Opinion: Why product planning may become auto industry's most coveted function

Here's a prediction – Product Planning will be the most coveted function in the Indian automobile industry, to navigate it towards true sustainable and accessible mobility over the next decade. Given the regulatory pressures, changing consumer behaviour and ever-fluid geopolitics, the year 2026 will be a crucial one.

Tightening CAFE norms, new safety mandates, end-of-life rules, powertrain fragmentation with varying levels of incentives, platform strategies, ROI anxieties and shareholder pressures are the various balls a product planner has to juggle on an everyday basis.

The complexities are enormous. The pressures are immense, right from supplier ecosystem stress and tech-stack capabilities to localisation targets, increasing price sensitivity and network anxieties. 

Now add the layer of multiple consumer generations coe₹xisting in the form of millennials, gen Z, gen α and gen β with opposing views on personal mobility, and you are in a function that very few will want. This is almost like being the editor of a Truffaut film – you need to edit, but are grappling with what to leave out. 

The product planner has been behind the backdrop for all these years. While marketers, designers, engineers and salespersons have been valorised, the product planners have preferred walking in the shadows. The media, barring a rare few, have overlooked them. This is possibly because the function is not too glamorous. For them, there are no launch events, no design conclaves, no sales conferences and no engineering hackathons. This tribe basically leads a typically 'boring' life in the marketplaces and on the shopfloors, studying multiple tracks, balancing various power centres and taking crucial decisions that affect the lives of the more glamorous and valorised. 

They operate in the classic chaos theory ecosystem, trying to create deterministic laws through interdisciplinary teamwork from the myriad dynamic stimuli arising out of culture codes and geopolitics. If the culture codes are evolutionary in nature and the geopolitics rest on collaborative trade and peace, life is easy for them. But not right now. The generational culture codes are in conflict. Geopolitics are in a state of flux. Stability and order are definitely not to be seen today and even in the next four to five years. The political actions of today will have far-reaching ripple effects. And the product planner is expected to provide working solutions and sustainable success. 

Will the SUV-isation trend remain? Will rising costs make entry-level vehicles out of reach? Will gen β want to buy a personal vehicle at all?    

Highly complex questions that many CEOs would stay away from answering. Yet, it is the product planner who will stick his/her neck out and not just hazard an answer but also provide a solution. Time to recognise this unsung hero as the pivot of the automobile industry.