My PM Intern Journey at Prodigal
Let me start from the beginning
I am Priyanka Bagade, a final year student in electrical engineering at IIT Bombay. I started my journey with Prodigal in March, where I worked with the product management team as an intern for the next 6 months (till date). Instead of talking about my journey in a long monologue, I will try and frame my answer as a PRD i.e a Product Requirement Document (I bet my manager will be proud of this)
Epic — My journey at Prodigal
For people who don’t understand what an epic is, just consider it to be a broad idea/ feature under which you include more details related to the idea/ feature
Opportunities/ Requirements (Why?)
1. Who does not like ownership?
One of the main reasons I wanted to join Prodigal was to feel ownership about my work. Having done projects in the past which were more of a recommendation nature, I thought it was time to do something on-ground. Be in charge of things start to end and see your work getting used somewhere
2. Culture
While working in a startup, you know you have to give it your best. Time knows no bounds (which is literally true in case of Prodigal because of their US-India team and time coordination). That’s when you decide the team you want to work with and not just your work profile. Having met Sangram (the CTO and co-founder) early on, I felt a certain confidence in choosing Prodigal as the place to work for almost half a year. Further working with my manager — Gunjan Agarwala — I realised I could be candid about almost anything. Be it the mistakes I felt I made or being slightly late in setting up sprint tasks 😛— she has always been there for help, and so has everyone else. If you ever feel like talking to someone (work related or not), all you need to do is Slack them (while this will often result in a meeting being set up sometime later filling your schedule:))
3. Trying something new -
I had never really worked in Product Management before. All I knew was that a PM will ideate new features and work on their details. While this may or may not sound interesting to you, it meant the perfect mix of creativity and research to me. There was no way I could have let go of an opportunity to work in this field and I am glad I did not
Requirements (What)?
For people who don’t understand what a user story is, consider it to be a sub-feature within the main one (epic)
User Story 1 : My work
As I said, my idea about a PM’s work was to come up with new features. While I largely agree with it, there is a lot more to it. Working as a PM (or an intern) is not just about adding things for the customer to see, it’s also about fixing things in the background. Imagine opening an app which takes forever to load, that’s what a PM fixes too! I got a chance to work on both the front end and the back end part in Prodigal. To note — any task I worked on required help from the tech teams to form a basic understanding of the processes. A special thanks to them for bearing with my limited understanding of things. While all this is said and done, I realized that documentation is no piece of cake either. Writing about your work in a way that everyone understands is just as important as making the thing itself (you can probably realize how much I have been into documentation just based on my article format..I feel I just cant leave it behind)
User Story 2: My environment
As I mentioned earlier, when you join a startup, you don’t just invest in its product, you also invest in its people. My guide, buddy, and manager were all the same. I could discuss my problems, my feedback and my progress without any apprehensions. People who might be living miles away from you (or even on a different continent entirely) are just a message away. Learning to appreciate, learning to support and learning to learn are my three most important takeaways here
How?
I don’t think I want to elaborate on how I applied for the internship or managed to get into Prodigal. I had 0 knowledge about product management with some corporate experience due to my past internships but I feel I had the willingness to learn. Working at Prodigal has made me realise that working is not just doing the tasks allocated to you. It’s also about doing things which aren’t theoretically yours to do.
Treating the company as if it’s my own is what mattered
End of my Sprint -
5 sprints later, here I am writing about my internship experience. I am happy that I got to get up at the time I wanted (which is a huge huge barrier for WFH college interns) and give my best. Hoping to see the company reach new heights!!
Note — If you do join Prodigal and go on a hike with them, be careful to do your own research. Their so called ‘hikes for kids’ are no walk in the park!
