Summer Internship placements play an important part in shaping your MBA journey. A lot of effort is exerted to make the most of this opportunity by MBA candidates. Choosing the domain to pursue your career can be challenging in the early stages as you may not have knowledge about the entire spectrum of the domain, the nuances in it and the work you would have to do.
Preparations required for each and every domain like Consulting, Marketing, Operations, Finance, ProdMan and General Management differ a lot as the roles require different skills to excel in it. However, preparing for consulting can be a safe option as the preparations for consulting, marketing and GenMan have a certain overlap. This helps the candidates to have a backup option if they are not able to get an internship in their desired domain.
ProdMan prep can be easily accomplished by an individual pursuing his MBA. Time is a major constraint in an MBA students life, ProdMan prep would have certain overlap with other domains and would help the individual to crack case interviews. The approach followed for cracking the PM interview is same as the one required for Consult/GenMan roles. ProdMan roles typically include liaison between Business and Tech team, planning for next deliverables of the product. The role gives the PM complete autonomy in deciding the future of the product.
Shortlists for the consulting companies would be out first, followed by finance and a few prod man companies. Shortlisting criteria for the companies differ as per the roles they have to offer.
Who should prepare for ProdMan roles:
B. Tech Candidates who have prior experience in Services industry either from Dev/Business side and others with previous related work experience.
Shortlists and Hotlists:
The shortlists would come to the candidates with the above-mentioned credentials to their names. As an MBA comes with its own twist and turns, getting a shortlist doesn’t have any effect as the Big IT giants would have their preferred candidates who would be on their Hotlists. The Hotlists of candidates would come in a day before the scheduled interviews.
GD Round
ProdMan requires candidates to go through the GD rounds. For GD preparation go through the sector reports shared by the clubs in the college. This would provide you with enough factual data about different industries to be used in the GDs.General awareness is a must to crack the GDs. The candidate should go through mock GDs conducted by college clubs to get a flavour of the heat thats going to be there on the final GD day.
Don’t lose your calm. Stay focused and make it a point to speak at least 2-3 sensible points. Normal GD evaluation criteria by panellists would be done. If you are thorough with the basics, the round should be a piece of cake to crack.
Interview Round Prep
The interviewers would ask you questions to judge your thought process and logical flow of ideas to structure and find solution to a problem. The questions can be mainly categorized into two types:
1) Guesstimates
The guesstimate problems for consult and gen man preparation are more than enough to crack this section of the interview. Keep the facts about the population of Metro cities, India, etc handy. This would greatly help you to reach the solution to the guesstimates.
2) ProdMan case solving
The following books are to be referred for Prod Man interviews:
Reference Books:
The starting 13 chapters from Cracking the PM interview would provide the groundwork in understanding the roles and responsibilities of the job. The main crux starts in Chapter 14: Product Questions. Make sure you go through all the cases discussed in the book.
The important aspects to focus upon are that the solutions formed should make use of the concept of MECE.
MECE: Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.
This would ensure that an entire holistic solution is presented to the interviewer.
Decode and Conquer should be the go-to book for solving and deep-diving into interview cases. The book talks about CIRCLES method. Following the method would ensure that you don’t miss into any aspects of the problem while presenting the interviewer with your solution. Ensure that there is two-way communication with the interviewer and all assumptions made by you for solving the case are in sync with the interviewer’s expectations.
CIRCLES Method
The steps of this method are:
C – Clarify. Ask questions to clarify anything that you are unsure of. Confirm your assumptions.
I – Identify the customers as personas like food lovers, cricket fans, high-speed users etc.
R — Report customer needs (use cases).
C — Cut, Through prioritization. The use cases should be ranked based on different attributes (revenue, feasibility, complexity).
L — List solutions.
E — Evaluate the tradeoffs of the solutions presented.
S — Summarize
The circles’ method would be greatly beneficial in forming a skeletal solution which can iteratively build upon.
For case solving, data samples can always be clustered using the HML method.
HML method
H – High
M – Medium
L – Low
Segregating the data into such buckets would greatly help you to form solutions to the problems faced by different categories as you would be focusing upon the minute aspects of the problems.
At the end of the case, state the final solution you would recommend, the benefits and the tradeoffs of the solution. Criticizing your answer in modest terms would take away the opportunity from the interviewer to do so as it highlights that you have critically analysed your solution and have looked through the loopholes in the solution presented by you.
Misc
The HR questions should be given equal importance, more but not less. Some companies would also be conducting psychometric tests to evaluate the candidate-job fit. Go through your resume thoroughly. Every point on the resume should be known in and out.
Prepare questions like:
1) Favourite product? Why? Features?
2) The product you dislike? Why?
3) Website XYZ, features liked/disliked? Add-on features to be incorporated?
4) Company product research (Eg. Microsoft product Suite, Amazon AWS offerings, etc)
Technology is ever-changing. Keeping in touch with the latest happenings in the field would help you acclimatize with the questions asked and incorporate the latest technological advancements in the solutions you would formulate. Follow the below blogs to stay in touch with the technology.
Blogs to follow:
Cheers to successfully cracking the PM interviews 😛
Feel free to reach out to me. Suggestions for improvements are welcomed.
Reference: