Nitika Bajwa is a MBA Student in the Class of 2022 at the University of Washington (Foster.) During the summer of her first and second year, Nitika completed a Senior Technical Product Manager Internship at Amazon, and helped worked on a launch of a new product. During this interview, Nikita spoke about her experience as a Senior Technical Product Manager Intern at Amazon, and what she learned from the experience.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship and what problem statement did you work on?
This summer I interned at Amazon as a Senior Technical Product Manager. I had the opportunity to work in the retail space on a new product for the Brands on Amazon. The problem statement provided to me was to create a product that would help Brands connect with their customers and improve their Customer Lifetime Value.
I created a product that easily allowed the Brands to run campaigns and measure its progress. They could monitor the traction they were gaining on different promotions and campaigns and draw insights to work on those campaigns in the future that would allow for increased LTV. It was really fun and challenging because I had to focus on young Brands and understand their challenges scaling up on eCommerce platforms.
MBASchooled:What made you pursue an internship in Technical Product Management?
Since I started recruiting for internships I was sure that I wanted to pursue a career in Product Management. I started my career as an analyst and was always amazed by the insights that data could provide. Till today I find it super exciting to play through data and extract the story the data is narrating. As a Product Manager, I get to use these insights and stories to work on and improve the products. This inspires me to see what other problems I could identify and solve by building new solutions.
MBASchooled:What were the important skills you had to use to be an effective PMT Intern?
I was once told that being a Product Manager is much like being the CEO of the product.
You need to have the complete vision of the product, the go-to-market strategy and the ability to communicate your vision to stakeholders from different domains like Engineering, Marketing, Business etc.
During my internship, I found it super important to have a good understanding of the different marketing frameworks. I took my time to understand the customer pain points, I used different frameworks like SWOT, 5Ps and even the basic pros and cons list to evaluate between different product ideas and launch strategies for the MVP. It was also important to be able to draw out a basic wireframe of the product to work with the UI/UX team and make the end vision come to life. Lastly, since I was the visionary for the product it was important to be able to communicate about the product in meetings and documents about the product details. I feel these were the most important skills that I had to use during my internship.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped? What was hard?
As predicted, building relationships virtually was very difficult from in-person. Being in the same building allows for the lunch catch-ups, hallways run-ins with each other and obviously work desk chatter. With all of this missing, I ensured that I had weekly one-on-ones with my manager to discuss my progress as my own progress like a manager and on the leadership principles instead of work-related progress. This helped me connect with my manager better. Another thing that really helped was the concept of weekly fun meetings that my manager had for our entire team. Every week for an hour all of us would virtually meet to catch up on anything team members felt like sharing. The team member could get feedback on their work prior to an important meeting or discuss anything that was bothering them at work. I feel this helped ensure that I had connected even with those team members that I was not directly working with.
MBASchooled: Knowing what you know now, what would you do to prepare in order to be even more successful in your internship?
Having been through one super fast-paced and challenging internship, I would definitely brush up on my fundamentals and frameworks. It is very important to be able to quickly run through data to identify pain points and evaluate several solutions for them. Only through post-analysis of multiple solutions could I be sure that my proposed solution was the best fit. For those who are weak with data analysis skills, I would recommend a brush up on those skills.
Another important lesson was to know that I was the main visionary for the product. I could take opinions and help but I finally had to have a complete vision to be able to explain it to others.
MBASchooled:What was a challenge that you had to overcome or work through?
In the early days, I usually tend to ask lots of questions to fully understand the work. This is easy while we are in person but can get annoying when you have to constantly message someone or set up calls. I had to quickly learn to start evaluating different options on my own before making decisions.
As a Product Manager, it was my responsibility to have the complete product planned and designed in my head. This involved constantly explaining it to engineers, designers, marketing teams and stakeholders. Performing thorough analysis and having concrete points to back up my proposed solution helped defend my idea in times of difficult questioning.
MBASchooled:What advice do you have for MBA students considering internships in Product Management?
I would advise MBA students to understand what Product Management in each company entails. Even within a company, it can often be time-consuming to understand your area and how the product can solve the issues of the people in that particular segment. A better understanding of the area you are working in helps build more useful products. Another piece of advice I would like to mention is the ability to apply different frameworks in different scenarios to assess the different situations and make the right decisions.