IIM Bangalore Student's Internship At Microsoft - Key Insights & Learnings

Microsoft is definitely one of the dream companies of anyone who wants to get into Product Management. The whole process of summer preparations culminated into two good months of enriched learning. As they say, the journey is more important than the destination; Microsoft definitely is one of those companies that ensure this. They made sure that my internship experience was a beautiful end to the months of preparations I put in to get there. I not only worked on one of the most upcoming technologies, but I was also made to feel how my decisions would affect my product’s direction. But before I delve into that further, let me walk you through my preparation and how I reached where I did. A very important piece of advice that I would like to give you upfront is that do not judge your preparation by your peers and no matter where you are in your preparation, it is never too late to start.

Preparation Strategy

If there is anything that preparing for summer internships has taught me, it is that no shoe fits all. But I do believe most of you will end up going through the phases that I went through sooner or later. If I had to describe my preparation, it would have to be in phases. The best thing that I would advise you to do is to breathe through it all, take it one day at a time and the day you get too overwhelmed, take a break and go outside.

Phase 1: The Clueless Phase (Sep 7th- Sep 20th)

This phase started for me as soon as the resume preparation began. I did some basic hygiene preparation in every sector like reading up on the latest developments, solving puzzles, collecting frequently asked questions from seniors. Since I had good grades throughout, most of the seniors believed that I would get lots of consulting shortlists. I had no clue what consulting actually did, but I knew that all the kids were running behind it. Thus, started my journey to Consulting Case Preparations. The preparation helped me with concepts like MECE (Mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive) questions. They also made me realize that when you were posed with a question, it wasn’t necessary to directly looking for solutions; it was equally important to know the finer details and that you could keep questioning till you gained clarity. The preparation had to be done in groups of 2-3 and finding common time with people became extremely difficult. I also realized that Consulting and Finance were something I did not want to pursue at all and once I eliminated them, the amount of pressure reduced significantly.

The Peer and their Pressure

If I look back at my experience of Summer Placement, I believe that this phase had me the most stressed out. I was heavily influenced and wanted to do what my peers were doing. As I formed my consulting case preparation group, I came under immense pressure. I felt that I had to constantly prove myself to them and I always tiptoed around them. I would be glad on the days we couldn’t meet and the days we did meet, I would feel extremely exhausted. I also realized my real output was pretty less. As more and more shortlists for consulting came out and I did not make the cut, I saw their behaviour change significantly. At this stage, I decided to walk away from that group and started talking to my friend in IIM Calcutta who was undergoing a similar situation. I found that even though our preparation would be over the phone, I would feel a lot more relaxed around him. There would be no judgments as we both tried to learn. We often laughed at our mistakes, applauded the good calls we made and reprimanded each other for repeating mistakes.

Phase 2: What next phase? (Sep 20th- Sep 30th)

As soon as I realized that Consulting and Finance were not something that interested me, I looked at what it was that I really wanted to do. At this stage, I started going for sessions arranged by seniors to see what each sector consisted. Going to presentations and seeing the kind of work each type of role would do also helped me in deciding where was I going to devote my time. While this phase should have been the shortest, it took me the longest time to realize what it was that I really wanted to do, what it was that interested me and was not something that resulted from groupthink. Meanwhile, I continued attending Group Discussions and Mock Interviews to judge how I was going to approach my preparation. I finally narrowed my interest down to two major fields: Product Management and Marketing. Now, that I had decided on my areas of interest, I moved to the next phase.

Phase 3: Preparation (Oct 1st- Oct 14th)

Phase 3-A: Planning Phase

The initial momentum and excitement to learn something kept me highly motivated. I would regularly devote at least 2 hours solving cases and on days I was tired, basic preparations across any sector I liked. However, as time progressed and the momentum started to wane owing to the fact that we had company presentations, long forms to fill, submissions in classes, I was unable to devote the planned no. of hours. I realized that while I was the kind of person who made plans and stuck to them, this method was not suitable for my current situation. In a week, some days I had more than 2 hours while in others, I was merely able to do my pre-reads for the next class. In fact, if I made a plan and then did not stick to it, it only stressed me out more thinking that I was slacking in my preparation. Thus, I changed my strategy of planning my daily schedule to planning my week ahead. At the start of each week, I would list down my weekly goals. They ranged from a number of chapters to complete to form filing deadline. On days I had too many deadlines approaching, I would ease on the preparations and on days I had time, I would double down. Another thing that helped me immensely was my calendar. They made sure I did not miss any deadline and I liked this method so much that I have continued using this for my academics as well. Further, as shortlists started coming out, my preparation became more and more focused on Product Management and Marketing. I continued focusing on GDs and Mock Interviews. In order to do better in GDs, I started a GD prep group in our section which practised GDs every 3 days across various topics.

Phase 3-B: Focused Preparation

Product Management, or ProdMan as it is called, came easily to me. I had worked as an engineer, developing products and so fine detailing products was not very difficult. However, it did take me significant time to learn to look at the bigger picture to see what segments and markets to target, how to estimate the user base and the revenue. This is where my experience of working with a student club helped me immensely. I was able to find segments and identify with their needs faster. For preparation, I worked with 2 books, “Cracking the PM Interview” and “Decode and Conquer” as suggested by the seniors.

Hindsight Insights:

I should have started avoiding people who told me how wonderful their preparation was or how they weren’t prepared at all. Both kinds of people stressed me and I realize that nothing fruitful came out of this sort of conversation. I also believe that I anchored myself around the opinions of my peers and seniors. As they glamorized the life of a consultant, I weighed my self-worth heavily in terms of how many consulting shortlists I got. DO NOT DO THAT. YOU ARE YOUR OWN PERSON. I met tons of people who hated their consulting job and some who loved it more than anything. But again, no shoe fits all.

The Placement Process

Microsoft and what worked for me:

When I entered the GD day, I had 23 shortlists for GD and at the end of the day, I had 27 shortlists for Day 1. Microsoft had a very unique method to judge its candidates. Unlike a 15-minute GD where everyone was trying hard to get some airtime, Microsoft had an hour-long case-based GD. We were a group of ten people who were given a case statement like “Design a next-gen car assistant”. We had to come up with a go to market strategy, our key performance indicators, the features, etc. We were all placed at different places in the room and over the next hour, the moderators came up to us and discussed with us what we had done so far. At the end of one hour, we were given a minute, to sum up what we had done. At the end of the day, they sent out an extremely short hotlist and I believe converted most of the people who they called. My interview next day lasted merely 8 mins, where they told me that they were extremely impressed with the way I had handled the case. I was asked basic HR questions and voila! I was hired.

Tips to crack the GD/Interview:

1. When you are given the problem statement, spend the first five minutes doing a need-gap analysis. Be as creative as you can be.
2. You need to have a holistic view of what you want to be doing with the product. Think about your sources of revenue (not something which everyone does).
3. The one minute that you get to sum up your case, be extremely concise and to the point.

The Internship Experience

8 weeks with Microsoft:

At the onset, no I did not get a PPO from Microsoft. Nevertheless, I cannot deny that I had an amazing time interning with the team. I worked with the Mixed Reality at Work team, where I had to design a product strategy for one of the apps that work with the HoloLens. I got to work with the HoloLens I & II. We were given full ownership of our strategy and spent the first half of our internship understanding the product and what was required of us. This entailed talking to a lot of people within the organization. We read lots of reports, understood what the competitors were doing, what we were doing and where we would like to go. Through our secondary research, we developed a hypothesis about pain points of our potential customers and then tried to validate them through a couple of primary visits to talk to customers on the ground (a way to do our need gap analysis). We also conducted numerous telephonic interviews with people we knew in our network who had worked in a similar domain. Compiling the above two, I then presented the final strategy.

Pros of my internship:

1. Great work-life balance. I was never overly exhausted. I worked for 8-10 hours and had plenty of time to do what I loved.
2. The technology was top-notch.
3. People at Microsoft are super helpful, even if they don’t know you.
4. I got to work with a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and design interaction engineers.

Cons of my internship:

1. Specifically, to my team: I did not have a mentor and that wasn’t the case in other teams.
2. A lot of times you would feel like a headless chicken, doing too many things all at once.

Key learnings from Microsoft:

1. When in doubt, always ask for a mentor.
2. Do not hesitate in reaching out to people for help.
3. Take continuous feedback.
4. Keep people in the loop and always have your manager in confidence when doing something risky.
5. Always leverage your network and be equally eager to help your peers when they are in need.

As my end my journey with Microsoft, I understood a major thing, it is not the end. Being in one of the most prestigious colleges in the country has made me realize that sometimes things don’t work out and that is probably for the best. If you ever face the same, do realize that the “Universe doesn’t make mistakes.”

Harshita Pathak
Program Manager Intern
Microsoft
PGP Class of 2020, IIM-Bangalore