My Duke Product Lab Experience

I decided to participate in Duke’s Product Lab program after speaking with a past instructor, Isaac Park, who was teaching the PM1 class I was enrolled in at the time. I saw it as a great opportunity to further explore the PM as a career, especially as a CS student with solely software engineering internships under my belt. I was really excited to experience PM hands-on and learn if this was a career path that energized me. I was also looking forward to working closely with the Product Lab instructor team, all veteran PMs with such incredible know-how and past experiences- I knew there was so much I could learn from hearing their guidance and observing their approaches to product challenges.

After Duke Product Lab

After participating in Product Lab and graduating from Duke as an undergraduate, I moved to the Bay area to start my career as an Associate Product Manager at Google. I’m grateful to Product Lab for providing me with hands-on experience in Product Management- the opportunity to work as a PM on projects and real-world companies during your undergraduate years is extremely rare. This opportunity is invaluable for college students: sometimes all you need is the opportunity to get some reps in and discover if this career is the right fit for you, skill- and interest-wise. Being involved in Product Lab sharpened my product intuition- I learned so much from hearing about the design and product challenges faced by each of the teams, and especially benefited from hearing our seasoned instructors’ guidance. From a leadership perspective, helping to power Product Lab from the backend by working with startup founders to source potential projects sharpened my ability to vet well-scoped products that would succeed in a sprint environment. These skills have paid off at my current role as an APM- I can more easily recognize design patterns, identify what makes a good product, and visit my archive of past experiences to inform my decisions.