How can a product manager get into the company of his dreams if he is not invited to interviews?

Want to work as a product manager at Yandex, Avito, Ozon and other leading IT companies, but they won't hire you? How to get into your dream company?

I often recommend subscribers your channel to similar companies. In 90% of cases, there is a refusal. The most common reasons: lack of experience in companies with a developed product culture, lack of expertise or skills in working with A/B tests. How to get relevant experience if leading companies do not hire, and your company has a poorly developed product culture?

There is a solution – an internship. For example, a call for applications has recently started for Avito Product Bootсampand in September 2024 you have a great opportunity to get on it. How to do this, what are the pros and cons, we will discuss in the article together with a product manager who got to Avito through an internship.

Briefly about the author

David Mkrtumyan

Founder of the service Kids-week.ru and the author of the channel ProductNet

Social networks: Telegram | Net | Linkedin | VK

Worked as a leading product manager at Avito and Yandex Market. Founder of the service Kids-week.ru and the author of the channel Product Netwhere you can learn about the best product practices of leading IT companies, get career advice and assistance in finding a job.

Structure of the article

Who is the internship suitable for?

This internship is right for you if:

• You have no experience working in the product, but you want to master the profession of a product manager.

• You work in a different role: marketer, project manager, analyst, sales manager, but want to move to product.

• You work as a product manager in a startup or a small company, but want to move up to the big leagues and master the best product practices.

By the way, the best not only in Russia, but also in the world. Former colleagues from Yandex, who got jobs in foreign companies, shared with me that Avito and Yandex are well known abroad, and they highly value product managers from these companies.

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How an internship works and what to expect from it

Registration deadlines: September 2–22, 2024

Internship duration: 9 months. After nine months of internship at Avito, a new product is born on the market 😉

Successful outcome of the internship: get a job as a middle product manager at Avito

The internship is a combat training. You will solve real problems, relying on the help of a strong team and an experienced mentor. In parallel, you will undergo training in key product competencies:

You will also have a clear learning track and an individual development plan.

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7 Benefits of Internship and Why It's Better Than Courses for Product Managers

1. Knowledge — you will get access to Avito's internal training materials, which were compiled by the company's leading experts based on their real-life experience. When I worked at Avito, I took such courses myself to improve my expertise, and I'll tell you — they are much better than the paid courses for product managers that I took. For ethical reasons, I won't name them 😉

2. Experience — you will work on real product tasks and get a great opportunity to immediately apply the acquired knowledge in battle. This is another advantageous difference from paid courses for product managers, because no case, even from practice, can compare with solving a real problem.

3. Reward — you will receive not only valuable knowledge and experience, but also a decent reward. The salary depends on the level of your skills, but in any case is within the framework of market offers for products.

   Unlike courses, you don't pay for the knowledge and experience you receive, you pay for it. It's just a holiday, isn't it? 😉

4. Community and networking — you will have the opportunity to meet and make friends with the best market experts and real professionals in their field. Life is long — the Earth is round. Maybe in the future you will launch a startup together.

   By the way, I recently launched my project together with a former colleague from Yandex. It is a service for finding entertainment for children Kids-week.ru

5. Possibility to do an internship remotely from any city in the world. Or come to one of the cool Avito offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Samara and Yerevan.

6. Work in a dream company — successful finalists get a job as a middle product manager at Avito.

   80% of last year's bootcamp participants got jobs.

7. Career springboard — even if you don’t get a job at Avito as a result of your internship, your knowledge and experience will not be taken away from you, and after training you will be able to find a job as a product manager in another company.

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Disadvantages of an internship

• 18+ — to get an internship, you need to grow up a little 😉

• It's full time, baby. — you definitely won't be able to combine an internship with anything else, since you'll be performing real product tasks and undergoing training. One is impossible without the other. Only those who successfully complete the training and show excellent results in their work receive a position on staff.

• Shit happens — this is a rare case, but it happens that a successful candidate does not get a position on staff, because there is simply no rate. But even in this case, you get into the personnel reserve and can get recommendations to get a job in another company. And a recommendation from Avito is worth a lot.

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How to get an internship

1. Register on the platform “Quarry workshop” — this is an Avito partner. It is better to do this as soon as possible to gain more time to solve the case.

2. Solve the case. On September 16, all participants will receive it, and if you register after this date, the case will open immediately. But the time to solve the case is limited, so it is better not to delay with registration.

3. Rate other participants' solutions — You not only solve the case yourself, but also evaluate the cases of 10 other participants.

   You will be selected not only based on how you solved your case, but also based on your assessment of the cases of other participants. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate honestly: without overestimating or underestimating others.

   And the ratings will also be checked by Avito's ML model, and believe me, it works as it should 😉

4. Become one of the top 150 candidates — they will move on to the next stage, where they will be selected by experienced Avito product managers.

5. Pass the interview — from 150 participants, hiring managers will select the best and invite them to an interview first with a recruiter, and then with the manager and the team.

6. Receive an offer and agree on a start date for the internship — the release date is discussed with each candidate individually.

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How to successfully complete an internship and get a full-time job: the experience of Sergey Zhirnov, an Avito product manager who completed an internship

Sergey Zhirnov

Avito product. Before the internship, he worked at r_keeper

What did you do during bootcamp?

I got into the program through solving a case on the Quarry Workshop platform.

At Avito, I worked in the CRM team — an internal solution that is used to communicate with the entire multi-million audience of Avito. It is used to do all mailings and notifications.

I was responsible for the growth direction: I was involved in developing and launching marketing mechanics that helped grow the main campaign metric – target contacts (deals).

Simply put, I made sure that Avito mailings brought an incremental effect: they helped generate new deals and monetized other products more effectively.

In addition, I worked with the SBC (seller to buyer communication) product — a paid service for sellers. It allows sending out mailings to buyers who are interested in their products. In this product, we also launched new mechanics, increased the reach and effectiveness of mailings for buyers.

What I learned during my internship

• Work with stakeholders: our customers were employees from all Avito areas, since almost all teams need to send communications to users.

• Build effective communicationAvito is a very large company with busy people. To be heard and understood, it is critically important to be able to convey your thoughts concisely and clearly.

• Structure information: in addition to the previous point. Without consistency and structure of thinking, you simply won't survive here 🙂

• Present the results: The work of a product manager at Avito requires you to be constantly visible and be able to keep both the team and external customers in context.

• Decompose, select, compare metricshighlight the most important ones and understand how to work with them.

• Work with A/B tests — During the bootcamp there was a really deep dive. I would say that you will be “friends” with A/B at the level of a junior analyst.

• Conduct research: mastered most of the popular research formats, and also “touched” many tools for conducting qualitative and quantitative research.

• Working with data: improved my SQL skills. The ability to independently extract “raw” data and work with it is a very valuable skill for most product managers.

My path after bootcamp

After completing the program, my team, unfortunately, did not have time to agree on a rate, and I moved to the Goods team, where I work now. I am engaged in the development of the “Construction and Repair” direction – one of the largest categories in Goods.

We are deepening categories and adding filters: this helps buyers and sellers find each other faster. We are implementing market-normal features – they allow our category to compete with specialized stores.

For example, together with the recommendation team, we are preparing an ML model for related products. We plan that it will be able to suggest suitable ads to users that will complement their searches and purchases.

7 life hacks to successfully pass the selection

1. Look at the analysis of good works from previous competitions, they are there on YouTubeThis will help you understand how to better structure and present information.

2. Learn the basic skills of presenting information in text format: structure, conciseness and consistency will be important in your work.

3. Don't hand in your work at the last minute: if possible, finish the basics early so that you have 2-3 days to reread and proofread. I assure you, you will find many things to edit.

4. See relevant interview examplesto better understand the format. I also recommend trying to answer the interviewer's questions yourself before you hear the candidate's line on video.

5. Practice interviewing: you can do this with a mentor or find like-minded people in a specialized chat. Even if you don’t find an expert, listening to feedback from the outside is still very valuable. I gathered guys in the Career Workshop chat, and we interviewed each other – it was super useful.

6. At the interview, you will have to talk about yourself and solve a product case. To prepare well for the interview, I recommend reading the articles:
   – “13 Interview Questions Every Product Manager Should Know the Answers To”
   – “13 Sins of a Product”
   – “The Perfect CV. What do recruiters look for?”

7. Or you can contact the author for career advice in the channel ProductNet. I also plan to publish a series of articles with tips on how to complete cases. So subscribe so you don't miss it 😉

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Parting words

And finally, the decision to become a product manager is one of the best decisions in my life! Working as a product manager in leading companies, I not only gained invaluable knowledge and experience, but also:

• I learned to better manage my life and finances – the skills of decomposition, prioritization and building traction models helped me with this.

• I improved my networking skills and got the opportunity to help people find jobs in IT.

• Gained skills in launching IT products from scratch and launched its own service for searching children's events Kids-week.ru together with a former colleague from Yandex.

So my experience is a clear example of how working as a product manager opens up new opportunities not only in your career, but also in life!

So don't miss this opportunity! I sincerely wish you success on this difficult but extremely interesting path!

Good luck!

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