Product Management Stories from UCLA Students

Meet Naman Modani, an APM INTERN at LinkedIn!

tell us about your recruitment process:

For LinkedIn APM:

  • Recruiter screen

  • PM interview

  • Final (2x45; product sense)

For Slack:

  • Recruiter screen

  • HM

  • Take-home (3-page technical program brief)

  • Final (1x45)

For Salesforce APM

  • Recruiter screen

  • PM interview

  • Final (2x45; 1 with exec, 1 with senior PM -- both product sense + behavioral)

Tell us about your summer project & current full-time project:

Worked on LinkedIn Premium Company Pages (a new B2B SKU), and shipped 6 acquisition and discoverability features worth ~$11.5M ARR. Did some growth strategy work: AI-driven personalization, streamlined onboarding, targeted retention emails, and contextual upsells.

Meet Renee yan, an Associate Product Manager at JPMC!

Tell us about your recruitment process:

My recruitment process moved pretty quickly! I applied in October 2025 and received a HireVue about two weeks later. Another two weeks after that, I had my final superday, which was two 30-minute interviews, one behavioral and one technical. Overall, it leaned more behavioral, with lots of questions about collaboration. The questions were straightforward, but many had multiple parts. I got my offer in late November!

Why PM?

I originally wanted to go into consulting, but realized I love seeing tangible results from my work. Being able to help build a product and see people actually use it was a big reason I became interested in PM. I also like having ownership over a project and seeing the process through. Since I enjoy working with people, getting to collaborate across engineering and design while shaping the product felt like a good fit. And a better work-life balance was definitely a plus!

Tell us about your summer project & current full-time project:

I spent my summer on the Card Planning and Analysis team. They didn’t have a dedicated PM or developers, so I took on the full product process, from understanding the team’s pain points to building a solution.

The team had a manual auditing process for federal reporting that took about three weeks. I built a webpage that multiple teams could use to automate the process, bringing it down to two days with more consistent and accurate results. It was really rewarding to see the team take my project into full development after my internship and use it for this year’s auditing cycle!

Day In The Life?

My days were a mix of meetings and time spent working on the webpage. I’d check in with my manager and join team calls to learn how my work fit into the bigger picture and impacted teams across the country. Those conversations helped me understand the broader purpose of my project and shaped what I built into the webpage.

The NYC office was super social, so there were always chats around the office and dinners with other interns after work. Outside of work, I loved exploring the city and trying new food spots!

meet esther tian, a product manager at microsoft!

Tell us about your recruitment process:

I got my offer within 2 months and by the end of October 2022. I had a phone interview with the recruiter in september and was notified of my final round end of september. My final round interview was 4 45-minute interviews with the org that my team is in. They were very behavioral (like I was run dry of all my behavioral responses by the end). I've heard others have some technical questions but still tend to be behavioral dominated. My team's technical component is related to cloud infrastructure so it's pretty niche and hard to test I guess. Questions focused a lot on stakeholder management. My final round occurred in October and I got my offer by the end of the month.

why pm?

I thought about what I would do after consulting and wondered why not try now lol.

I chose to pursue PM because I felt it would be a way to feel more tangible impact in a job (in comparison to PM). I liked the idea of having ownership and seeing an entire process through. Being able to interact with people and across different teams sounded cool as well. I also liked knowing the hours would respect my evenings and I would be able to have boundaries with work.

tell us about your summer project & current full-time project:

My team works on the delivery of cloud infrastructure (data centers), particularly looking at potential capacity constraints in our regions and shaping demand to mitigate these constraints. My personal projects are related content management and managing security requirements for our team's work, building our team site, creating co-pilot agents for our internal platforms, and analyzing our supply data to assess a region's capacity health.

day in the life?

A lot of meetings. My team is stays pretty involved with each other so I get looped into a lot of team calls. Half my team is European so my mornings are filled with team meetings and 1:1s. My afternoons usually have scattered meetings because I'll schedule my manager syncs and any coffee chats then. And then I try to spend a few hours for personal work time. The NYC office is also quite social so I have a lot of hallway chats. We have fun Early In Career Network events as well (happy hours, holiday social events, etc.)