Tag: Technology

Gordon Fan is an MBA2 specializing in marketing and brand management. Prior to Stern, he worked in Cartier’s 5th Ave Mansion Client Experience Team and Retail Innovation Lab, and also served in the Taiwan Military Coast Guard as an event/graphic designer. At Stern, he serves as the Co-President of Luxury Retail Club and President of NYU Buddhism Club. He holds a BFA in Stage Design from NYU Tisch. He loves painting Buddhas and making dance reels!

This summer, I had the opportunity to choose a hybrid-in person option for my Amazon Retail Leadership Development Program Internship! My role was Vendor Manager in the Kitchen Retail Team (Hot Beverages). My summer project was to manage and improve sales, profitability, and customer experience for four high-priced coffee machine vendors: De’Longhi, Jura, Technivorm Moccamaster, and Bunn. I was also responsible for onboarding a new luxury espresso brand, providing a recommended strategy and roadmap to attract luxury kitchen brands, and updating the vendor-facing pitch deck for new potential brands.

A typical day would be filled with weekly check-in meetings with my vendors. In meetings, we would discuss areas of improvement. The main goal for all my vendors was trying to secure ample inventory for Q4 and holiday shopping season. This was challenging, as port congestion issues and COVID-19 outbreaks delayed shipping for products. We had to find the right balance between our forecasted amounts, how much our fulfillment centers can take and how much allocation vendors can give to us. There were a lot of back and forth negotiations.

I would also recommend marketing options that can help brands have more discoverability and visibility on the storefront webpage. Some things to look at weekly were the number of products that were out of stock, gross merchandise sales, NetPPM, bottom line profit margins, and vendor’s confirmation rates. With a vast number of teams in Amazon, you have to know the right people to ask and also depend on internal wikis, pitch decks, and info docs. Finding a strategy also required a lot of information gathering – similar solutions that I would come up with for my strategy might have been started or in the process of being implemented. So it was eye-opening to interview a lot of people from different groups and understand the experiments and research they did to implement new products. My strategy was a combination of creating a separate UX subpage between regular and high-priced kitchen products, adding a pre-sale live chat function for users and refining internal materials for vendor outreach.

At Amazon, we were not required to go to the office, and you could tell very fast that Amazon relies on working virtually. As long as you have your laptop and a double screen, you are all set. Everything is communicated by email, Slack, and Chime (Amazon internal Zoom tool). During the summer, I would frequent the office twice a week either to socialize with other interns and colleagues, enjoy a walk at the Spheres (Amazon Greenhouse Planetarium), or do some painting at the Expressions Lab (art classroom open to all employees to destress).

As a New Yorker, moving from NYC to Seattle for 3 months was quite an experience. Although work was stressful and busy mostly, I was grateful to experience the nature that Seattle has to offer, meet other Sternies at Amazon, and meet other MBA interns! It was fantastic to get to know other interns from other MBA schools, learn about their school’s cultures and the things they’re working on in their team at Amazon. The highlight of my internship was making new friendships and visiting the Olympic and Mount Rainier National Park. I’m glad I made the trip for an amazing Seattle summer!

Michael Graf is a rising MBA2. Prior to Stern, he worked at J.P. Morgan Chase as a Reputation Risk Associate. This fall, he will be serve as the Co-President of OutClass, an Orientation Leader, a Leadership Fellow, and a Graduate Ambassador. Michael is working towards specializations in Strategy and Leadership & Change Management, and enjoys crossword puzzles, snowboarding, and reading historical fiction. 

NYU Stern’s “Summer Internship Series” sheds lights into Sternies’ internships. Posts are written by rising MBA2s who are currently working at their summer internship.

Today is my last day as an Integrity Program Manager at Facebook. While you might expect that I would be focused only on off-boarding and saying goodbyes, I am actually spending my last few hours in this role working closely with a data scientist to implement my summer project into our team’s product review process. 

My three months at Facebook have been rewarding because of the responsibilities my manager and team have entrusted me with. I was tasked with defining what Integrity ‘success’ looks like for product launches: essentially, asking how Facebook can measure the likelihood that a new product will allow for problematic content like spam, fake accounts, or abuse. More importantly, I was asked to define the effectiveness of our Integrity teams at reducing or mitigating the prevalence and effect of bad content. 

I was initially overwhelmed by the ambiguity of my project and the challenge of tackling something so huge while navigating a new industry and company. Facebook defines success as having impact, and without a background in tech, I wondered how I could present and execute innovative solutions in a few short weeks. I spent my first week furiously googling engineering and coding jargon to simply understand my coworkers. I also questioned my ability to design a solution that would be applicable to the variety of spaces that Facebook works in. How could I create a process that worked for Groups, Dating, Fundraisers, and Gaming? Facebook is a vast platform and risk presents itself in so many different ways.

While these dynamics were obstacles, I came to view them more as opportunities. The wide scope of my project gave me a foot in the door with integrity teams across Facebook. I met with and learned the pain points of teams tasked with protecting the user’s experience with ads, News Feed, and Stories, among many others. I turned these diverse relationships into a working group to receive weekly feedback on my idea for a comprehensive risk assessment for teams across the company. Additionally, I leveraged my background in risk management to recommend additional use cases for the risk assessment, including identifying integrity gaps, surfacing high risk product launches, and tracking risk reduction. This framing helped my project land with leadership and connected my work to our team level efficiency goal for the year.

I also drew from my coursework at Stern to drive home my initiative and the quality of my work product. I recall hearing Professor Pettit’s voice in my head during a team-wide meeting my first week, “Don’t wait to lead,” as I built up the confidence to share my opinion on the value of risk quantification. I knew from his class, Leadership in Organizations, that leadership can be achieved at any level. By highlighting the value of risk quantification in comparison to the team’s status quo (even in my first week!), I built credibility and inspired my teammates to believe in the value of my project. I am grateful to Stern for equipping me with a toolkit to approach a challenging project in a new industry with confidence.

With the incredible support of my team and engagement from cross-functional partners, I designed a quantifiable risk assessment for all new end-user products on Facebook. My team of seventeen committed to adopting my plan, and I had the opportunity to pitch my solution to integrity teams across Instagram, Oculus, and Messenger. 

The combination of my coursework at Stern, my background in risk management, and my willingness to assert my ideas and ask for feedback enabled me to execute my ambitious project plan. I am thankful to my colleagues for giving me runway to explore a huge challenge for the company and believing in my ability to make an impact.

Asad Farooqi is a rising MBA2 and is interning over the summer as a Product Manager at Amazon. He serves as Co-President of the South Asian Business Association at Stern (SABAS), and holds leadership positions in the Arts, Culture, Cuisine (ACC) and CannaBusiness clubs. He is specializing in Strategy and Product Management and hopes to continue working in tech after Stern.

NYU Stern’s “Summer Internship Series” sheds lights into Sternies’ internships. Posts are written by rising MBA2s who are currently working at their summer internship.

After a busy but extremely fun and memorable first year at Stern, this was supposed to be the dream summer in Seattle. Instead, I am writing to you from my apartment in NY, out of which I have been rolling out of bed and onto my desk to ‘dive deep’ at Amazon over the last five weeks. Even with a remote start to the internship experience, this has been one of the most educational and fascinating work experiences I have had to date. After slowly adjusting to a completely new way of work vis-à-vis COVID-19, it has been interesting to spend most of the day having unfettered focus for my assigned projects. It gives me a lot of time to really reflect and apply all the little nuggets of wisdom that I have gathered from Stern and my previous work experiences and leverage them in the work I do on a daily basis.

As a PM working with the Amazon Renewed team (refurbished items), it is my responsibility to evaluate performance metrics that measure the quality of products, and determine composite metrics that can capture a wider extent of the customer experience. This involves getting into the details of what constitutes an ideal customer experience and working backwards to determine how much of that experience can be quantified and captured to uncover ways to drive improvements in quality. Working through such a project requires interacting with multiple stakeholders across Amazon, as well as learning how to leverage data analytic tools and business processes to answer questions more effectively.

My experience at Stern has given me a more robust understanding of fundamental business concepts like statistics and strategy and has also taught me to become a better leader and take ownership of my work. The project scope was the only thing communicated to me at the beginning of the internship, along with a note that “we’re looking forward to your leadership over the summer.” Having taken some invaluable courses over the last two semesters, I felt fully prepared to work through the uncertainty and uncover interesting insights along the way. Some days are long, and some are longer. I did not realize how quickly day turns to night when you’re sitting in your room and working away, but that is also a testament to the engaging nature of the work itself. There is always that ‘a-ha!’ moment during the week, when you’ve figured out a particularly challenging roadblock, and that usually serves as motivation to keep on thinking about the work for the rest of the day.

There is still time left in the summer for a bit of rest and relaxation before the semester begins again. With NY having gone through the worst of the crisis (fingers crossed), we are all looking forward to being able to convene in-person soon. The sense of community has not diminished during all this time. All of us are constantly in touch, sharing our summer experiences and joking around as much as we can since we are all excited about returning to campus in any capacity in the Fall. We hope to see you all here soon, and please do feel free to reach out with any questions that you might have about Amazon, recruitment, Stern, NY, or anything about business school in general.

 Najma Yakob is a rising MBA2 and is an Operations Product Development Intern at Apple. Najma serves as the Co-President of Stern Women in Business and as an Orientation Leader and Career Mentor. She is specializing in Business Analytics, Strategy, and Sustainable Business and Innovation.

NYU Stern’s “Summer Internship Series” sheds lights into Sternies’ internships. Posts are written by rising MBA2s who are currently working at their summer internship.

I’m halfway into my virtual summer internship with Apple and I can confidently say that I did not expect to be here a year ago. I’m on the Operations Product Development team and my focus for the summer is on scaling Apple’s current efforts to transition its manufacturing supply chain to 100% renewable energy.

Prior to Stern, I worked at a small tech company focused on renewable energy, and then in consulting helping electric utilities buy and sell renewable energy. I knew early on that I wanted to go back to the tech industry because I loved the culture and I enjoyed working on dynamic teams with flat reporting structures. As a result, I was lucky to secure a role that capitalized on my prior experience as most tech companies prefer to recruit individuals who can quickly contribute to their role.

The most surprising thing about my internship so far, the virtual part notwithstanding, is how much I do feel like I’m part of the team. I’d never worked with MBA interns before so I wasn’t sure whether I would own a few transactional tasks but for the most part be relegated to the background. To my pleasant surprise, I’ve been given direct ownership of some high visibility initiatives the team is working on and although this has raised the stakes for me, it’s also been gratifying to feel like I’m working on something that actually matters. I’ve been lucky to be placed in a small and somewhat specialized team which has allowed them to give me support and attention that would not be possible in a larger team. All in all, I’m really enjoying my experience and am looking forward to what the next few weeks will bring.

Regarding the virtual experience, it’s definitely easy to get caught up in what could have been and the unrealized dreams I had of a summer in the Bay Area getting to know my fellow interns and experiencing the west coast. Doing the internship from the comfort of my Brooklyn apartment has been both easier and harder than I initially anticipated. On the one hand, I’ve been more readily able to channel the confidence and experience I’ve gained in just my first year in the MBA. Certain tasks that I would have been unsure about prior to Stern feel easier and more achievable. On the other hand, it’s been more work than I would have expected to put myself out there in order to make connections and get things done. Where I would have more easily met people in passing in the hallways or during social events, it’s been a valuable learning experience to proactively invest time and effort into remotely meeting new people.

For those unsure about what next summer or even what the next year will look like, I can confidently say that I’ve developed a deeper ability to be patient and take each day as it comes this year. As a planner, it’s been frustrating and sometimes heartbreaking to let go of the big ideas I had for my time in business school. However, I’ve also learned to be grateful for the fantastic experiences I’ve had and the great connections I’ve been able to make with my classmates and my co-workers. I highly recommend keeping an open mind and being as flexible as possible. I often reflect on the fact that a career is a journey and each moment, whether positive or negative, is building towards a bigger picture that we can’t yet see. Believe in yourself and hold on to the idea that everything will work out as it should!