During her MBA Summer internship, Asha Williams (Fuqua, ‘20) worked as a Product Manager at Amazon. In this role, Williams worked on identifying new features to come up with for the product, which gave her great exposure to life as a Product Manager. In this interview, Williams shared her experience as Product Manager intern, how she navigated her summer internship, and her advice to fellow MBA students for successfully navigating the summer internship.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship? What project(s) you worked on?
I was a product manager in Amazon’s Alexa business. I worked on a team called Alexa for Everyone which is working to make Alexa more useful for older customers (i.e. 65+). My project scope was very vague – come up with an Alexa feature that could help older customers. My final deliverable was an Amazon 6-pager which was basically a pitch for my feature idea.
MBASchooled: What was the most important lesson that you learned?
Demonstrating that you can structure your work and thought process is very important. I was given a very broad scope for a project but it was my job to break it into pieces and take a structured approach. If you have no idea how to start, perhaps dive into learning about your customer and honing in on a problem you can try to solve with a product.
MBASchooled: What was a surprise from your internship experience?
Similar to my response above, I found that structuring my time was critical to success. I ultimately took a design thinking approach to my project which helped me a) start broad and narrow, and b) find a problem and always stay focused on that problem.
MBASchooled: What was the best way for you to build relationships with your colleagues?
I asked for a ton of meetings with as many people as I could. These included people I directly worked with on my team, but also adjacent teams to learn how their work was connected to my team’s work. I reached out to folks who were working on something that could be useful for me to incorporate into my own project, but since I was a PM, I also met with other PMs to hear about their advice about working in product management and things that have made them successful in their careers.
In my experience people are usually happy to meet for 30 mins to help an intern. And frankly, it was helpful to have friendly faces later in my internship to bounce ideas off of. Relationship building was really helpful to me in my internship and I received positive feedback in my final evaluation that they liked how I came in and created my own network within the company.
MBASchooled: During your internship, what was a challenge you had to work through?
Figuring out how to scale my idea. Although all the technical components may not exist yet, and teams may not be aligned on how to solve a particular problem, it was important for me to prove that I’d thought beyond the short-term stuff like the MVP, and how I planned to scale things in the longer term.
MBASchooled: How did your first year prepare you for navigating your summer internship? Were there any courses, experiences, etc that were most helpful?
This sounds broad, but the practice in critical thinking throughout my first year helped me during my internship. Amazon demands rigorous thinking so they want to see that you’re attacking a problem from every possible angle. I had limited experience in finance which I felt could have been useful for some of my analysis during my internship, so I doubled down on those courses in the second year of my MBA.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for how MBA students can prepare for their summer internship?
- Be prepared to take all matters into your own hands. From my experience at Amazon, they’ll probably want to see how you manage yourself and your assignment with little guidance.
- Rescope if you can. If you’re given a project with a scope that is too broad/big for you to deliver meaningful results in your 10-12 weeks, try to tactfully work with your manager to make it something achievable so you can set yourself up for success.
- Do your best to structure your time because you want to make sure you’re always on track to deliver what you need to deliver at the end of your internship (rather than say you ran out of time).
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help. As I said above, people were more often than not willing to help if you ask.