Landing at Razorpay

Disclaimer: This experience has survivorship bias; no two people reading this have the same story. No two people reading this will have the same journey. This is just an account of how my experience was and in no way reflects the viewpoints of Razorpay as a company or its employees.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, here’s who I am:

I am Manan Agarwal, a final year engineering undergrad at MIT, Manipal, and I work as a product management intern at Razorpay. More specifically, I work in the RazorpayX Payroll team, where I own a bunch of initiatives around Group Medical Insurance and the Payroll product.

How I landed here is a story worth telling. Recently, it has also been the most asked question to me.

While this may seem like a story of getting extremely lucky and can be a case study in serendipity, I’d want to say it has been a long journey of 3+ years of hustling in the ecosystem that has resulted in this.

Although this is just the start, and the hustle never really stops, it is a good point to stand and reflect on the journey till here.

“Luck is manufactured only when opportunity meets preparation”

If I were you, an aspiring PM Intern or just a general college student reading this, the only takeaway from this is to keep doing what you’re doing and trust the process.

Good things and opportunities will come your way, if not immediately, eventually. Your career is 30-40 years long. Two internships more or less barely scratch the surface.

In late 2019, I used to work at SpringWorks and had moved to Bangalore for my internship. Almost every weekend, I used to cross the Hosur main road and would look at people sitting next to the windows working, overlooking the road.

Coincidentally I would always say this looks like such a cool place to work, mainly because these couches are all you saw from the road :

Cut to 2021, have done two internships one as a PM at Bounce, talk about it here, one at Springworks, built and scaled InternFinder and almost graduated college.

I came across this from Rahul Mathur at BimaPe and just replied in jest:

Aditya Morarka {Follow him so I can ask for a raise :P} , who is the PM at RazorpayX Payroll saw this tweet and while replying to Rahul chanced upon my tweet and sent this :

If you’ve been in the Indian ecosystem long enough, you’d know, Razorpay doesn’t have an internship program for PM Interns and only hires them based on business needs. This was when I thought, this is the perfect opportunity to grab it.

Following this, there were 4 rounds :

Disclaimer: This is NOT standard practice Razorpay wide. It was a very specific process created for this role : The normal PM hiring process at Razorpay is defined here.

Round 1 - Intro Round :

I was asked about previous experiences, specifically on InternFinder from a product thinking PoV about its conceptualisation, GTM, and what’s next.

I had done a fair bit of research on the product, including watching a 1.5-hour webinar on YouTube about it, so that worked because I believe I asked reasonably good questions.

Round 2 - Assignment Round :

Received an interesting problem to write a Concept Note (read more about Concept Note and how it’s different from traditional PRDs) here

Take any B2B product and build a feature that adds a large amount of value to its customer.

This is challenging in two ways :

1. B2B product exposure is significantly less at this stage of my career.
2. Building a feature on top of this that will add a large amount of value is also more challenging.

I wrote a detailed and extensive Concept Note as my solution which I may make public in the future.

Round 3 - Assignment Discussion + Product Thinking Round :

Interesting round: I was asked to present my Concept Note and was asked questions on how I thought about metrics, GTM, and a bunch of contextual stuff.

There was also an interesting B2B live product problem where I had to think from conceptualization to the GTM of the problem statement.

Ended up having a 2-hour chat with Aditya, never felt like an interview.

Round 4 - Stakeholder Round :

Extremely fun chat with Anuj Jain, who is the founder of Opfin (now XPayroll) and a GM and Director at XPayroll, where I spoke about my journey of what all I have done to date with a couple of questions from him on some projects.

This entire process lasted for a month and culminated with me signing the offer letter on my birthday, so it was a happy ending.

DMs on Twitter always open to chat. Thanks for reading, folks :)

If you want to read more on cracking PM Internships I wrote a bit about it here.