Recruitment Stories - Salsabil's Experience at BongoBD

Salsabil Ahmed Khan is currently working at BongoBD as a Product Owner. She has completed her undergraduate studies in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka.

For the past 3 and a half years, Salsabil worked as a Business Analyst in a Technology Consultancy firm called Portonics Limited. During that time, she had the opportunity to work on a wide range of projects and, to handle multiple enterprise clients. Also, she learned the various intricacies of running a technology business and worked with different internal stakeholders such as Legal, Finance, and HR. Last year, Salsabil decided that it was time for her to move on to working on in-house products instead of client products and gather knowledge on that domain. This had led her to apply for the Product Owner role at BongoBD, one of the largest OTT Platforms in Bangladesh.

In this article, I will be sharing Salsabil’s experience of landing a job at BongoBD so that someone preparing gains some insights.

Salsabil saw the job post on LinkedIn and then, she forwarded her CV to an ex-colleague within the company. She then went through the following recruitment phases before accepting the job offer:

Phase 1: Technical Interview

Before appearing for the technical interview, Salsabil took a lot of preparation. Since she applied for the Product Owner role, it is very important to learn about various agile methodologies and practices and so, she reviewed her notes taken during completing a few Coursera courses related to Software Product Management and, during completing SCRUM certification on ScrumAlliance. She also brushed up her knowledge on Scrum, Kanban, and XP. Afterward, she moved on to learning about OTT platforms. Since this is a huge industry to study, Salsabil focused only on the basics - SVOD, AVOD, and TVOD, high-level overview on how one can use AWS to set up an OTT platform, history of different OTT Platforms and so on.

One of the frequently asked questions during an interview for a Product Owner role is - what feature can you introduce to enhance our OTT Platform? To answer this question, the interviewee needs to study the company's product and think of a few features beforehand, that can be included in the product as well as the benefits these features will bring about.

Salsabil’s interview was conducted by the Head of Product and the CTO. It started with a very common question - what is the difference between Product Management and Project Management? These terms are usually used interchangeably in our country, however, the roles are quite different. After that, there were some common questions regarding Product Management, Scrum practices, the ideal day of a Product Owner, and so on. Salsabil was asked to share an experience regarding her biggest failure while running a project and an experience that she was proud of.

Since stakeholder management is part of the role of a Product Owner, Salsabil was given various hypothetical scenarios and asked how she would tackle them. For example:

• If two internal stakeholders who were both on a managerial level asked for 2 features to be developed in the next sprint and Salsabil could deliver only one, how would she prioritize them, and based on what criteria?
• How would she justify her decision to the stakeholders?

To answer the questions, Salsabil used her best judgment and, walked the interviewer through her thought process.

Finally, Salsabil was asked whether she had any questions for the interviewers. Since this is a very important part of the interview where she can get insights regarding the job, which will help her decide whether this is the right fit for her, she had a list of questions ready based on the job description and also based on what she studied online about Bongo. Salsabil referred to her notes while asking the questions since she did not want to miss any of the questions she had prepared to ask.

It's a good practice for an interviewee to structure his/her questions in a way that helps him/her learn more about the role he/she will be performing and what is expected of him/her. That way if he/she does get selected for the job and decide to join, he/she has a clear line of path on what to do.

Phase 2: HR Interview

In this phase, Salsabil had discussions regarding her salary expectations with the interviewer. Also, she got to know about the culture and core values of the company.

Special thanks to Salsabil Ahmed Khan for taking out the time to share her recruitment experience with me. If you have any queries, feel free to contact her at salsabilahmedkhan@gmail.com