India Needs a Product Manager

Imagine India is a product. 1.4 billion users. Massive scale. Revenue growing. But the user experience is... let’s say, suboptimal.

Now imagine you’re a Product Manager hired to improve it.

You open the analytics dashboard. You look at where users are spending their time. And you see something horrifying.

Crores of hours. Every month. Burned on tasks that should take minutes.

Not on building things. Not on creating value. Not on innovating. On paperwork. On compliance. On dumb… work?

A PM would see this and lose their mind.

Let me give you one example. One. But it’s a big one.

In India, most businesses rely on their CA to do their accounting, tax calculations, and return preparations. In smaller businesses, even the bank statement entries in Tally are done by the CA. Every month - or quarterly, or annually for the smaller ones - businesses need to send their bank statements to their CA.

Here’s how it works today:

1. The CA’s office calls the business owner and asks them to send the Bank Statement.

2. The business owner or their accountant logs into NetBanking

3. Downloads the statement as a PDF / Excel

4. WhatsApps or emails it to the CA

5. The CA receives it and enters it into their software

6. Repeat for every bank account. Every client. Every month.

That’s manageable. Annoying, but manageable. For businesses, the statement is usually already entered into their ERP or Tally, so in some cases the CA does not need to do that.

But it’s not just businesses.

Individuals file their returns via CAs too. And there are WAY more individual return-filers than companies. (I searched. 8 crore ITRs were filed last year - 96% of them are individuals and HUFs. Mind. Blown.) Their bank statements are definitely not sitting in any accounting software. And unlike companies that typically have 1-2 current accounts, return-filing individuals can have many more - savings accounts, FD accounts, salary accounts, that one Neobanking account that you opened to get 2 free monthly movie tickets, etc.

Now here’s how it actually plays out for the individual.

The individual gets a call from their CA. “Bank statement bhej do.”

He was driving. Can’t type it into a reminder. Tries to remember it but forgets by the time he reaches his destination.

2 days go by.

Another call. He is currently writing an intense, new blog post about how India needs a product manager. Keeps it for later. Forgets it.

2 days go by.

Another call. This time he downloads the HDFC Bank statement and sends it.

2 days go by.

Another call. “HDFC ka bheja hai, aapka Canara Bank ka bhi hai.” (Damnit IITB student account! Need to go to Powai and close it.)

Downloads it. Sends it.

Now, let’s do the math.

7.9cr individuals and HUFs filing ITRs.

Let us take a big estimate. Let half of them be self-filers. Unlikely, but okay.

4cr individuals x 2 bank statements minimum = 8cr statements to be shared.

Each cycle involves: reminders, downloads, sends, re-sends for missed accounts, data entry. Even if we take just 10 minutes of back and forth per statement per year (minimum).

That is 1.33 crore hours per side (CA and Client).

Total, 2.66 crore hours. Every year. On calling for, downloading, and sending statements.

For the IT self-filers out there:

So, 2.6 crore man-hours. In getting statements. 😵‍💫

Because I was bothered by how much followup and time was wasted by my family members in sharing their statements with our CA (he complained to our CFO, my wife), I wrote to the RBI and ICAI:

Mandate the creation of View-Only Access of All Banks (RBI can)

A decent chunk of software development will need to be done, of course.

1. Every Client can grant their CA view-only access to their bank account. They can have a selection in their profile or account - CA ID: XYZ123ABC for e.g.

2. Let the CA’s office log into a portal (let’s call it CATimeSaver.com) with their ICAI-linked credentials.

3. They see the list of their clients and their bank accounts (where they are set as the CA). They click. They get the statement. Done.

No login account of the client. No bank account for the CA. Just a linked view - authenticated, consent-based - where the CA can pull statements of their authorized clients directly.

With the Account Aggregator framework that already exists, this is technically feasible. The pipes are there. Someone just needs to connect them.

Result: Saving crores of man-hours every year. Reducing frustration in lakhs of people every day. Eliminating the dumb work of calling clients for “Statement Bhejiye Please”, freeing up lakhs of people to do meaningful work.

I know it’s not simple. Privacy concerns. Authentication layers. Consent management. Bank integration. I’m not saying it’s a weekend project.

But I wrote to the RBI. I wrote to the ICAI. I said - and I meant it:

If this can reach the right people to hear/review this, the purpose of this email would have been served.

Credit where it is due, I got replies from the RBI:

Reply #1:

We would like to thank you for your suggestion with regard to easing the process of filing income tax returns by taxpayers. However, it is advised that as per the current Account Aggregator (AA) architecture, the financial information such as information on bank deposits can be accessed through Account Aggregators only by the customer or Financial Information Users (FI-Us), which are entities registered with and regulated by any financial sector regulator (viz. RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and PFRDA), based on explicit consent of the customer. Hence, at present Chartered Accountants cannot be onboarded in the Account Aggregator ecosystem as an FI-U to access financial information of customers.

Reply #2:

In this connection, it is advised that RBI has not issued any specific guidelines prohibiting banks from granting access to multiple users to the same internet banking account with differentiated transaction/access rights. In fact, certain banks are already providing such differentiated access to multiple users for the same bank account, especially in case of corporate customers.

Well, this was not the suggestion. But I ran out of energy to further reply to it and make them understand it. It needs to be done by someone who gets paid for it or who doesn’t need any more money.

This is one example. ONE. With massive returns on the effort.

If a motivated set of people got behind it, they could come up with dozens within a year. The scope for Obvious Optimization™ is endless: GST reconciliations, PF transfers, TDS return matching, and many more.

Each one of these has some or the other product problem. Not a policy problem. Not a budget problem. A design problem.

The tragedy is that India’s tech capability is there!

UPI is proof. Aadhaar authentication is proof. E-Way Bill and E-Invoice - once stabilized - are proof. DigiLocker documents are now accepted at passport offices. (I wrote a complaint letter to the MEA about this in 2019. No reply. But they eventually did it. I’ll take the W.)

When India decides to fix a user flow, it CAN. The talent is there. The infrastructure is there.

What’s missing is the mindset. The person sitting in a ministry who looks at a process and asks: “How many hours are citizens spending on this? Can we cut it by 80%?”

When The Ken wrote that the Product Manager role is dead, they meant the massy PMs - handling indistinguishable consumer apps, hired in bulk during the VC boom. They meant 90% of PMs may be redundant (over-hiring done with VC money). But the senior-most, impactful, smart people - the ones who can look at a system and see the crores of man-hours being wasted - are desperately needed. In Government.

Also, if a company does not hire the right Product Managers, their UX sucks and they are punished by their customers. If the government does not hire the right Product Manager, the UX sucks and the customers are punished.

By the way, the PM would need to be either deeply experienced - someone who has actually dealt with government portals as a citizen or businessperson and knows the pain - or absolutely fresh-eyed, someone who can look at a 17-step process and say “why isn’t this 3 steps?”

In any case, they must get into the nitty-gritties. Use the portals themselves. File returns themselves. Download the bank statements themselves. Try to transfer their PF. Only then will the absurdity become visible.

Productivity wastage is not a line item in any ministry’s budget. But every business owner, every CA, every salaried employee feels it in their bones.

India doesn’t need more apps. India needs fewer steps in the apps it currently has.

Someone needs to look at the dashboard. And that someone needs the authority to actually ship the fix.

Until next time.