<aside> 👩‍💻 Valeria Cordova Mulvany is a junior majoring in Information Systems and minoring in psychology and HCI. She is currently in London doing an exchange program, and she is interested in product and program management. Last summer, she had an Explore intern at Microsoft and switched into program manager, and she is going back to Microsoft for program management in May. Let’s get to know more about her experience!

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Could you briefly introduce your internship position and what do you do for this job?

With the Explore internship, we got a mix of both software engineers and program managers. It's a 12-week internship. I did eight weeks of software engineering and four weeks of program management. For software engineering, I worked on the front-end work specifically. We were doing that with two other team members doing the same internship. They were working on a slightly different (programming) language but accomplishing the same thing, so we worked on that. I had my manager and four other software engineers that would work with us and offer us mentorship.

Why did you choose program manager at Microsoft specifically?

I chose to go back to Microsoft because I liked the people, even though it was a virtual internship. I was in this program that they would pair you up with a different person in Microsoft every two weeks. So I met people from the Xbox team, the sales team, OneDrive, or Microsoft 365. It's really fun. A lot of them have been there for quite some years. My manager has been at Microsoft for almost 20 years. I love hearing how many projects they've worked on. Also, they have offices everywhere, which is very nice. One of the people I got paired up with was in India, and then another one was in Paris. So I love the fact that it's international. I also interviewed Google for PM, but they have more of their way of doing it because their apps are pretty similar, at least aesthetically. So the way things get done could be similar. At Microsoft, every app is entirely different. OneDrive, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams office they're all individual things. So we might take something from each other, but we do not necessarily have to do it this way because that team did it that way, which I like a bit more because it gets you to be a bit more creative.

What is your process of applying and getting into this position like?

My journey was a bit different because I did Explore Program and then switched to PM. Mine was a 30-min phone interview, gauging how I think and how I work with teams, really big ones. They'd like to know how I work with every team, like engineers, designers, managers, since you will indeed work with them all during the internship. They ask you whether you have had any good team experiences and why you would consider it good. And if you had any bad ones, and how to resolve them. Then they also go into your product mindset, like what's your favorite product? Why is it good? How would you improve it—which is one that most people don't expect when you're like, oh, I like this product already, but what do I fix? And then they ask you for the bad ones and why don't you like them? How would you improve these products? And then afterward, I just got a little bit of basic data structure technical interview questions. A month later, I got an email saying you passed the interviews. And then they scheduled the second interview, a two to three-hour back-to-back interview. Those are supposed to be partly technical and partly personal. So that's where I had to solve the technical questions. The first guy that interviewed me was actually a CMU grad, and I actually got a question from 112. But the thing is, I was doing my interview in Java, not in Python, because I'm much, much stronger in Java. And then the only class I've taken in Python at that point was 112. So I blanked on how I would do this coding-wise. I knew all the steps and all the logic for how to solve it, but I blanked on the actual code. And I was staring at it. I told them all the logic, but I can't remember how to solve it. And he's like, no worries, you're all good. And like, god bless, that worked out pretty nicely. And then, he also asked about my aptitude, like what areas I was looking to go into. Afterward, he asked why I like these areas, and I asked about their experience with Microsoft and their favorite projects. And that was it. Mine was pretty straightforward. And then they told me that it would take about two weeks to get to hear back from us. Mine took three days. But then, once I got to Microsoft, I talked to my recruiter, and she told me that they got back to you (this fast) was because they already had chosen you for the team.

What is the difference between Project Manager, Product Manager, and Program Manager?

I always think of project management as like construction because you schedule things and deal with resources. Then there's program management, which is typically more tech-based, whether it's like an app, part of a website, or part of a product or something like marketing, for example. Program management is associated with a feature. That's what it usually entails. So what I did was add this one little feature to this whole app. It's everyone's pieces being put together into something already existing. And then there's product management, which is like the higher one and more applicable to tangible things, like actual products, the packaging. Or also like, in just general like tech, what's this computer going to have? Or what does this app do? When you're making a new app, you're like, okay, I'm having a home screen, the settings, the account screen, and then the other screens or whatever the app does, for example, for creating a social media. I want my thing to scroll to see the pictures, or some people are like, nope, I want us to slide. That's all part of your actual product. So that's when it does the initial release. It's one thing, like version 2.0. Product management holds things versus individual things, and the program management is like 2.1, 2.0, individual features, or like, "oh, we have bugs to fix," or like, "oh, we redesigned some of the logos or some other icons." So those are more like individual features— that's program management.

What is one biggest challenge that you faced during this internship?

My program manager mentor gave us a very ambiguous problem. So depending on what perspective you looked at it, you (and your peers) could be solving completely different problems, which was nice because it forces you to think and take into account consumer perspectives, what they need, and what you, as a manager aim to achieve. And out of these two problems, which one do you think is more important? So that was good because I knew the teams already had the solution for it. They just had to design it and work with the engineers. But ours was like from the problem. So we didn't have a baseline for anything in the first place because we didn't even know what problem we were solving. It was funny because we only did the program management part for four weeks. So in our first three, four days out of our first week, we do little — spend time figuring out what problem to solve, not even on any solutions.

How did you try to overcome this challenge?

So what we did was talk to a couple of other program managers to figure out what to do, what to expect, and how to think about things. And then we the three of us sat down, thinking from young people's perspective because that's one of the primary target audiences they're trying to serve. And then, from then on, once we figured out what problems to tackle, we developed the personas, which, thank God, I took classes on that.

What is one thing that you learned and find the most valuable/useful from this experience?

When I first looked at the codebase (for our project), I was having a meeting with my project mentors. They should be the first point to look for when we need help. And when the code base finally downloaded, I opened it, and I just saw folders within folders within folders. I had my meeting with him (the mentor) 20 minutes later, and he saw that I had a full panic. I was like, "I don't know how I'm gonna do this. This is a lot — what does each thing do? All these things?" And he's like, okay, you're freaked out, but you're allowed one big freak out a week. Only one. This taught me a lot because it tells you you sometimes over-estimate how much things are like, but looking back at it, it doesn't. I took that mindset into school because sometimes I'd be very overwhelmed, and now I'm like, well, couldn't be worse (than the code base). So it's kind of like a mindset changer.

Another big thing I learned from being a program manager or talking to program managers is that you have to write them down if you have any ideas. Because some managers will come to you and ask, do you have an idea? And they're like. I have 10. And you have to have some of the more worked out or pretty fleshed out so that people can take them and go.

What are some important skills you think a program manager should possess?

One thing is to keep up with all the trends. I've looked at and followed UX design newsletters to keep up with some of the trends, like how the websites are functioning and 2022 design trends, or things like "this year, we're seeing these colors, we're seeing these types of icons, and these types of flows." Also, overall, there's a really big push into AR for these types of fields. One of the questions I got for my Google internship that caught me so off-guard was that if your clients want you to make an app with augmented reality, what will you do? And I'm like, what...? But thank God I know a bit of augmented reality because if I didn't, I'd be like, well, I can't do anything. So if you aren't keeping up with the trend, your ideas will not be with the trends or in the general direction of where technology is going. So that's a really big one.

And just overall, learn to communicate clearly, whether it's by writing or by talking. I knew that early when I was doing my program management. When we're doing a write-up, I write one thing, and then my teammates would be like, what do you mean? Then I'd explained in actual speaking, and they're like, why didn't you write that? It is more concise. But concise does not necessarily mean clear sometimes. So being able to communicate is very important.

Could you give a tip to other students who also want to find an internship/job in program management?

I would recommend doing LeetCode even before you would have an interview scheduled. Because I only did it a couple of times in the week before my interview, I was like, I don't know about that one (code-related question), at least from my Google interview. So, highly recommend LeetCode. Just in general, it is very good for your interviews.