Catie Bass (Foster, ‘21) spent her summer as a Product Management Intern at Adobe. During this summer, Bass got the chance to identify and propose solutions for the pain points of graphic designers using one of Adobe’s key products, and got the chance to conduct user interviews, generate customer insights, and propose potential solutions. In our interview, Bass spoke about her internship experience, and provided her key takeaways about the role of a product manager.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship?
I was a product manager intern with the After Effects team. There’s a wide variety of creatives who use After Effects – motion designers, animators, visual effects artists, and video editors, for example – but I spent my 12 weeks at Adobe learning about and understanding graphic designers who use After Effects to add motion to their work.
MBASchooled: What projects/responsibilities did you have as a Product Management Intern? What were the important skills you had to use?
My main focus was identifying and proposing solutions for graphic designers’ pain points in After Effects. I spent my time at Adobe developing and refining assumptions about the graphic designer segment – I first met with team members to learn about how our team understands graphic designer use cases. I then used those assumptions to design and conduct virtual user interviews with external graphic designers.
After that, I designed a quantitative survey to pressure test our assumptions. I used a combination of survey responses and learnings from the user interviews to identify solutions that enable graphic designers to do more motion design.
MBASchooled: What were your favorite aspects of your Product Management Internship?
There were way too many to count, but I enjoyed conducting user interviews with external graphic designers. People were forthcoming about what worked and didn’t work for them when they used After Effects, and a lot of times answered my questions before I even had to ask them.
I also loved the community aspect of the internship. Even though we were scattered all around the country, I was able to build fantastic relationships with my fellow MBA interns via events hosted by the MBAs@Adobe group as well as University Talent. The University Talent and MBAs@Adobe teams did an incredible job of moving the intern program to a remote setting.
MBASchooled: What were some of the things that helped you be successful in your summer internship?
Adaptability was a really helpful skill during the internship. Sometimes things didn’t go exactly to plan, as most things in life tend to do, so being able to find multiple ways to accomplish my goals was key.
I also had the ability to take an After Effects kickstart course through the School of Motion before I started – it really helped me build a foundation for understanding the product, as well as the users I would be working with.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped? What was hard?
Everyone at Adobe was so friendly and approachable, which really helped with relationship building. That being said, being remote made it really easy to be shy — I definitely had to push myself to establish connections with people outside of the internship program or my own department. I tried to set a goal for myself to reach out to two new people per week for a 30 minute “coffee” chat over BlueJeans — it was a great way to get to know people in other parts of the company!
MBASchooled: What was an important lesson that you learned from your summer internship?
Soft skills are just as important as the hard skills taught in business school! I started my career in customer service, so I’ve always considered my soft skills to be pretty strong, but the success of your user interview depends on whether you can make your interviewee comfortable enough to share frank opinions. If they’re nervous or afraid to hurt your feelings, you may not be getting the information you need from that interview, so setting the right tone is vital.
MBASchooled: Knowing what you know now, what would you do to prepare in order to be even more successful in your internship?
I would have made more time to read before my internship started. I started reading “The Lean Product Playbook” by Dan Olsen and “Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights” by Steve Portigal after the internship started, and they were so helpful that I wish I’d had more time to read more books before I started working. I’m making up for lost time before classes start, though!
MBASchooled: What was a challenge that you had to overcome or work through?
One of the challenges this summer was finding enough respondents for my quantitative survey. I took a multi-pronged approach — I worked with the Adobe social media team to post the link to one of the official social media accounts, which was so helpful for getting responses. I also worked with our product marketing manager to post the link in some online communities she was a member of in order to recruit some more graphic designers. Finally, I also reached out to designer friends of mine, who were kind enough to circulate the link in their networks as well. It was a great learning experience and the survey went really well!
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for MBA students considering internships in Product Management?
Talk to people! Product management can look really different depending on the company or even the product you’re working on — talking to people in your network or at your school about their experiences can help you narrow down what your ideal product management experience looks like. I’d also recommend the “This is Product Management” podcast — it’s another great way to hear about others’ experiences, and several episodes helped me understand how my past experience fits into a product management role!