INTERN STORIES

Intern Story #11: Manan’s Product Management Internship @ Bounce

Manan Agarwal is a pre-final year mechatronics engineering undergrad at MIT, Manipal. He just completed a product management internship at Bounce, before which he interned with SpringWorks in a growth strategy role.

He is heavily invested in the Indian startup ecosystem and loves to talk about anything and everything startups.

At college, Manan leads the Business and Public Relations team at Manipal’s largest media organization, Manipal The Talk Network.

MTTN | We Are Manipal

When he is not doing the above, he can be found playing Call of Duty or finding new excel shortcuts.

Getting hired (Application Process, Interview Experience)

I was in early talks for a summer internship with a VC firm in late Feb — March, but due to the lockdown, things couldn’t move forward on that front. During the initial days of the lockdown, I read a lot of product blogs and, at the same time, was also debating about whether or not I really should do a remote internship.

I firmly believe that an internship especially at such an early stage of one’s career gives access to a different network as well as a lot of exposure outside the team. This was something I thought would be tough to replicate online, especially as an intern.

I had been following Sid (my manager at Bounce) on Twitter for quite some time, and when he tweeted that Bounce was looking for PM interns, I decided to have a chat.

The process was relatively simple. It was an intro call → assignment →a follow-up call.

The introduction call was a 15 min call, it was about what I was doing, what I had done, and why I wanted to get into a Product role at Bounce

This was followed by an assignment where I was asked to design a self-pickup from a restaurant model for Swiggy. I wrote a PRD for that, which you can check out here.

PRD - Self Pickup from restaurants on Swiggy

After I emailed the assignment, I got a call from Sid, where he told me about the project I would be working on. I was also asked if I were to sell bikes in Manipal, how would I go about it and a couple of other things, following which I had the role.

Day in the life as an intern

Joining a shared mobility company during a pandemic was an exciting experience because you get to see how these companies think beyond the usual.

I was primarily working in the Fleet Monetization team. Bounce essentially has over 25k petrol bikes across cities in India and slowly wants to transition to an all-electric fleet for various reasons, primarily because of asset safety and unit economics.

For this move, the company had decided to sell the existing petrol bikes, and the primary aim of the product team here was to enable 3x sales using all product levers.

I worked on various products, the app, the website but primarily owned the Whatsapp Bot. When I joined, the Whatsapp Bot was not a big top of the funnel source for leads or final conversions, but by the time I wrapped up my internship, the Whatsapp Bot, was generating over 150 sales leads a day and around 5 sales a day.

I also did a lot of internal tooling, CRM management, geospatial analysis, UX research during my time at Bounce.

A typical day would start at 11 am and finish by 8–8:30 pm, with breaks for my college classes in between; the company was very flexible with timings and adjusted to my college schedule.

If I had to document my learnings, I’d say that because of the high degree of ownership that I got on whatever I did at Bounce, there was learning everywhere. All problems statements and challenges that I solved were figured out by me — by myself — and though doing this remotely was challenging, it was an excellent learning experience.

I was asked to run meetings as well as used to present the weekly metrics from the project to the VP of Consumer Products.

I learned how product teams are run, how the product needs to meet business goals, and how product teams liaison with engineering and UX research teams.

Advice to aspiring interns

1. If you’re interning in a product team, the art of prioritization is essential. Time is limited, don’t be afraid to ask for help
2. Reach out to people outside your team, even if it is for 15 mins, try to talk to stakeholders in the company, you will find a lot of insight there.
3. Most of the time while hiring interns, it is more about how well you fit into the team as compared to how skilled you are; if you’re able to convince your recruiter that you will be a good fit and can add some value, it is not tough to land an internship.
4. Try to document your learnings weekly for future reference.

For any discussions or queries, feel free to drop me an 👋 on mananagarwal0308@gmail.com or on Twitter.

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