The CPO of 2030: Product Leadership in India's Next Billion User Economy

India reached 900 million internet users in 2024. By 2030, the number is expected to exceed 1.2 billion — representing the single largest expansion of the global internet user base in any country over any comparable period. The 300 million new users arriving between 2024 and 2030 are not a more of the same addition. They are coming from parts of India — geographically, linguistically, economically, culturally — that have been largely absent from the digital product design conversation. They are older, less educated in formal English, more likely to communicate in regional languages, more likely to be navigating the internet for the first time, and more likely to have their most important financial, health, and social transactions mediated by digital products for the first time.

For India's Chief Product Officers, this is not a demographic trend to note and account for in the next planning cycle. It is a structural redefinition of what Indian product leadership means — and, given India's size and the global attention on its digital market, a potential redefinition of what product leadership means globally. The CPO of 2030 in India will be building products that are simultaneously at the frontier of AI capability, designed for the most complex user diversity of any market in the world, and operating within a regulatory framework that is still being written. That combination of challenges and opportunities is genuinely unprecedented.

The Bharat Product Design Challenge

The term 'Bharat' — used in India to refer to non-metropolitan India, encompassing the tier-2, tier-3, and rural markets that account for the majority of the country's geography and a large share of its population — has moved from political rhetoric to product strategy imperative. India's next billion internet users are overwhelmingly from Bharat, and building products for them requires a fundamental rethinking of product design assumptions that have dominated Indian technology product development since its inception.

The design assumptions that work for urban, English-comfortable, smartphone-native users — clean, text-heavy interfaces; feature-rich applications; complex onboarding flows; assumption of stable broadband connectivity — are largely wrong for Bharat users. The product design principles that work for Bharat start from different foundations: voice-first or voice-assisted interfaces for users with lower text literacy; visual and icon-based navigation rather than text menus; onboarding flows that complete value delivery within the first session because the user may not return if they do not immediately understand the benefit; and offline-first architecture for users in areas with intermittent connectivity.',

Jio has been the most consequential force in bringing Bharat users online, and JioPhone — a feature phone with a simplified operating system, voice-first navigation, and pre-installed apps for the most common use cases — has been the product vehicle for that expansion. The JioPhone design philosophy is a masterclass in Bharat product thinking: start with the user's actual context (low data literacy, voice-comfortable, functional rather than aspirational digital needs) rather than with what an urban product designer thinks a 'good' interface looks like.',

Meesho's evolution from a social commerce platform primarily used by urban women resellers to a general commerce marketplace serving buyers and sellers across tier-2 and tier-3 India illustrates the product strategy evolution required for Bharat scale. The platform rebuilt significant portions of its buyer experience to accommodate users who had never previously made an online purchase — simplifying the search, browse, and checkout flow, building trust mechanisms appropriate for users who are sceptical of online transactions, and optimising relentlessly for the specific devices and connectivity conditions of its expanding user base.

Multilingual Product Architecture: The 2030 Imperative

By 2030, building products that work only in English will be commercially self-limiting for any Indian consumer platform with ambitions to serve the full market. This seems obvious, but the organisational and technical implications are more complex than they appear.

Multilingual product architecture requires not just translation — the relatively straightforward task of rendering interface text in multiple languages — but localisation at a much deeper level. It requires user research conducted in local languages, with researchers who understand the cultural context of the users they are studying. It requires product design that accounts for the different text lengths and reading directions of different languages (Indian script languages tend to be longer in text than their English equivalents, which affects layout and design). It requires content strategies — for notifications, educational content, customer support — that are native to each language rather than translated from English originals.

The companies building genuine multilingual product capability in India are creating a structural advantage that will be difficult for late-movers to replicate. ShareChat, whose platform serves over 300 million users across 15 Indian languages, has built multilingual capability as a core architectural principle — the content recommendation algorithms, the moderation systems, and the user experience are all native to each language rather than adapted from an English-language original. That investment, made early, is now a genuine competitive moat.

"Multilingual is not a feature we add — it is an architectural commitment we make before we write the first line of product code. Once you have built a product that assumes English, adding multilingual capability later is expensive, slow, and always feels bolted on. The CPO who builds for India's next billion users must start with multilingual architecture, not arrive at it." — CPO of a leading Indian vernacular content platform, speaking at Product Conf India, Bengaluru, July 2025.

The ONDC-Enabled Commerce Transformation

India's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is potentially the most significant product infrastructure development for India's e-commerce CPOs since the launch of UPI transformed digital payments. ONDC is building an open protocol for digital commerce that allows any buyer application to connect with any seller application — breaking the monopoly model of closed platforms like Amazon and Flipkart and enabling a much broader ecosystem of commerce applications to flourish.

For CPOs building commerce products in India's post-2025 environment, ONDC changes the product strategy calculus significantly. The question is no longer 'how do we build a marketplace' but 'how do we build a buyer experience or a seller experience that can connect to any counterparty through the open network?' This creates product opportunities that did not previously exist: a local grocery ordering app that accesses the full catalogue of ONDC-registered grocery sellers, a logistics app that can route orders through any ONDC-registered logistics provider, a credit app that can offer purchase financing for any ONDC transaction.

The CPO of 2030 who understands ONDC architecture — and who builds product strategies that leverage open network infrastructure — will have access to a much larger addressable market than the CPO who builds closed platforms. India's DPDP Act will shape how data generated through ONDC transactions can be used, creating both constraints (data portability and consent requirements) and opportunities (the ability to build data-driven products on top of consented transaction data).

AI and the Hyper-Personalisation Imperative

India's next billion users do not have the same relationship with digital products as the first billion. For many of them, their first significant experience with AI-powered personalisation will happen simultaneously with their first experience of digital commerce, digital finance, or digital health — making the personalisation experience part of the foundational impression of what digital products are.

This creates both an opportunity and a responsibility for India's CPOs. The opportunity is to deploy AI personalisation from day one of a user's digital journey, creating immediately relevant experiences that demonstrate the value of digital over analogue alternatives. A first-time health insurance buyer who receives an AI-generated recommendation perfectly calibrated to their income level, family composition, and regional health risks will have a very different first experience than one who receives a generic product catalogue.',

The responsibility is to ensure that AI personalisation for this user population is accurate, trustworthy, and does not exploit the information asymmetry between sophisticated AI systems and first-time digital users. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act creates a framework for consented, purpose-limited use of personal data — but the spirit of the framework requires product leaders who build AI personalisation systems to go beyond compliance to genuine user advocacy. The CPO of 2030 in India will be evaluated partly on how well their AI-powered products serve users who are not in a position to advocate for themselves.

The Organisational Design of the 2030 Product Function

The product organisation that can successfully serve India's next billion users will look different from the product organisations of today. It will require product managers with deep cultural fluency in regional markets — professionals who have lived in and understand the contexts they are building for, not just researchers who visit those markets periodically. It will require design talent with expertise in voice interfaces, low-literacy design, and the specific visual language of different Indian cultural contexts.',

It will require data scientists who understand the statistical challenges of building AI models on data from populations that are underrepresented in global training datasets — the risk that AI models trained primarily on urban, English-language data will systematically underperform for Bharat users is real and documented. And it will require a product leadership philosophy that values the product experience of a first-generation internet user in Bihar or Assam as highly as the experience of a power user in Bengaluru or Mumbai.',

The CPO who builds this organisation — and builds it as part of a deliberate strategy to serve India's complete user base rather than its most accessible and familiar segment — will be doing the most important product leadership work of the decade. And they will be building something that has implications not just for India, but for every market in the world where the next billion users are waiting for products worthy of their needs.