Overall experience: This was an online interview. Although it was scheduled between 9 to 11, my turn came at 11 30. It was a rather short interview. The panel was very hurried and looked to finish the interviews quickly. As I was already experienced in giving interviews, I was calm and confident.
Panel: Male prof (M), Female prof (F).
M: Good morning Karthik.
Me: Good morning sir.
M: Start with where you did your graduation? Where are you working? Why MBA and why at FMS?
Me: All in a go sir?
M: Yes, don't you know we have marks for your SOP?
Me: Yes sir, I will start.
*Gave a brief answer touching all the questions*.
F: Okay Karthik, let's move on to the extempore. Your topic is “Build to Last”.
Me: *starting to write something on paper".
F: You are not allowed to write anything down. Look at the camera, think for the 20sec, and speak for a minute.
Me: okay ma'am. The things that came to my mind when I looked at the topic are startups and infrastructure. I'll start with start-ups. We know that more than 90 percent of startups fail after a few initial successes. There may be multiple reasons for this. The founders may be very young and lack the expertise to create sustainable businesses. There may be ill-allocation of capital or ill-planned rapid expansion. Also, there may be foraying to non-core sectors which may result in failure. Maybe the founders need to gain enough experience before starting a company so that they can build companies that last. Coming to infrastructure…..
F: Your time is up. Did you read the book “build to last".
Me: No ma'am.
M: Okay Karthik, let's go into your core interview. When did you start working?
Me: July 2019 sir.
M: What are the revenue streams for Adobe?
Me: There are three revenue streams for Adobe, document cloud, creative cloud, and experience cloud.
M: So how do you think Adobe fights these free PDF tools available in the market.
Me: Sir, Adobe has a suite of tools rather than just one or two features available for free. After a few times, we need to give credit card details, etc, for free sites. So after a few times, the process is cumbersome. Also, Adobe doesn't focus on retail customers, its main focus is enterprise clients.
M: who are the enterprise clients?
Me: Mostly government organizations are our clients. They are moving towards paperless governance.
M: How sustainable are the revenues?
Me: Adobe moved to a SAAS (Software as a service model) so revenues are recurring .i.e. clients pay for the service regularly.
M: What's the third revenue stream you were mentioning?
Me: It's experience cloud, sir. Basically, we provide a comprehensive product for companies to run their marketing campaigns. It includes analytics, targeting mechanisms, and social media campaign management.
M: Interesting, how do they fight with giants like Google and Facebook.
Me: Our competitor is Salesforce. We have an Open Data initiative with Microsoft and SAP to help us have more data and have better insights. With this, we may become the leader in the marketing cloud space.
M: How do you propose to increase the revenues of your company?
Me: In document cloud space, we are more or less a monopoly in the organized space. There isn't much room for growth here. In the marketing cloud space, there is a huge market to capture and we are now at less market share and have room for growth. It's prudent to focus here on more revenues.
F: Nice talking to you Karthik, we can take this for some more time, but there is pressure from the next candidates. So this is your interview. All the best.
Me: Thank you, ma'am.
Note: FMS has marks for SOP, extempore, GD (canceled this year), and core interview. The core interview has fewer marks when compared to IIMs.
Source of the PI experience: Karthik Raghuram
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