My Product Intern Interview Experience at Upstox

My Product Intern interview at Upstox consisted of 2 rounds including an HR phone round first. First-round was with an Associate Product Manager and the second round was with the Senior Product Manager.

I applied for the opening through LinkedIn. Although I don’t have any prior experience working with on a product team, (all my previous internships were technical) I have been wanting to move to a more strategic and product oriented role and hence decided to apply for the same.

Process -

Round 1 — SQL, Dashboarding, Analytics
Round 2 — Product and Strategy

Round 1 : Problem Solving

Interview type: The interview started with my introduction. The interviewer then asked me about my experience working with SQL. He then explained the job role to me (which involved customer and consumer analytics with SQL primarily). He asked me if there’s a special query that I had written and remember.

We then moved onto the technical part of the interview. He asked me a few basic questions related to SQL.

Questions -

1. Difference between Having and Where Clause?
2. What’s the use of SELECT DISTINCT statement, etc.
3. What’ are RANK, PROCEDURE ?

He asked me if I had ever worked with Analytic Functions in SQL to which I said no, but I explained their use cases.
We then moved onto the query writing part of the interview. I had to share my screen, open up a google doc and write queries for the given problem statements.

1. Question 1 was based on Advanced Analytic Functions. This was a tricky part for me. Firstly because I had never faced a ‘google doc code round’ and the questions he asked required the use of RANK and PARTITION which I had never used before. I took sometime to try and come up with the solution but could not do so.
2. Question 2 was based on the same tables but was focused on JOINS. I could answer this question.

TIP : Always speak your approach and thought process out loud and discuss with your interviewer. Even if you don’t attain the correct answer, this helps a lot.

He then asked me a few oral questions and we came to an end of the discussion. I asked him if he had any feedback for me and he sent me a course link to help me upskill myself.

Course Link : https://www.kaggle.com/code/alexisbcook/analytic-functions

Round 2 — Product and Strategy

Behavioural discussion on resume, guesstimate, design, favourite product ( I chose Spotify as it is something I use daily) Then got a strategy question.‍

Was asked the following questions in this round -

1. Three things you like about my favourite product
2. Three things you don’t like — wow features you’ll add
3. What was the last thing you did on the product
4. Why Spotify over Gaana.com or other competitors.
5. What are the metrics you feel are most important for the product. I said — Retention Rate, Daily Active Users and CLV.
6. How would you calculate Retention Rate over 3 months?

Tip : Always answer product questions in a structured manner. More than the answer, Interviewers gauge your thought process and alignment of your thinking sequence.
Start with the user pain point -> the solution -> product’s benefits

Results -

They wanted someone who could work from office atleast 2 days a week. Couldn’t do the same, unfortunately due to college commitments.

Lack of experience was also a major roadblock.

Major Learnings -

This was the first time I interviewed for a product role, had no idea how to approach the same.

Always ask a known contact what you could expect in such interviews, what you should prepare and how to approach any question.