentations by industry participants on a variety of themes examining the accelerating pace of digital transformation in product management. More specifically, conversations probed how product organizations are evolving in an AI-first environment, India’s role in powering global R&D, building inclusive and accessible products, balancing human judgment with AI capabilities, scaling Indian products internationally, leveraging DPI for innovation, and understanding the psychology behind product choice.
Experts, including Capt. Raghu Raman, Strategic Coach, Former CEO of the National Intelligence Grid, delivered sessions on ‘Resilience is a profit strategy, leadership lessons for PM’; Harish Bijoor, Founder, Former VP, Tata Coffee, Business & Brand-strategy specialist, on ‘The Psychology Behind Why Consumers Choose Products’; Dr. R. S. Sharma, Distinguished Visiting Professor, IIT Kanpur, Former CEO, NHA, Former Chairperson, TRAI, on ‘Building for a Billion – What Product Leaders Must Unlearn’; Mr. R. Gopalakrishnan, CEO, Mindworks and Former Director Tata Sons, on ‘From Management to Meaning: How Leaders Create Value Beyond Metrics’.
Deep-dive workshops were held on the first day of the summit by Prof. Haragopal Mangipudi on ‘Value-based Pricing for Digital products’; Manish Jain, Associate Vice President and Global Leader, Finacle Consulting Group, Infosys, on ‘Ecosystem Thinking for Product Managers: 
Designing Beyond the Product’; Prof. Rakesh Godhwani on ‘Communicating for Impact: Product leaders’ playbook’; Prof. G. Shainesh, Chairperson, Digital Learning and faculty of the Marketing area at IIMB, on ‘The Science of Customer Retention: Frameworks Every Product Manager Should Use’; Vishal Kumar, Founder, Quantana & ESG Pilot, on ‘AI-Accelerated Prototyping: From Voice to Product - The "One-Person Product Squad" Workflow’; and Sireesha Gangavarapu, Product Management & Strategy Leader, AI Products.
Research paper presentations were held on Day 1. The winning paper was titled ‘SignFormer: Multimodal Motion Transformers for Sign and Gesture Recognition’, authored by Bhumika Peshwani, Pradeep Malineni, Kalyana C Chejarla and Raghav Nookala. Prof. Mayank Kumar and Prof. Merlin Nandy were the Chair and Co-Chair for the Research Track.
The Student Case Competition saw presentations from students of UC Berkeley, IIM Sambalpur, Hari Shankar Singhania School of Business (HSB), and IIM Bangalore. The winning teams were announced, with HSB taking the top spot. The program committee for the student track consisted of Abhijit Bendigiri, Ankita Parihar and Deepak Chauhan.
The Program Committee for Industry Track comprised Sireesha Gangavarapu, Director, Product Management, WNS-Vuram; Subhashini Dhandapani, Independent Consultant; Deepak HP, Director of Product Management Industry Cloud, SAP; Kartik Suryanarayana, Principal Product Consultant, Ellucian; Ramkumar Arumugam, Sr. Product Manager, Swiggy; Dr. Praveen Kamath, General Manager HR - Global Head - Strategic Functional Hiring & Redeployment, Wipro; and Anuj Pruthi, Global Leader - 'Project to Product' Transformation at Lowe's Companies, Inc.
The SPM Excellence Awards recognized outstanding software products across various categories. Zongovita won in the ‘startup’ category for their product Zongoflow, Vassar Labs won in the ‘new software product from an established company’ category for their product fieldWISE and TCS won in the ‘established software product’ category for their product Quartz. Mediversal received a citation for developing an integrated healthcare access and fulfilment platform especially suited to the Indian context. Prof. Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Professor In-charge, New Campus, served as the Jury chair. The other Jury members included Muthu Ranganathan, Sr. Director of Product Management, Oracle; Vibhuti Singh, Operating Partner & Chief Product Officer, Product Advisors; and Venkatesh Balakrishnan, Manager, CSITM at IIMB.