From Engineers to Innovators: IIITH’s faculty training initiative is building next-gen Product Managers

Product Innovation, a unique faculty development program (FDP) for engineering faculty has grabbed that sweet spot at the intersection of business, design, customer and technology. Here’s more about the IIITH-SCIENT experiment.

Hosted by IIIT Hyderabad in collaboration with SCIENT (School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship), the product innovation – Train the Trainer program is a longitudinal engagement to effectively mentor students in innovation, entrepreneurship and technology-driven product development.

Training the Trainer – Purpose and Pedagogy
It began in 2022 when a MeitY– IIIT Hyderabad collaboration led to a set of curated faculty development programs/certificate programs in Product Design & Management (PDM) spanning Design thinking, AI in product management, etc. The goal was to create a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem for engineering students to innovate and create new products, with design sensibilities.

It took on a new avatar in 2025 when IIIT Hyderabad was approached by Hyderabad-based SCIENT Foundation, who proposed a joint FDP that finessed the existing format for engineering faculty, in product design & management. IIIT Hyderabad’s think tank-training team includes SERC’s Prof. Raghu Reddy, Prof. Raman Saxena, Prof. Ramesh Loganathan and Prof. Ravi Warrier, with Sudhakar representing SCIENT.

“The FDP emphasizes empathy-driven innovation at the intersection of technology, design, and business. Rooted in Human-Centred Design (HCD) principles, it trains faculty to help students deeply understand user needs, behaviors, and contexts before developing solutions”, observes Prof. Raman Saxena. “By integrating empathy mapping, user research, and HCD methods such as prototyping and usability testing, the program transforms product development into a people-centred process. It encourages faculty and students to reframe engineering problems as human problems, design for diversity and inclusion, and reflect on the social and ethical implications of technology. Ultimately, the initiative nurtures empathetic innovators and educators who design meaningful, responsible, and impactful products for real-world users.”

SCIENTific collaboration explained
Fifteen engineering colleges in Telangana have been part of the first tranche that kicked off in September 19-20th 2025. The rigorously structured FDP collated key learnings from previous workshops and features specialized modules to cascade knowledge down to students. It fundamentally focuses on two aspects – Product design and innovation; adopting experiential pedagogy and combines faculty training and student immersion; to culminate in hackathon-based innovation.

Structured in a sequential 3-month framework, the first phase was the Training the trainer workshop for 30+ faculty from Telangana-based engineering colleges. The two-day program covered four PDM modules in Design Thinking, Problem Statement, Customer Discovery, and Product marketing,[RR2] 

In the second stage, the mentee faculty will lead sessions for students in their respective colleges (approximately 100-150 students in total), for four instructional days of ideation across two weekends. 

Students will delve into the design domain, thinking process and the actionable steps from discovery, definition and an actionable brief; from ideating and prototyping to user testing and validation. From defining the Problem and framing a strong Problem statement, students explore existing alternatives and market gaps and set the Problem-Solution Fit, reframing the challenge with design thinking and creation of Problem Validation Tools.

Customer discovery entails techniques of discovery, identifying customer segments, creating customer personas, understanding the pain and gain points, insights to product design, Iteration and continuous discovery.  In product marketing, students will understand the importance of marketing in the product lifecycle, apply key concepts, analyze customer behavior, design go-to-market strategies and development roadmaps to integrate marketing perspectives into pre-launch (product design) and post-launch (go-to-market) phases.

Supported by IIITH’s materials, assignments and content, the trained faculty will help cohorts to develop solutions to a specific problem statement, with a Pre-hackathon on the final day to shortlist the best product ideas.

In phase three, 10-15 shortlisted teams will visit the IIIT Hyderabad campus “for one immersive week of ideation and mentoring to rapidly prototype ideas, reinforcing entrepreneurial thinking to transform project ideas into potential ventures. While we have conducted multiple train-the-trainer programs, this is the first time where it has been structured as a sequence of structured programs spanning 3-4 months; where it starts with faculty, translates to students and the loop closes with students developing products at the final hackathon”, notes Prof Raghu. For sustained impact, students will be invited to summer product camps on campus.

Idea that evolved out of M.Tech in Product Design and Management
“It started in 2020 with a series of random discussions that revolved around the fact that there is not enough design in our computer science curriculum”, explains Prof. Raghu, who wrote the proposal for the PDM program from a product design perspective, with key inputs from Prof. Ramesh Loganathan et al.  “IIITH has always had a good ecosystem of startups but the key elements missing were design skills and moving research from lab to land. We were always very highly tech-oriented. The whole startup ecosystem talked about transitioning from tech to actually building a product. But there is a big gap in understanding the business side of things and customers.  So that is where the discussion started, in terms of what we could effectively implement. We ended up bouncing these ideas off multiple industry folk who were very keen to produce astute product managers with a holistic tech-design edge”.

Atmanirbhar India in finessing design and engineering
Throwing more light on the India-first aspect, Prof. Raghu adds, “Most of the time, decisions get taken somewhere else in the global village and we just implement them. So now if you are able to build an end-to-end product cycle where the decisions also get taken in India, then it will help the nation to transition from a Service to Product industry.  That brought us to the broader goal that industry was interested in, about the need to build a special brand of product managers with a tech background, design skills and business savvy to build a prototype and get it market ready”.

When viewed from a business perspective, typically there are product management programs offered by B- schools that are more focused on the management aspect.  Design schools like NIDs were always about industrial design. ISBs are pure business. IIITH is pure tech.   So there was a chasm between these seemingly disparate domains and that is the sweet spot where the M. Tech program evolved, carving a niche for itself in the technology-product design-entrepreneurship space. The then MeitY director concurred, especially given the push for software in 2020 and approved five-year funding for this particular program. 

The uniqueness of the M. Tech program lies in the flexibility it offers for various types of learners admitted to the program, some with 20 plus years of corporate experience.  The idea is to create customer-aware technical managers; techie at core but knowledge about customers and management know-how. The course is a mix, of a third each of business, tech and design. 

Project work spans most of the second year where students will take a product idea from zero to one, and develop a prototype that is pitched to an external jury. Thus far, the sixty graduates that have come out of this program have found corporate placements in product and development roles, UI/UX engineers and as assistant product managers and product managers.

An unusual spin-off and a road map
“At this point, as mentor institution with SCIENT, we are first structuring the bones of the program”, observes Prof. Raghu who has a research background in software engineering. “One realization that came out of the Train the Trainer programs, which was not our original intent, is that participant colleges actually peg this as a value add for the graduating students”.  After Telangana, the team plans to scale efforts to include the Visakhapatnam cluster of engineering colleges.