How we hire Product Managers at Razorpay
Product Managers at Razorpay, similar to PMs at most technology companies, are expected to be superhumans who are playing different roles in numerous different discussions every single day. A lot of aspiring PMs and people outside of Product Management domain don’t know what we do. And assume that the key aspect of our job is to decide what to build and tell everyone around to go build it. Setting the vision, direction and identifying ‘What to do’ is very important and one of the most interesting aspects of a PM role, but only a part of what we do as PMs.
Product Management involves multiple different things. A PM at Razorpay is expected to both zoom out to 10,000 ft and devise the strategic direction. At the same time, he is assumed to understand the ground realities across all functions & zoom in and run the show as and when needed. A given day or a week could involve talking to the Sales or Accounts team to understand feedback on new asks from an Enterprise customer. In a few hours, you might be connecting with engineers to clarify questions on an existing feature that’s in the development phase. Lot of us start our day by looking at data to ensure the health of our product or platform is good. Time is often spent connecting with customer-facing teams to do a knowledge-transfer session on the new feature that’s about to be rolled out. Lastly, we do have to carve out some space to envision the next big feature. All of this when we are surrounded by specialists in different functions such as Engineering, Design, Sales, Business Operations, Finance, Legal, etc. Hence, the ability to understand most of these as a generalist, empathise with them, build trust and asking the right questions is extremely important to excel in this role.
There is a method to this madness and chaos. Good Product Managers are decisive, are not afraid of owning new things, thrive in a chaotic environment and have the inherent ability to marshal a team towards a common mission.
By now you would have realised that the role is difficult and demanding. To get the right folks on board and make them successful in this role we go through an elaborate set of discussions in trying to understand individuals who are interested in signing up for this. Next section describes the skill-set we look for in our PMs and how we assess them.
Product Thinking
This round tests the candidate on Product solutioning and product-first thinking as a whole. Given a product problem, are you able to break the problem down and put together and defend a high-quality solution (mini-PRD)? This is one of the core skill-sets for a PM.
Sample Questions
- How would you design an app for Swiggy’s delivery exec?
- Design a mobile app to be used by parents at an amusement park.
- Build a product solution for Flipkart to win the senior citizen citizens — online shopping destination for senior citizens
- Design an elevator system.
- Design a washing machine for blind people.
Problem Solving
Given a day-to-day problem, how would you approach it? This round tests your ability to structure a random, new problem so you can attack it well, get to the actual root-cause and propose multiple solutions. Once that’s done can you go deep into the top 1–2 solutions.
Sample Questions
- Flipkart’s app conversion has dipped by 10% yesterday. How would you diagnose the same?
- How would you improve the signup process of Amazon to increase conversion?
- Should a commerce app such as Bigbasket app have a default sign-up post an app download from the Android playstore?
- Should Oyo’s paid ad on mobile take the user to app download or mobile site?
Business Acumen
Do you understand the business context behind a given product? And would you be able to build a business strategy for new product offerings? Or better the business model of an existing offering? This skill-set is often combined with problem-solving cases.
Sample Questions
- Identify a monetisation strategy for Medium.
- How would you approach pricing for a new product offering such as ‘Swiggy super’? Is Swiggy potentially underpricing the product currently?
Technology grounding
PMs at Razorpay are working with Engineers on a day-to-day basis and are expected to understand technology to both collaborate with Engineering and build & launch a meaningful technology product. While we don’t expect our PMs to code, we do expect them to understand the feasibility of a particular idea, appreciate the high-level system architecture, understand where the technical constraints could affect the product experience and also size a particular product feature at a high level.
Sample Questions
- Can you describe the technology architecture of your current product in as much detail as possible?
- How would you define non-functional requirements for an at-scale product such as Flipkart’s PWA mobile site?
Strategic thinking and planning
This round tests the candidate on his strategic thinking and planning abilities. The role involves devising the business strategy, product vision as well as putting together quarterly and yearly product goals and turning that into a high-quality roadmap.
Sample Questions
- In your current company, what does your forward-looking business strategy look? How is it different from the competition?
- Why is Amazon Prime so successful? What would you the next 1 year roadmap look like if you were the PM for Amazon Prime?
Summary
Summarising the key skill-sets we look for in our PMs below.
- Product thinking
- Problem solving
- Business acumen
- Data analytics
- Technology grounding
- Strategic thinking & planning
I hope this post gives you insights into how we hire Product Managers at Razorpay and what is the PM role at Razorpay like.
If you are interested in a career in Fintech and Payments, we are growing the team across functions and levels. Do check out our current open positions here.
Thank you
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Originally published at https://razorpay.com on July 31, 2019.
