Product Manager Co-op at Wayfair - Spring'23 Experience

PMs are more humble servants than "CEOs of the product." They put their teams first, they do what needs to be done, and they demonstrate that every day.- Ken Norton

This quote aptly sums up my PM Co-op experience at Wayfair's Boston HQ.

I had an exciting opportunity to work as Wayfair 's Product Manager Co-Op during Spring'23.

Wayfair is an American online retailer of furniture and home items. It was established in 2002 under CSN Stores and now sells 14 million products from more than 11,000 international vendors.

I was in the?Merchandising, Merchant & Supplier Data Platform PM team. The team provides business and our suppliers with timely, reliable, insightful data from the catalog and the rest of Wayfair's assets.

As a Co-op, I created product dashboards that track and communicate our KPIs and OKRs. I attended and owned Agile sprint ceremonies, Jira board. I received hands-on experience using modern BI tools such as Google BigQuery, Looker, & Data Studio.

I analyzed the business impact and value of tools/functionalities/features for prioritization against multiple initiatives and asks. I also developed expertise on the product I worked on and associated inter-linkages. I was part of the product discovery work and the usage tool analysis.

I am grateful to my manager Joe Walt for providing me with a structured path to learn the intricacies of and enhancing my PM Skills. I also thank Patrick Yu for insightful bi-monthly mentorship sessions.

I had taken courses like Foundations of Digital Product Management, Database Foundations for Business Analytics, Data Visualization, Managing Digital Strategy, Spreadsheet Modeling and Analytics, which helped me do the co-op.

Thanks to Prof. Florence Lowe for helping me with understanding the finer nuances of a career in PM and with constant guidance and course corrections.

Also, thanks to Jason Cirilo for input related to the co-op and preparedness for corporate America.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my fellow comets Payal Agarwal and Divyansh S. Jadon for assisting me in adapting to Wayfair 's culture and vision of '?? ?????????????? ???????????? ????????'!

#UTDMSITM Naveen Jindal School of Management, UT Dallas