CREDIT: ALISA STERN; SHUTTERSTOCK SEVENTYFOUR, EARLY SPRING
ASK THE hiring managers at eSewa, Pathao or any of Nepal’s funded tech startups what they struggle to find and the answer comes back the same. Not developers. There are 100,000 people in Nepal’s IT sector, and the country’s university system produces software engineering graduates every year who can code competently and pass technical interviews. What nobody can find is someone who knows why the feature should be built in the first place — who the user is, what problem they are paying to solve, what the business needs to earn from the solution and how to explain all of that to a developer without adding seven contradictory requirements three weeks into the sprint. This person is a product manager and Nepal’s tech ecosystem has almost none of them.
This is not a minor gap. It is the problem that separates a country with a lot of IT workers from a country with a tech industry. That matters because building software for a client who tells you what they want — which is how most Nepali developers earn most of their income — requires entirely different skills from building a product for a market of customers who cannot tell you what they want until after they have tried what you built and found it lacking. The first is a service. The second is a product. Nepal has built the service economy successfully. The product economy is where the compounding value lives, and it requires a skill set that the service economy never trained anyone to develop.
Product management, in practical terms, is the discipline that answers three questions before a developer writes a line of code: what should we build, for whom and how will we know if it worked? In most mature tech ecosystems, this is a profession with a career track and a well-worn curriculum. The major technology companies in the United States, India and Singapore run associate product manager programmes that take promising recent graduates and turn them into junior PMs through structured mentorship. India’s product ecosystem produced enough trained PMs through companies like Flipkart, Freshworks and Razorpay that the skill spread downward into the startup tier. Nepal has none of this pipeline. It has no APM programmes. It has no domestic product-first company large enough to have developed and exported PM talent at scale.
The cause sits in how Nepal’s IT exports are earned. Some 70 percent of the sector’s work, by most industry estimates, is services: a client in Australia or the United States defines what they want built, the Nepali developer builds it and the value capture is the hourly rate. This model is commercially rational and has produced real income for 100,000 people. It has not produced product managers, because the client is the product manager. You do not develop product instincts when someone else has already made every product decision before the project reaches you.
The few PMs who exist in Nepal’s ecosystem tend to share a profile: they are either founders who taught themselves by building and failing, or returned diaspora who worked in product roles at companies in India, the UK or the US before coming back to Kathmandu. Both groups are tiny. A survey among Kathmandu’s funded startups would likely find that the PM function is being performed by the founding CEO, by a developer who got tired of being given bad requirements and took over the specification process, or by nobody at all. The last category produces companies that ship features nobody uses.
Investors have noticed. Fund managers at Dolma and other early-stage vehicles describe seeing teams that are technically strong — sometimes world-class engineers — who cannot explain their product in user terms and cannot articulate why a paying customer would choose them over an alternative. Technical merit without product thinking raises the failure rate above what even a thin capital market can absorb.
The solution exists and is not exotic. Nepal’s accelerators could embed experienced product people as mentors or programme directors. NAS-IT could advocate for PM-specific training the same way it advocates for coding curricula. Diaspora PMs could be recruited back on short-term consulting arrangements. None of this requires the government’s Rs 730 million startup fund but a recognition that the skill holding Nepal’s ecosystem below its potential is not one that the university system currently teaches and that the market alone has not yet found a way to produce.
Nepal has the coders. The missing person in every Kathmandu startup meeting is the one who decided what the coders should build — and why. ■
