Michelle Ma: APM @ Yahoo | Seed Guest Series
Learn more about Michelle's journey in Product!
This week, we chatted with Michelle Ma about her experiences working as an Associate Product Manager at Yahoo and to share her advice on product management recruiting and internships!
Too busy to read? Listen to our conversation on Notion! Check it out here.
Can you just tell me a bit about yourself and why you became interested in product management?
Hello, I'm Michelle! I just graduated from college, so I'm a 2020 grad. I went to Swarthmore College where I studied CS and philosophy and I now work as an Associate Product Manager at Yahoo, which is now Verizon Media. Right now, I'm working in the data privacy space, as well as some machine learning and it's been really interesting.
There are a couple of things that got me interested in product. I've always been entrepreneurially driven. I've liked building things from scratch and started a lot of projects. In high school, I like started a public speaking project and in college, I would do a lot of work in the tech for social good space.
I tried doing software engineering; I did an internship after my sophomore summer and it was really cool. I learned a lot about real-world software development, as opposed to in-class CS labs and whatnot. But I think something that kind of just stuck with me was that I wanted to ask different questions.
I feel like a lot of the world of software engineering, at the early-career level is really asking yourself, how do you build things, what frameworks to use, etc? I just didn't find myself as interested in those questions It was really, really important for me to understand, but I found myself craving to ask why are we building this in the first place? What problem are we solving and how are we actually solving the problem, as opposed to how are we building the solution?
What do you think are effective ways to build a great product management resume as a college student?
I think there are two ways to think about this question.
One is how do I make it through the PM interviews?
And the other is what skills do I actually need to be successful as a PM?
At a high level, this can be applied to both the interview process and the job. There needs to be some level of technical proficiency. It doesn't mean that you have to code, but if you're going to be a product manager in tech, you should know how tech works. Things like what an API is, what are the trade-offs between using different frameworks, or even just what an engineer is telling you and what that means for the product are important to know. There are some APM programs, like the Yahoo program and the Google APM program that have a dedicated technical round, so if you want to have a good shot at those programs, you need to have something to show that you understand tech. A resource I love recommending is my friend David Cai’s website called pmtechlessons.com.
Another thing to have is a level of product sense and leadership. What that means in college would be starting an organization. What I did at Swarthmore was start a tech and social organization where we created products for organizations in need. That could be a way to flex your product skills.
I think leadership can be a lot of things. It could be a soccer team, it could be in an acapella group, a dance team, or running your own product society. I think just having some level of responsibility, some experience of holding people accountable, some experience with delegating work and getting work done, those are all core tenets of being a good product manager.
What recruiting strategies did you adopt that you think led to a job offer?
I think being intentional about your internships is really helpful. I did a software engineering internship my sophomore summer, both to figure out if I wanted to do software engineering, but also because there aren’t a lot of PM internships for rising juniors. But I think that was so core in me getting a product internship at Microsoft the next summer because it came up in all my interviews, since the product side can mostly be learned, but having some sort of technical proficiency can take some time to cultivate.
In a sense, my software engineering internship helped me land my product internship. Then my product internship helped me apart from a lot of the other people who are trying to break into product when I was doing the APM interviews. And the APM interview loop is a really competitive, so whatever you can do to demonstrate that you have both technical proficiency and product sense is going to be really helpful.
Besides that, if you're recruiting for product, do a lot of mock interviews. I was so bad at product management interviewing in the beginning. And then I did around 80 mock interviews towards the end and got so much better. Some people are just naturally talented, but for the rest of us, you need to put in the practice, otherwise, you're going to fail your actual interviews.
What additional advice do you have for students just beginning their journey in product?
My only last piece of advice is collaboration over competition. The early career PM world is in many ways cutthroat. There's not a lot of companies that hire product managers out of college, so it's really tempting to try to beat out everyone. I knew I had no chance, I'm coming from a non-target school where there’s only like two product managers in our alumni database, so my odds were not high. I think the reason why I made it was because I made a lot of friends through mock interviews and I cheered people on. Strength in community is the key because once you make it past the interview, you got the rest of your career left and maybe some of those mock partners are going to be some future best friends or future co-founders, who knows?
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter! You can find Michelle on Twitter and check out her project, APM Map, to find even more product resources!