Why Product Managers Are Becoming Critical to GCCs in India

For years, global capability centres (GCCs) in India were viewed primarily as efficient, cost-effective, and execution-focused offshore delivery arms. That model is now rapidly breaking down, with GCCs, led by engineering talent, being reconfigured to drive advanced innovation.

However, there is an overlooked yet increasingly relevant trend of hiring product managers (PMs). A growing number of GCCs are increasing their investment in product management roles to the point that, in some cases, those roles are growing faster than pure engineering headcount.

As enterprises face compressed market cycles, digital-native competitors, and growing complexity across platforms, data, and customer expectations, the key constraint is no longer building software. Instead, it is about deciding what to build, why, for whom, and with what measurable impact. This decision layer is where product management has become indispensable.

Talking to AIM, Balaji S, Founder and CEO of US-headquartered SaaS platform Aurigo Software, observed that GCCs have started to look like product companies. This shift has elevated the role of product managers and product engineers inside Aurigo’s Bengaluru GCC.

“Our product management capability today is significantly stronger than it was three years ago. Earlier, we operated with a smaller product team and a much larger engineering base. That balance is now shifting—we’re deliberately hiring more product engineers and complementary roles to drive higher impact,” he remarks.

While the company continues to grow at around 30% year-on-year, he says that teams will not scale at the same rate. Headcount growth is expected to be closer to 10% YoY. 

In the past, a 30–40% growth trajectory typically required a roughly 20% expansion in headcount, particularly in SaaS, according to a McKinsey note. Today, similar growth can be achieved with limited workforce expansion by boosting productivity, efficiently leveraging talent, and clearer product ownership.

In 2026, Balaji says that the focus will be on the quality of growth rather than volume. 

“We plan to increase our physical headcount by at least 10%, adding approximately 50–70 people, while also onboarding 200+ agents across operations. At the same time, we are consciously shifting hiring toward complementary, high-impact roles such as product engineers, design thinkers, and architecture experts, strengthening our ability to scale outcomes without scaling teams linearly,” he explains.

According to Quess Corp’s recent demand assessment, product management hiring across India has accelerated sharply.

“We are seeing a noticeable surge in product manager hiring across India’s GCCs, though engineering roles—especially in AI/ML, cloud, and product engineering—still dominate overall demand, with hiring growth in these areas 4x faster than traditional IT services,” Kapil Joshi, CEO of IT Staffing, Quess Corp, notes.

In 2025 alone, product management roles in India grew 42% year-on-year, with GCCs accounting for roughly 53–54% of the hiring activity. In the last three months, nearly 6,000 new product management positions were created across industries—an average of 2,000 per month—of which nearly 50% were replacement hires.

Demand remains heavily concentrated in Bengaluru (4,500+ job postings), followed by Delhi-NCR (600+), Hyderabad (469), Chennai (250+), Pune (150+), and tier-2 cities contributing over 100 roles.

Scale Maturity and Limits of Engineering

For mature GCCs, the shift is also a question of scale efficiency. Most established centres already possess deep engineering benches, mature delivery frameworks, and access to vendor ecosystems. Adding more engineers does not necessarily translate to impact.

Product managers, by contrast, improve the effectiveness of existing teams. They bring clarity to priorities, rigour to trade-off decisions, and discipline to value realisation. Their impact lies in preventing teams from building features that do not advance customer, business, or platform objectives.

“While PM demand is rising, for every product manager, multiple engineers are required to support execution, highlighting the techno-functional nature of these roles,” Joshi notes.

This balance underscores that engineering remains essential—but increasingly, it is product leadership that determines whether engineering effort translates into business value.

More than 50% of Aurigo’s product development now happens in Bengaluru, with the city emerging as a core R&D and product execution hub. “This allows us to provide predictive capabilities,” Balaji says.

Aurigo’s Bengaluru GCC works on AI orchestration, large-scale data pipelines spanning over two decades of infrastructure data, and applying predictive intelligence at a product level.

Rising Expectations, Rising Pressure

The growing prominence of product roles has also increased pressure on product managers. GCC product managers are expected not only to define roadmaps and strategy, but also to understand AI workflows, API economics, compliance requirements, and production-ready systems—often across global regulatory environments.

With supply lagging demand, particularly for senior and specialised product leaders, competition has intensified.

“Around 72% of GCC leaders report upskilling gaps, and retention is a top challenge for 51% of GCCs,” Joshi adds, reflecting the pressure on product managers to deliver outcomes while mentoring multidisciplinary teams.

Roughly 50% of Aurigo’s shipped code is AI-assisted, compressing development timelines by nearly half. Tools like Figma AI and Lovable have fundamentally altered product development workflows.

“The cycle that took 6–8 weeks now takes two weeks,” Balaji says, “The intermediate roles that translated requirements—those are disappearing.”

This shift has made the role of product managers and product engineers more critical than ever.

Trust and Strategic Maturity

The rise of product management roles also signals that GCCs are now transitioning from support functions to co-creators of enterprise strategy. Also, when global headquarters place product and portfolio leaders within GCCs—such as Aurigo Primus, an AI-powered capital planning solution built almost entirely by Aurigo’s India and South Africa teams—they transfer decision rights and build strategic trust.

As product-led platforms, data assets, and AI-enabled systems become central to business differentiation, GCCs are increasingly responsible for living systems that require continuous discovery, governance, and iteration. Engineering excellence remains vital, but without product stewardship, such systems risk becoming technically sound yet strategically misaligned.

“Importantly, this evolution does not diminish the role of engineers. Instead, it rebalances the system,” Alouk Kumar, CEO and MD, Inductus Group, adds.

He further notes that strong product management enables engineers to operate with greater focus, autonomy, and purpose, spending more time solving the right problems deeply rather than navigating ambiguity or shifting priorities.

“In essence, GCCs are hiring more product managers not because engineering matters less, but because value creation has become more complex,” Kumar states.

As GCCs mature, their competitive edge lies not in how much they can build, but in how effectively they align technology, business intent, and customer outcomes.