Experiences
Product Management Intern at Postlight, part of Launch by
NTT DATA
New York City, NY
Summer 2022
As an intern for Postlight, a strategy, design and engineering agency based in NYC (acquired by NTT DATA during my summer internship), I focused on product and design work for a platform Postlight built for the NYC MTA. The platform facilitates improved communications among staff at the MTA, among riders in the system, and to the public over social media. I focused on writing strong requirements that drove new capabilities while also serving as test cases. Despite the team not automating test coverage, I standardized their approach to requirements writing that made an eventual transition to automation seamless. I worked with Product to understand user research and present findings for additional user capabilities. I collaborated with stakeholders at the client to create a product roadmap. This experience provided me direct experience with user experience, research, product management, design, the product design lifecycle, and all in the context of a client engagement.
Transforming Test Cases For Mercury
During my time at Postlight, I was tasked with improving the quality of the product. The team had to manually test by following a lengthy list of 50+ different steps. Leveraging my QA experience, I proposed rewriting the test cases in a Gherkin format. This would facilitate automation and could also serve as user stories. I interviewed members of the engineering team to ensure alignment with the proposed Gherkin format. My focus was on creating robust requirements that would also function as test cases. I established a standardized approach to requirements writing that made a seamless transition to automation possible.
In this video, I demonstrated for the team how they can perform the weekly QA procedures that I established. Additionally, I will compare the previous release QA procedures with the new ones that I introduced.
Creating a User Feedback Database for Mercury
The Mercury team faced challenges in collecting, organizing, and directing feedback to the appropriate channels. The team relied on multiple tools such as Jira, Shortcut, Google Sheets, and Coda that did not communicate with each other, resulting in a lack of a credible source of truth for the client. To address this issue, I leveraged Airtable to establish a new feedback collection and organization system, which eventually led to the creation of a Product Management hub. This hub utilized forms to gather user feedback, categorized tasks based on release and feature sets, and created a tentpole roadmap that linked tickets to their respective feature sets. I also designed interfaces to present the data to stakeholders. Furthermore, I used Zapier automations to connect with Slack, Jira, and Shortcut.
This is a video of a presentation that I gave at the company's weekly Show Your Work meeting, where I provide a walkthrough of the system.
Software QA Intern,
SageSure Insurance Managers
Jersey City, NJ
Summer 2021
As an intern for SageSure, an insurance managing general underwriter based in Jersey City, NJ that specializes in bringing insurance capacity to distressed markets, I focused on increasing automated test coverage for their insured-facing portal MySageSure. SageSure’s Software team was working aggressively towards a goal of achieving continuous delivery & continuous integration (CI/CD) for all products & services. In order to meet this ambitious goal, a key component is to achieve full automated test coverage. I worked with the Product and Engineering teams to migrate established test plans that were executed manually to fully automated and integrated into their automated product delivery pipelines. I also worked with Product on defining tests to cover the new functionality added to MySageSure. This experience gave me direct visibility and participation to a high-functioning software team, the software product lifecycle, and how automation enables increasing the rate of high quality software to production.
Head of Public Relations,
Zeta Tau Alpha Fraternity
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA
2022-Current
Since my freshman year, I've been an active member of Zeta Tau Alpha. Through my previous internships, particularly my Product Management role at Postlight, I had the opportunity to work closely with a graphic designer and gain insights & experience with design. With a growing interest in this field, as well as my passion for HCI, I applied for the position of Head of PR to develop my leadership and graphic design skills. In this role, I lead a team of 20 members in order to create, design, edit and manage all content for our chapter's four social media accounts, website, and blog.
