PM Interview at Flipkart

Had total 5 rounds going through grilling sessions with Product, Technology and other stakeholders. All interviews had some or the other case/problem to solve. The

Business, Problem Solving round cases were based on Flipkart. The technical round was basically to provide approach plans for a new feature or general scenarios wherein Product/Tech Teams have to hash out in high-traffic, unpredictable monster scaling situations. 

Round 1 - Business strategy

Q1 - Strategy assignment: Assume that Flipkart owned E-kart Logistics was thinking of entering the business and how you as a product manager would go about figuring this opportunity? 

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Q2 - How will you design a Product for an apartment complex where the apartment owners need to use certain club facilities like Gym, Garden, Book club etc? Other questions were majorly hypothetical business case studies and the interviewer prodded on my decision making frameworks. Here you can share a past experience where you had to ruthlessly prioritise and take tough decisions. Situations when you said no to a business stakeholder. If you knew how to prioritise amongst the list of features, you would crack this round. 

Round 2 - Product Analytics 

Q1 - How would you measure the success of Google search results? 
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Approach: You can refer this article for ideas on how to approach metric questions. 

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Q2 - Can you give me the total number of Tubelights in Bangalore? 
Approach: Start with thinking where all will you find Tubelights and then estimate basis area calculations, hotspots, density, need for tubelights. This is a typical Guesstimate question. 

Note that my friend got a different Guesstimate question - What's the total number of
students interested in football across all Engineering colleges in India?  

Round 3 - Problem Solving

The problem solving round started with generic process optimisation question and then product thinking questions based on real Flipkart Product situations. 

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Q1 - How would you give recommendations to Sellers on Flipkart?
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Approach: Start by defining Seller motivations and needs. And then tie-in a list of attributes that would impact the recommendations. Never take a strong stand but list out the possible recommendation engine rules. Here, the goal of the panelist is to see how would you devise a well-rounded algorithm considering multiple factors at play (fair competition, drive usage etc.)

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Q2 - How would you determine the dip in GMV of Flipkart?
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Approach: Think of all possibilities first. And then try to discuss with the panelist before arriving on any conclusion. You can think of usage, tech, environmental, political, legal, etc. actors - everything possible that can negatively impact.

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Q3 - Design a warehouse storage space for a category of products. 

Round 4 - Product Strategy / Brainstorming

Q1 - What would you do to get sellers sign up quickly? Take certain baseline assumptions.

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Q2 - How would you make e-commerce experience more social?

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Q3 - What would be your top priority if you were working at Uber? This was a follow-up question as I said Uber is my favourite product. 

Round 5 – Technology

The panelist here asked couple of scenarios w.r.t. e-commerce problems at scale-cart abandonment, payment method issues. No questions were related to you
knowing how to code but rather seemed like real case scenarios that the technology panelist experienced. You are supposed to understand APIs, technical stacks and engineering KPIs - that's it.  

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Q1 - Flipkart Big Billion day sale is ongoing and you are to be vigilant w.r.t scale issues. You see that the time to complete orders is increasing. 
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Approach: You are to work with Engineering to resolve the issue, but they aren't sure on the correct approach and there has been a decision deadlock. The ask is to tell the panelist your process to this situation.

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