I spent 12 weeks of Summer 2020 interning at LinkedIn as an Associate Product Manager, and it was nothing short of amazing. But if you are anything like me before the internship, you probably have very little idea what to expect or how to succeed.

My Day-to-day

I worked on the Messaging Abuse team under Trust, which meant my job was to prevent abusive messages on LinkedIn. Overall, my days involved a lot of meetings but also individual work time. Given this, my day roughly resolved around three themes:

1. Working on Main Project(s)

   1. Envisioning what we should build. Intern projects are usually carved out by managers prior to the summer to make sure you're set up for success. That said, given the problem statement, there's still a lot of flexibility on the approach you take to solve it. So I spent a lot of time researching and brainstorming with teammates in order to come up with the right solution. This culminates in a doc called the Product Requirements Document (PRD) outlining the problem we're facing, why it's important, and how we're solving it; this was my main final deliverable.

      Personally, I worked on one big project all summer from start (not to finish) because of its scope and complexity; I also knew other interns who worked on and shipped multiple smaller projects.

   2. Getting the resources to build. Now you know what to build, you need to get the resources (time, headcount, technologies) to make it happen. For interns, this might has already been taken care of; but if your internship collides with quarterly planning season, you may get to participate the process of fighting for your projects to get funded, making prioritization decisions for the team, etc.

   3. Building. Finally, with the solution in mind and resources in hand, you can start building! This involves setting timelines with engineers, designers, UX researchers, etc, and making sure that the project sticks to the timeline. When the project finally gets to ship, you will roll it out by phase (e.g. 1% → 10% → 50% → 100%) and closely follow the impact by working with data scientists (DS). Voila, that's the entire cycle!

2. Crises Diagnosis and Mitigation

   As PMs, we look at metrics (data) a lot, and when unexpected irregularities happen, we need to find out what happened. This is a lot like working through product execution questions such as "as the PM for Instagram Stories, identify the root cause for a 10% drop in views last week." I worked a lot with business operations, DS, and eng in these cases.

   When we do identify the root cause, we come up with mitigation plans, for both short and long terms. They might already be in our pipeline or completely new projects.

3. Personal Development & Social Events

   1. Manager & Mentor meetings. As an intern, one of the great things you get is tremendous mentorship. I met with my manager 2-3 times a week and my mentor almost every day, talking about both work and things outside of it, including personal and professional development.
   2. Coffee chats. This was probably my favorite "intern privilege" — if you reach out for a quick coffee chat, almost no one will say no! I tried to take advantage of that and met with as many people (mostly PMs, but also other functions) to learn about them and their work.
   3. Intern social events. The internship programming was pretty awesome and exceeded my expectations given these ~unprecedented times~!

People I Worked With

One of my favorite part of the work is interacting with people with different functions, perspectives, and backgrounds. It's also worth highlighting the variety of roles in tech: you definitely don't have to code to work in tech! So here are some roles I worked closely with (again, these are simply how I interacted with them and by no means reflect their whole job):

• Engineer: AI/ML, infra, front-end, etc.
• Data Science: I worked super closely with DS because of how data-driven decision making has become. They turn data into insights, analyze the impact of ramps/features, and identify key problems to solve using data.
• Designer: UI/UX, content design
• User Experience Researcher (UER): they find out what users think about certain issues in your product or a potential design by sending out surveys and conducting interviews. They then turn user voices into product/design feedback. Typically social science (e.g. psychology, sociology) backgrounds.
• Business Operations (BizOps): they come up with strategies for products based on market research, competitive analysis, etc, and monitor key metrics/performances. Typically consulting/investment banking/business backgrounds.
• Product Marketing Manager (PMM): they conduct market research to identify key trends and run marketing or member education campaigns.
• Legal: they identify legal risks and give advice with upcoming launches.

My Favorite Things About LinkedIn & PM

1. Ability to bring my whole self to work. I was so pleasantly surprised by how genuine & open the workplace culture is. Not only is everyone comfortable talking about life outside of work, the leaders really try to create a safe space. One example is how my VP dedicated an entire team meeting to discussing the results of our employee satisfaction survey (scores, how we did compared to before/company, etc.) and brainstorming on how we can improve.
2. Exec access. Towards the last couple of weeks, I self-initiated a side project, along with the other APM interns, to come up with strategies to make LinkedIn more GenZ student-friendly. We were able to pitch this idea to dozens of people (including exec) in the company; not only did none of them discredit us for being interns with no experience, most were super receptive and some even converted our ideas into action items. This tangibly enabled me to "act like an owner" (one of LinkedIn's values).