We interviewed current second-year MBA student, Kelsey Hewett, on her experience working this summer as a Product Management Intern at Datadog in New York City.
Please share a bit about your background. What did you do prior to Ross?
Prior to Ross, I worked as a software engineer for five years after graduating from University of Virginia as a Computer Science major. As a new grad, I worked at Amazon in Seattle as a Software Development Engineer (SDE) within the Kindle organization. After two years at Amazon, I was looking to move to a smaller organization where I could make a larger individual impact, so I moved to Boston to work at CloudHealth. CloudHealth, which was acquired by VMware in 2018, is a cloud cost management company. There, I worked as a senior software engineer on the team building features for Azure customers.
Datadog is a cloud infrastructure monitoring service. What is cloud infrastructure monitoring?
While Datadog today has 15 core products, the company was founded as an infrastructure monitoring company for cloud resources. Companies using the cloud pay for infrastructure like compute instances, relational databases, file storage, and other services. Actually monitoring the usage and efficiency of these resources can be quite difficult, especially as a company scales and may be using millions of resources every day. Tools like Datadog provide users with metrics to monitor how they are using their cloud resources (think CPU, memory usage, requests), as well as provide valuable operational data like service availability, latency, and error rates that help engineers better monitor and maintain their services.
What was your typical day like as a product management intern?
I worked on a team split across time zones, so in the mornings we held team meetings with our engineers in the US and Paris. These meetings included daily standups for each team member to share their status on current tickets, weekly lead meetings with the team’s tech lead, PM, and manager to discuss longer-term projects, and one-off meetings with engineers to answer technical questions. After my morning meetings, it was time for catered lunch in the office (tech perks!). I then spent the rest of the day working on my internship project. For my project, I was presented with a problem the team believed users were experiencing in the product. My job was to first interview users and observe how they used the product to understand their pain points. From there, I worked with the engineering team to brainstorm possible solutions and prioritized the solutions that delivered the highest user impact relative to engineering effort. I then used Figma to create high-fidelity prototypes of these solutions, test with internal and external users, and iterate on the prototypes to come up with an end solution for engineering to implement in the product.
What type of person and skills are right for product management?
While it’s beneficial to have technical skills and experience as a PM, I think the most important trait is to be generally curious. You should be someone who is genuinely interested in and believes in the power of technology, wants to be constantly learning about your product and new technologies, and seeks data and evidence to back your decision-making. It’s also important to be collaborative and enjoy working with a technical team. Effective PMs know they are not in charge of the engineers on their team or adversaries, but rather colleagues who need to work together to achieve the same goals. PMs also need to be self-starters who aren’t afraid to ask questions, reach out to new people, and seek additional data and information.
What clubs, classes or initiatives best prepared you for your internship?
As a +Tech Scholar, I have to of course plug Business+Tech events like the Tech Literacy Download, which can be a great opportunity for those interested in tech but without a technical background to learn more about tech topics.
I also think speaking with MBA2s last year who had interned as a PM was very helpful, as well as speaking to Ross alums working in tech as PMs. In my experience, Product organizations can vary wildly from company to company, so getting to speak to alums and learn how their Product organizations are run and structured is very valuable.
What advice do you have for students pursuing a career in product management?
First, I would advocate for gaining technical skills, even if that just means taking a free online course in SQL or Python – I recommend https://www.codecademy.com/! You can also attend tech talks to learn about the latest trends in technology, or read tech news. Having a solid interest and background in technology will help you communicate with the engineers who will be your teammates, and better understand their priorities and concerns as well as technical feasibility, limitations, and timelines.
To learn more about Product specifically, I recommend reading Marty Cagan’s blog or books. The blog contains great articles discussing how to be an effective Product leader, how to create a strong Product culture within an organization, and other relevant topics to future PMs.
Did anything surprise you about your internship or role?
One pleasant surprise was how effectively my team was able to work remotely, and across different time zones. I sat in NYC, but my engineering team was spread out across Boston, Virginia, Maryland, and Paris. Despite not being able to work together in person, we were able to collaborate effectively, which can sometimes be difficult to pull off. I even got to travel to Paris to meet my team in person!
Another surprise was getting to do my own product design work for my internship project. For organizations of Datadog’s size, this is fairly atypical since this work would usually be done by an in-house product designer. However, I loved getting to learn to use Figma, a tool that was new to me, and create usable, high-fidelity prototypes that could be iterated upon quickly to react to user feedback. This is definitely a skill I plan to take with me in the future.