How I Conducted a Product Internship
Hello! My name is Vladislav, I am the Head of Product at the online school ProductStar.com, where we train IT professions (including Product Managers). In this article I will tell you about my first experience of conducting an internship for product managers.
In November 2022, I decided to hire a Junior Product Manager to strengthen our product team. In the same month, he launched a competition for product internships among our ProductStar students with subsequent employment in the product department. I will briefly tell you how it was and what conclusions I made.
Competition for an internship
I immediately assumed that there would be many applicants, and I could not physically send more than two people for an internship, because I need to work with the guys constantly during the internship and devote a lot of time to them, but no one canceled my tasks. Therefore, I prepared a competition of several stages that had to be successfully completed in order to get an internship.
Stages of the competition
I immediately assumed that there would be many applicants, and I could not physically send more than two people for an internship, because I need to work with the guys constantly during the internship and devote a lot of time to them, but no one canceled my tasks. Therefore, I prepared a competition of several stages that had to be successfully completed in order to get an internship.
Response and filling out the questionnaire: 28 people.
Solution test task:
Received a test task: 21 people.
Passed the test task: 19 people.
Successfully completed the test: 11 people.
Interview with me: 11 people.
Solution of a practical case during a call: 4 people.
Invitation for an internship: 2 people.
It was difficult to decide who to take on an internship, because. the guys who reached stage 4 were strong and some even experienced. As a result, two students (Sveta and Roma), who had not previously worked as products, passed for an internship. And the whole competition took a little less than a month.
Internship
And so, on December 15, the guys went on an internship, which lasted 5 weeks.
The product of our future Junior Product Manager will be ProductStar learning platformso the entire internship was built around the platform and only on real tasks, which we then took on.
During the internship, the guys had to conduct research, understand the main pains and needs of users when learning on the ProductStar platform. And also to draw conclusions, determine the key task for the next quarter and start working on it.
Internship Plan
1 Week. Acquaintance with the development team and study of documentation.
2 weeks. Conducting CustDev active ProductStar students.
3 weeks. Conducting a survey among all students.
4 weeks. Summing up the results of the study, conclusions and definition of the key task for the current quarter.
5 week. Elaboration of the key task of the quarter: description of the action plan, assessment of risks and necessary resources, description of the necessary functionality and technical. requirements, interface prototyping. Summing up the results of the internship and self-analysis of the results.
Internship results
During this time, the interns showed themselves only from the best side and gave 100%, that sometimes I even had a question: “Have you definitely not worked as a product manager before?” And they used their previous experience from other areas very cool. Roma previously worked as a brand manager and this experience helped him with user surveys, and Sveta previously worked at EdTech with the iSpring LMS system, which allowed her to better work out the interface prototype.
To sum up the results of the internship, I created a table for myself, where I indicated 20 parameters (soft skills, hard skills, quality and speed of task completion, evaluation of colleagues, etc.), according to which I evaluated each intern. And all because there was no obvious leader during the internship and the choice was not easy to make!
I stopped my choice on Sveta (14 points for her, against 10 points for Roma) and did not lose. Sveta has been working in our team for more than a month, she quickly plunged into all the tasks, optimized several processes and is actively working on the task of the quarter. We didn’t leave Roma either, our Career Center actively helps him with employment.
conclusions
I definitely recommend other companies to conduct internships for Junior level specialists. The result was worth the time spent on the competition and internship, I was able to test the candidates I liked in practice and choose the best one, and the guys got real experience working as a product manager in an IT company. Even though it took me a long time.
Already this month, I launched another internship, but this time for Junior QA engineers. I publish all new vacancies and internships in my linkedin.
And also below I will give the top 3 pluses and minuses of an internship on the part of the company, namely the hiring manager.
Benefits of an internship
By the time of employment, a new employee will be more immersed in the specifics of the work of the department, so that he will show the result faster.
The opportunity to test the skills of candidates in practice.
You will understand how close the values of the company and the format of work are to the candidate, as well as how comfortable it is for you to work with each other.
Cons of an internship
Long recruitment cycle for an employee (2 months from the start of the selection of candidates to the completion of the internship).
The internship will take you (as a leader) a lot of time.
There is a high chance that during the internship one of the candidates will fall off. Therefore, it is better to recruit several people for an internship at once.
Did you do internships or maybe organize them too? Share your experience in the comments!
Vladislav Noskovets
Head of Product at ProductStar Online School. Product Management, EdTech and Career Mentor.
