Product Management Stories from UCLA Students

Meet Shashank Venkat, an Associate Product Manager at LinkedIn!

Tell us about your recruitment process:

For LinkedIn:

  • Recruiter Screen

  • 1-Hour Technical w a PM

  • Writing Assessment

  • Super day with 4 PM Leaders / Senior PMs

  • Salesforce and Google APM were very similar. Salesforce had no writing assessment and Google had a much longer writing assessment but no recruiter screen.

Why PM?

  • Loved building impactful things and learning about complex domains.

  • Feel fulfilled being a part of all aspects of the product development process.

  • Strengths in working with people (and getting the best from them), communication (written and verbal), and asking questions.

  • Was only a top 50% coder and wanted to do something I had a higher ceiling in

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

Interned at a start-up before senior called Blend. I built a core feature for their mortgage product that impacted hundreds of thousands of users in the home purchase/refinance process and loan officers. Led product discovery, scoping the feature, designing, and executing with engineering.

Day In The Life?

I work on a growth team now, overseeing 8-9 initiatives at the same time. Day to day highly varies depending on where each project is and what’s most important for that day or week.

Most days have a healthy dose of stand ups with engineering/design, meetings to design or align on features with other product teams/design/legal/pricing/etc, and (ideally) deep work time where I write scoping docs/review designs/brainstorm new growth ideas/read competitor/UX research.

 

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 (hella) contextual upsells.

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.)