25 PM Projects to Build Before Your Internship with Ashutosh Rai

Don't build 25. Build one, well.

The 25 PM Projects guide gives you 25 practical projects you can actually build, ship and write up before your first Product internship.

Because when you don't have PM experience, one of the best things you can create is evidence that you can think like a PM.

This isn't a checklist you're supposed to finish.

It's a menu.

Pick one that fits your time and your strongest edge, ship it, write it up, and turn the work into proof.

Inside, you'll get:

25 project ideas across 5 categories:

→ Teardowns & Analysis

→ Discovery & Research

→ Build 0→1

→ Metrics & Experiments

→ Strategy, Writing & Campus

Each project tells you what to actually do and what PM skill it demonstrates.

Pick based on your time

The guide helps you choose between:

Weekend · Easy

Teardowns, notification audits and short memos.

Weekend · Deeper

A/B test designs, funnel maps and PRDs.

Weeks · Easy-ish

User interviews, surveys and teardown threads.

Weeks · Ambitious

Shipping an MVP, running a campus product or helping a real business.

Some of the projects you'll find inside:

The "Why Did I Churn?" Study

Pick an app you stopped using. Reconstruct the moment you left and propose a fix.

Five Real User Interviews

Pick a campus problem and interview five people using open, non-leading questions.

WhatsApp-First Concept

Design a service entirely inside WhatsApp for a Tier-2/3 user who won't install another app.

AI Agent for a Boring Task

Automate a genuinely tedious personal or campus workflow, then frame it as a product rather than just a clever technical demo.

Design an A/B Test

Define the hypothesis, primary metric, guardrail and the result that would make you kill the experiment.

Run Product for a Campus Thing

Own the product of a fest, club app or event with real users and real constraints.

Fix a Local Business's Flow

Help a real shop or creator solve one product problem around ordering, bookings or another workflow.

Contribute to a Community / Open-Source Product

Operate inside an existing product with people you don't already know.

The rule

Pick one → ship it → write it up.

A finished, documented project beats five abandoned ones.

And the write-up is what turns:

effort → evidence → portfolio proof

Every project can feed into your portfolio and resume.

Why I made this

I'm Ashutosh, an IIT Guwahati student and Product Manager.

When you're trying to break into Product, it's easy to fall into the same loop:

"I need experience before I can get experience."

I wanted this guide to give you a way out.

You don't need to wait for an internship to start doing Product work.

You can investigate a problem.

Talk to users.

Tear down a product.

Design an experiment.

Build something small.

Work with a real business.

Then document what you learned.

That's much more useful than collecting another certificate.

This is for you if:

→ You have no PM internship yet

→ You want something real to put in your portfolio

→ You're tired of generic "build an app" project ideas

→ You want projects that demonstrate different PM skills

→ You have a weekend and want something useful to do

→ You want a deeper project you can work on over several weeks

→ You're looking for Product projects that don't require a huge engineering team

You don't need to do all 25.

Pick one. Ship it. Write it up.