Chaitanya Sonsale (Foster ‘22) interned with AWS Amazon this summer in a hybrid work setting (virtual+in-person). In this interview, Chaitanya shares his learnings, challenges, and experience as an MBA PMT intern at Amazon and his advice for aspiring Product Management interns.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship and what problem statement did you work on?
This summer I interned with AWS as a Technical Product Manager with the S3 team. I was working on building a 3-year roadmap for a specific feature within S3. This involved understanding the feature, talking to customers, collaborating with internal stakeholders, analyzing usage patterns, and prioritizing feature requests. The end goal was to suggest improvements that would increase user adoption.
MBASchooled: What made you pursue an internship in Technical Product Management?
Before my MBA, I was working in software testing with Accenture. While I loved working in the tech industry I realized that I wanted to contribute in deciding what technology products are being built rather than testing software that has already been developed. A technical product manager works at the intersection of business and engineering. Hence, it was the perfect role for me.
MBASchooled: What were the important skills you had to use to be an effective PMT Intern?
The 3 most important skills were dealing with ambiguity, interviewing customers and analyzing large data sets. The internship lasts only 12 weeks and you are expected to solve an open-ended problem. To do that you need to get a structure in place really fast. Knowing how to handle ambiguity really helped me with this. Amazon is customer-obsessed and I spent many hours interviewing customers and understanding their challenges. Amazon is also very data-driven and you need to have concrete data to back any recommendations you make. So analyzing large data sets was also a very important part of my internship.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped? What was hard?
Working virtually was definitely a challenge. As a new member of the team, it is challenging to understand the team dynamics and jargon if you are not in the same room. Reaching out to everyone on the team and understanding their projects definitely helped. So did being in the office a couple of times a week. My manager was very accessible and getting regular face time with him also made onboarding easier for me. Despite their busy schedule, almost everyone I reached out to made time for me and was really helpful.
MBASchooled: Knowing what you know now, what would you do to prepare in order to be even more successful in your internship?
I feel brushing up my data analysis skills, especially SQL, would have allowed me to get to the crux of the problem faster. Getting proficient with UI/UX design principles and prototyping tools such as Figma would have also been useful.
MBASchooled: What was a challenge that you had to overcome or work through?
One of the big challenges was to figure out the right person or team to contact. As a part of my project, very often I needed information that was not readily available. While someone in Amazon always had the right information, it definitely was a challenge to find out who this person was. Amazon’s size, being an intern and working virtually definitely made this harder.
MBASchooled: What was an important lesson that you learned from your summer internship?
Keep all relevant stakeholders informed about your progress and proactively ask for feedback. You are responsible for your own career. It is up to you to be intentional about your career and get the right advice. It is definitely okay to ask whether you are on track for a return offer or not.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for MBA students considering internships in Product Management?
Product management roles come in all shapes and sizes. A PM role in one company can be totally different to a PM role in another company. It is very important to be clear about what it is about a PM role that excites you. For example, a PM role at a Big Tech Firm will be completely different from a PM role at a 20 person startup. Building expertise in a particular technology (cloud computing, blockchain, AI) or industry (Financial Services, Healthcare) also separates you from the crowd.
Contributing Author: Shivani Tripathi (Foster, ‘22)
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