Wharton Tech Blog

By Stephanie Chu | WG’09 | Product Manager Intern

This summer I interned as a Product Manager at Amazon.com in Seattle. I had a great experience with my projects, the business team I worked with (Grocery), and the company as a whole. I thought I’d try to share some of my experiences with you through a typical day.

7am - I start the day by making breakfast in my apartment. Amazon puts up summer interns in Harbor Steps, a fully furnished upscale apartment building in downtown Seattle with views of the water.

8am - I meet one of the other MBA summer interns downstairs in the lobby and walk to work together. Our offices are only a 15 minute walk from where we live, so it’s a nice way to start the work day. We grab coffee at Tully’s, then get to our desks.

8:30am - Check email, review to-do list for the day.

9am - Talk with logistics companies and put together a request for proposal. One of my summer projects is to figure out a fulfillment solution for Amazon to be able to offer some new grocery categories. This has included getting up to speed quickly on all of the relevant supply chain needs for the business, researching and reaching out to prospective logistics partners, and starting to build out a solution. My background prior to Wharton was in e-commerce product management, where I focused mainly on website product development and marketing initiatives, so it has been really fun to delve into the operations side of retail. In fact, this is one of the things I really enjoyed about Amazon - the breadth of the product management position means that you are able to get involved in many aspects of the business.

11:30am - Catch the Amazon shuttle to one of the other Amazon buildings for today’s Executive Speaker Series. Amazon sets up an amazing line up of executive speakers for its MBA interns including many of the Senior VPs as well as Jeff Bezos. This is in addition to the company-wide Fishbowl speaker series, which are typically writers, artists, and other relevant public personalities.

1:30pm - Meeting with the senior developer for Amazon’s pricing tools. My other summer project is around competitive price optimization for the Grocery business. I am meeting with him to understand how Amazon’s pricing tools work, so I can optimize the data quality and pricing algorithm in order to improve pricing to increase sales and optimize margins. I was impressed that both of my projects this summer were very hands-on. The work I did had a tangible impact on the business, and were also areas that needed attention, so the team seemed happy to have my help.

3pm - Kick-off meeting with the market research agency who is helping us collect additional competitive pricing data to inform our pricing strategy. Both Grocery (dry goods) and Fresh (Amazon’s local grocery delivery business) are doing pricing optimization projects this summer, so we are working together with the agency to deliver a research product that suits both groups’ needs.

4:30pm - Return some calls to West coast logistics companies.

6pm - Head out for the night. There is an Amazon MBA intern happy hour down the street, so I plan to stop by there for a couple hours, then join friends for dinner at Quinn’s, a new gastro-pub in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 2:19 am and is filed under Internet, Career Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.