ChEA BLOGS
Sabhya Sanchi | GoComet
Hey! I am Sabhya Sanchi, a 4th-year IDDDP student pursuing a Dual Major in Chemical Engineering and MBA in Operations Management from SJM SoM. I did my third-year internships in the domain of Product Management, at GupShup and GoComet.Apart from academics (which I’m not quite fond of xD), I have explored multiple domains ranging from designing and editing, to webdev and coding, to marketing, and I have worked in multiple positions of responsibilities.
For me, it wasn’t, and frankly still is not very clear what I wanted to pursue, but I was pretty clear about what I didn't want to do.
I tried tech - it was a No for me.
I tried coding and dev - a big NO.
I tried core chemical engg - I realized that I am not really good at it at all :)
I explored various domains, managed teams, and worked with multiple stakeholders. Through the work that I did in all these projects and positions of responsibilities, I realised that I enjoy exploring new things, communicating with people, empathizing and solving problems. Apart from that, previously in my second year, I got the opportunity to work with a professor of SoM and an NGO as a Product Management intern, and it immensely helped me to understand what type of work I wanted to do. These early opportunities also helped me to build my profile in that domain.
Basically, I realised that I’m someone who gets bored quite quickly if I have to do similar kinds of repetitive tasks. That's the beauty of product roles – most of the time, you will be working on solving different issues, working on different features and leading teams including people from various backgrounds!
Navigating the Internship Season:
I got both of my 3rd-year internships, at GupShup and GoComet, through off-campus opportunities. During that time, there were not many companies coming to IITB for product-related roles. I got shortlisted in almost all that did, but got rejected in the final rounds due to lack of preparation, as I was unaware of the standard type of Product Management interviews.
Talking about my interview process at GoComet as a PM intern, there were 3 rounds after the resume shortlist.
The 1st round consisted of 4-5 mathematical puzzles, which lasted for around 40 minutes. A few of them were intuitive, but a few were pretty tricky problems. These are just to check how structured your approach is.
The 2nd round lasted for about one hour, before which they gave me a problem statement to solve in a day. It was to do benchmarking and create a go-to market strategy for one of their products and present it during the interview. After that, the interviewer asked typical Product questions related to my favourite product and how I would improve it, and we discussed cases related to designing a new product (how to prioritize features, monetizing the feature, etc). This round focuses primarily on checking creative and communications skills.
The last round was the HR round, which lasted about 45 minutes and was taken by the CEO himself, a CSE graduate from IITD. We discussed motivation, why not core chemical engineering, future plans, the idol of your life, the entrepreneurial journey, and he was asking a lot of questions like a typical insti POR interview, so I was in my comfort zone.
Coming onto my 2nd internship at GupShup, an alumnus working in the organisation referred me, and HR just discussed with my our expectations, and my experiences and time commitments. This is where networking comes in handy!
Skills, Preparation and Product Interviews:
The primary skills that are required are your creative thinking skills, ability to empathize with people and their problems, and basic analytical and problem-solving skills. You should be good at working with people and communicating with them.
There are many books and courses that at available on the internet and platform like Udemy and Coursera, and they are helpful as well, especially with the basic technical terms of PM. I am also adding a link to a doc where I gathered various content from multiple sources, which I hope will be helpful.
Talking about the interview process, it varies a lot from person to person and organisation to organisation, and I would suggest practising a few things that will not only help you in product interviews but other interviews too.
1.Mathematical puzzles
2.Product deck(PPTs)
3.Guesstimates
4.Various Case studies (a bit different(more product oriented) from consulting interviews)
a.Market Entry(new product or features)
b.Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
c.Metric & Pricing
d.Product Design
e.Scheduling/Operational Questions
f.Market Trend
5.Basic concepts & frameworks, KPIs, Metrics, terminologies
My experience at GoComet:
GoComet is a SaaS company that provides AI-powered multi-modal logistics platforms to simplify end-to-end logistics. I was working under a Product Services team that works on basic but essential tasks, ranging from the onboarding of customers to overlooking all the general features common amongst all the products (where any change will affect across the entire platform).
With the CEO of GupShup:
I worked in multiple areas like analysing data coming from multiple channels, automating various tasks using Excel, holding standup meetings, creating and presenting progress reports, doing QA testing for new features & bugs, and researching other SaaS companies for possible collaborations. The one main project was to create a concept plan for auto onboarding of users and implement it on the platform, which I did effectively, and it is in the implementation phase as of now.
The work culture was great, and it's a WFH internship with flexible working hours. Additionally, GupShup only required me in office 1-2 days a week, so there was not that much work pressure. My manager and other people were also friendly and it was overall a pleasant experience.
Conclusion:
These experiences not only helped me to get a bit more clarification on what I want to pursue in my life but also increased my learning of various new domains and gave me a newer perspective for solving real-life problems.
I have tried my best to summarise and cover all the topics necessary for the internship season. If you want to discuss anything else, I'd be happy to help.
Best wishes!