Intern Story #3: Sonali’s Product Management Internship @ Snapdeal

I graduated this year from IIT Kanpur due to COVID-19 (Batch of 2020 :/). Right now, I am placed as an Associate Product Manager at Nestaway.

My internship journey has been incredible. I was too scared in my third year that whether at the end of the semester, I would be able to end up with a successful internship or not. Luckily when I tried off-campus for an intern through emails and LinkedIn, I landed up with several interviews among which I chose the product management internship at Snapdeal.

The concept of leadership and making my own decisions and strategies always fantasized me. During my college life, I worked for consecutive three years in Techkriti, the annual technical and entrepreneurial festival of IIT Kanpur. In my third year, I got a chance to become the festival Head, Media, and Publicity where I got the opportunity to lead the team of my executives. So, I was familiar with the fact of planning, marketing, development, and executing the strategy in a festival but how that works in the world of product cycle was utterly unknown to me. I was aware of my interest in management until that time. I did courses such as Supply Chain Management at IIT Kanpur, which helped me to gain more insights into how things worked.

1)PREPARATION STRATEGY: The product cases are mainly asked in the product management interviews. I preferred two books: ‘Decode & Conquer’ by Lewis and ‘Cracking the PM Interview’ by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. The other thing asked would be guesstimate, puzzles or general questions to test your creativity.

2) INTERVIEW: I was asked regarding SQL in my internship interview. Well, companies can vary in the skills they require for product management. I was also asked regarding the strategy to introduce a startup for cycle rentals inside my campus. Your creativity is the main thing that will be tested for the interview.

3) MY INTERNSHIP EXPERIENCE: The internship began on 22nd May 2019 for 58 days located in the main office at Gurugram. The first day was orientation, where we were briefed about the policies, the company structure, timings, code of conduct, and other important points. After then, I was introduced to the product management team consisting of 6 people, including the Director, VP, and the managers (Each team had its own Director and VP).

Sonali’s desk at office!

The best thing about an established company over a new startup is that it has a very well defined team structure for every field. For e.g. there is a separate team for product design, product management, operations management and supply chain management.

We were given our ID cards which felt like a full-time employee as there is hardly any differentiation between interns and employees. I remember getting scolded many times for calling them Sir/ Ma’am in the starting days. The team used to have weekly meetings on Thursdays for discussing the progress where we intern also presented our part. My objective was to develop a strategy to mitigate the RTO (Return to origin) products.

I had to choose various parameters such as an address, order timings, category type, etc for finding out what combination based on seller, customer, courier and product-level had maximum shipped orders in RTO.

The data extraction and handling were done using SQL as the data was stored in Vertica. Vertica is a columnar storage platform designed to handle large volumes of data, which enables high-speed query performance in traditionally intensive scenarios.

My message to the Product Management Interns:

1. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It is important to understand what your product does. How exactly things are done.
2. Master the art of observing. A large part of the learning comes from observing the product managers at your company.
3. Prioritize everything you want to do in the product as the time is limited. Discuss your ideas with your product managers.

Watch Sonali sharing her experience for Academics and Career Council, IIT K:

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