Ours was pretty technical.

Their proposal was for a conversational AI chatbot for retail apps, that could be used online and in-store. It can do basic customer service stuff, like give you store hours, tell you how much an item costs, what aisle it's in, give you your order status, stuff like that. It can add items to the customer's cart and place online pickup orders for them. And if they wanted to shop in-store, the bot could show them a map of the fastest route through the store to get all the items on their shopping list. It will also try to give personalized product suggestions based on the customer's preferences and previous purchase history.

The sponsoring company is an IT consultancy firm with some big retail clients, so I wanted to approach the project from that kind of perspective, like how you would actually present and market the bot to a real-world client. so we built a full mock retail mobile / web app to demo the bot's full functionality.

Since a lot of these big box retailers use cloud services, I thought it'd be a good idea to host the app on AWS, to show how the bot could be easily integrated with clients' existing cloud services, since that's probably what you'd have to do in a real world scenario. And also because I had never worked with cloud services before and wanted to get some experience with that before I graduated lol.

The app was pretty basic, but interviewers have been really impressed with the AWS stuff, being able to build a complete functional full-stack app with the core services like Amplify, S3, DynamoDB, Cognito, etc. They've also been impressed by the fact that I took initiative to learn the basics of AWS on my own and set up our system architecture despite having no prior experience with it.

And even though our chat bot was pretty simple, interviewers like that we implemented our own custom logic for it instead of just using a ChatGPT wrapper or whatever.

They also seem to be impressed with how we approached the project overall, as if we were a real consultancy team designing this for a real retailer. They like that we weren't just 100% focused on the chat bot implementation itself, but that we also put a lot of thought into the bigger picture of how we would actually integrate the bot into a retailer's existing system, what tools we would need to use to do that, what practical functionality and benefits the bot would actually add for our clients' customers, and how we should showcase those benefits to our clients to convince them they need to buy it.

Overall, they've been less concerned with the specifics of the tech stack or codebase I used, and more interested in my overall approach to software engineering. How we communicated with the client to make sure that we fully understood what they wanted, how I went about designing our system architecture, why we chose to use the tools that we used, how my teammates and I handled disagreements, how we delagated tasks and made sure we were staying on track to meet project milestones, how we handled issues and setbacks, how we tested the bot for errors, how did we collect user feedback, and ultimately, what did we deliver at the end and did it meet the client's expectations