Learning at Teaching hub
Product Management Internship at Edfora myPAT
I got an opportunity to intern with Edfora myPAT as a Product Manager. Ahead is a crisp overview of my fun learning experience. The internship included multiple knowledge sessions, simple to complex and exciting to tedious tasks, which gave me a glimpse of a PM’s day. I could grab this internship via LinkedIn. The work included was pretty diverse and can be enlisted as four tasks and explained briefly below.
Task 1 — Product and Market study
Understanding the product and market segment is the most crucial step for anything ahead. So, the journey started with it.
Problem Statement: Understand working and the market standing of myPAT. myPAT’s primary market segment is school students preparing for competitive exams.
Work-flow: I studied the B2C model of myPAT and prepared an extensive qualitative, competitive analysis report with the prominent market players, namely Toppr and Byjus.
Findings: myPAT provides a comprehensive performance tracking system, and easy-to-access revision marked questions (which is extremely important for preparatory phase students). Unavailability of course content and non-active doubt solving facilities are the areas of underperforming. During the next week, I realized that these are the in-process work of the organization.
Problem Statement B: Identify user problems and propose a solution for the same.
Work-flow: I started by creating user personas, identifying problems striking the market segment during the ongoing crisis, and figured out the features to ease the current situation. I used affinity clustering to group the related components.
Output: A mini-product idea of “Group Activity Mansion” was proposed. It would be a software application, including different rooms, namely, Quiz area, extempore stage, creative room(having prompts for attempts and discussions), speed meetups, and gaming zone. Enlisted individual room features. It was more of a fun activity but accompanied KT sessions broadened the scope of thoughts.
Task 2 — Strategized Beta Plan
It’s easy to strategize bigger plans, but it’s painful to get them validated. Many upcoming features and a whole new version of myPAT were in process. The task was to plan out the validation part. Technology will play on a bigger number, but to derive a suitable algorithm, required is the base plan with certainty. Laying out a beta testing plan and formulating hypotheses was a part of it. I formulated a complete strategy to take a sample from the population and create a whole plan for testing. (PS. I can not disclose much xD)
Task 3 — Documenting and communicating
In college projects, we have a team for 4–5 or up to 10 maximum. But when the number rises, the importance of documentation increases. With a team of 50+ designers and developers, full documentation of a single feature becomes crucial. I could work on documenting element mapping and user-communication elements. Toast messages, pop-ups, coach marks, etc., were major learning as a whole. Posh names of various kinds of documentation are “Product Requirement Document (PRD)” and “Software Requirement Specification (SRS).” Time restriction snatched away the opportunity to make one, but I could read and understand them. The efforts while making one are completely worth it as it ensures the proper communication and easing out the whole teamwork.
Task 4 — School product study, flow, and PRD writing:
I would call it the last moment task which turned out to be the most learning-oriented week. I was provided with the login credentials for the teacher interface of myPAT product for school.
Problem Statment: myPAT has a school product as well, but is to undergo up-gradation in terms of design. I had to recreate the flow of the product.
Work-flow: I spent time understanding the product. It is a wholesome LMS where a teacher can create concept-wise, chapter-wise, unit-wise; assignments or tests. Created content can be assigned to a particular or multiple classes; or a group of students; or individuals. It also has students’/classes’ performance statistics displayed in a consumable format. I had to create an Information Architecture adding the scope of improvement at each step and further details about the features.
Output: Thorough understanding of the product, Information architecture was made on Miro Board and I used Notion for PRD writing turns out to be a more presentable platform.
Takeaways…
Application: If you get an opportunity by messaging or approaching people via LinkedIn or in fact, any other platform, you yourself have to be super active to make the best use of the opportunity. I found myself on a back foot initially and the realization of responsibility hit me a lot lately. After some time I could communicate better regarding tasks, but I could not utilize the opportunity to the fullest.
Knowledge: Every day you spend learning a new thing is a mug from the ocean, but that’s how it starts. I discovered the existence of many processes, terminologies, and, yes, the importance of communication. Most important is the attitude towards work. Until you are ready to iterate multiple times, it is harder to improve. I had to iterate almost every task involved. It was a nice experience.
So yeah, that’s almost all!!
Limited time, crucial onboarding, and work from home took away some part of the experience, but I am glad to have accomplished it as it gave me a bit more clarity about my dislikings. (I follow elimination xD)
Acknowledgment
A major thanks to Udit Sawhney(CEO, myPAT) and Prabhat Kumar(AVP Product, myPAT) for accepting and general internship requests. I am extremely thankful to Arjun Duggal, for being such a great mentor. I would also mention Shristi, a chirpy fun-woman, who helped me in understanding relevant stuff, and Swati for a smooth onboarding process :P
