During my time as an MBA Student at UNC Kenan-Flagler, I had the good fortune of interning as an MBA Product Marketing Intern. Here is a summary of my experience, why I liked Product Marketing, and my advice on how to be successful as an MBA Product Marketing Intern.
What did you choose to recruit for as a 1st Year MBA Student and why?
During my first year of business school, I explored a few career paths but I knew that I wanted to work for a tech company, and ideally, within enterprise software. Ultimately, I decided on Product Marketing. For four main reasons:
- I wanted to work in a cross functional role where I could work with lots of teams to produce impact
- I wanted to work in a role that connected to customers, and where I could be a liaison between customers and the company
- I wanted to work in a role where I could get the chance to do things like present, speak, and generally, be involved in an external capacity
- I wanted to work in a role where I could have a role in working with new or innovative products
What did you do as a Product Marketing MBA Intern?
Through recruiting, I was able to land a Product Marketing internship at Salesforce. I was an MBA Product Marketing Intern for my MBA Summer Internship. In my summer, the team structured my role to focus on a number of projects.
Writing an ebook – Part of the role of our team was to write content that helps drive the marketing campaigns that generates demand and hopefully then sales. Since my team saw that I had a background in writing on technology topics, they asked me to write an ebook. In this project, I was given a topic and then worked with the creative team (ex: copywriter) to develop a short ebook on IT Trends for CIOs. This required me to do some research, content strategy, and then putting together an outline that I worked with the copy writer on. The end result was an ebook that was then used for marketing campaigns in the next quarter.
Sales Enablement and Training – One of the responsibilities of our team was to do sales enablement training every other week at the new hire trainings. This required presenting the product, speaking to the value prop and then presenting a demo of it. My job was to re-do the training and then deliver subsequent sales training sessions throughout the summer. Since PMMs work a lot with sales teams, this was a great way to get exposure to a core competency of PMM.
Competitive Analysis – During the summer, there was a resurgence of another company who had a product that was competing with ours. My team asked me to be the lead for researching and evaluating the product. In this role, I worked with a cross functional team across product management, sales, and engineering to write up a report (google doc + Executive summary in Powerpoint) on this competitor. My job was to research product reviews, read analyst reports, and come up with some insights.
Conference Prep – Our yearly conference was going to be in October, but it required us to start working on it during the summer. I was able to work on some of this by helping produce 2 sessions. In this role, I worked with 2 separate customers to come up with the overall structure of their session and then provided guidance on how to create their presentation.
Did you have any goals for your Product Marketing Internship?
I wanted to get a full-time offer, but in addition to that, I had a few other goals:
- I wanted to meet other MBA Alumni who worked at the company to learn more about their career paths – I wasn’t sold on if this was the right path for me, so I wanted to learn from other alums about other opportunities.
- I wanted to build good relationships with the MBA interns – I wanted to meet other interns from other schools and build relationships with them, personally or professionally
- I wanted to publish one piece of content – I learned really quickly that being able to produce content was really important as a PMM at this company, so I wanted to make sure I could do that
What was challenging about your internship?
First, being new is difficult. It’s even more difficult when you are an intern and you have to have the label of being an intern. As someone who can be a bit shy at first, especially in situations where I don’t know everyone, or don’t feel like I have credibility, this sometimes causes me to stay quiet, or not branch out. I had to really push myself to raise my hand, to speak up, and to get over the insecurity of being “the intern.”
Second, learning the “ways of working” is always difficult. How do you work with others? What formats are best for your deliverables? What does good look like? These are all questions I wrestled with, perhaps spending too much time trying to answer at times. The way around this is to remember that there are lots of smart people you work with, and then to work with them to find the answers. For me, getting others to share with me their examples of good work product (ex: good decks or deliverables) or hearing from them on who was the expert for a specific topic or area of expertise was super helpful, and I made sure to write those notes down.
Finally, another challenge was just the sheer growth that was happening on my team. We were constantly taking on new projects, it was hard to keep up at times.
What did you do well?
First, I was very clear with my manager around goals and priorities. On the first day, I asked him what I was going to be measured on, and he said he actually didn’t know. From there, we worked together to come up with some goals/KPIs, and then he encouraged me to write up a report every week on how I was tracking against it. This was helpful for two reasons. First, it helped me catalogue what I had learned and worked on. Second, it also helped him understand the work I was doing and the progress I was making.
Finally, when it came time to decide on whether or not I should get an offer, he had a whole list of evidence to show the impact I was making
Another thing that I did well was that I found a way to deliver value very early on. Since the internship was short, I wanted to make a positive impression as quickly as I could. During the second week, my manager remarked at how we needed to hire for 3 new roles but the team was strapped for time. Having been a career consultant and career coach, I told him that I could help, and went ahead and reviewed over 50 resumes and narrowed down the candidate pipeline. From there, I actually helped set up the interview panels, and the team even asked for my opinion on who we should hire, even though I had only been on the team for 2 weeks!
I think this was a good thing in that it helped me contribute to the team in an impactful way. Nobody had time to do this, so I volunteered and pitched in, and was able to contribute and show that I was proactive and helpful. Furthermore, it also gave me an excuse to start working with some of the other members on my team. This helped me build trust with them, but also credibility, because I was able to demonstrate my knowledge and expertise.
Finally, the last thing that I did well was that because I had an understanding of what the measures and values that were important to my team, I made sure to demonstrate those in the projects that I delivered. For example, on the first day of my internship I asked my manager about the qualities and characteristics of a good PMM, and he talked about the importance of storytelling and being able to deliver presentations with confidence and poise. During my summer, I tried to focus on this, but I also watched a ton of videos of other PMMs who had presented to try to learn some of their tips and best practices. I then tried to implement and incorporate them in my own presentations, which got great feedback.
What did you do to prepare for your internship?
Read up as much on the company as possible – I consumed a lot of content on the company reading any article that I could find. I also looked at research outlets like Gartner and Forrester.
Read up on the product – This is a no brainer if you are working on a particular product and you know what it is. For starters, you can obviously go to the website, but you can go even deeper by looking at customer reviews, looking at the competitive landscape, and in some cases, even trying out the product itself.
Contacted former MBA interns – There were not a lot of alums from my school that interned at this company so I reached out to a few former interns via LinkedIn and had informational interviews. I focused on learning more about their projects and experience, the things they did that led to successful outcomes, specific examples of the culture and what that looked like, and their advice on how to succeed in an internship.
Asked for a list of people to meet – On the first day, I asked my manager for a list of people to connect and build relationships with. I got started on it right away and found this helpful at various points because many of these people I would need in order to work on some of my projects.
What advice do you have for MBA Interns on how they can be successful?
Prepare – The internship goes fast and you only have 10-12 weeks. You also need to prove yourself. I was glad that I prepared leading up to the internship because it allowed me to hit the ground running
Set Goals – I knew that I wanted to get the offer and by virtue of that, make a positive impression on my team. But I also encourage people to look for other goals+success measures outside of just getting an offer. At the end of the day, an internship is meant to be a learning and growth experience – so make sure to ask yourself what you want to achieve, outside of just external measures of success
Find Quick Wins – One of the best ways to build relationships and to demonstrate that you are an impactful team member is to find a quick win early on. To do this, think about what your strengths are, and how you can use them to contribute to something the team needs. I was able to do this by helping with hiring, but it could have been many other things.
Have Fun – I know that an internship can seem like a lot of pressure especially if you are gunning for a specific career outcome (Read: Getting a full-time offer so you don’t have to re-recruit!) but I think it’s also important to remember that this is meant to be an experience and that you can and should use it to enjoy yourself. I loved getting to know my team members and the other MBA interns. I loved being able to take advantage of the great perks, and I really enjoyed the events they put on for us during the summer. I know that for myself, I get so much meaning out of work outside of just what it is that I am doing every day, and I am glad I took the time to really get to explore and enjoy the other aspects of the company culture when I was there.
Want to learn more about Product Marketing Careers? Check out these resources: