Hi everyone! I wanted to try something new this summer and share updates about my internship experience at Twitter. Coming up on my senior year of college and this being my last internship before graduating, I can’t believe how fast time has flown by and I want to make sure that I’m appreciating every moment.
I had planned to document my experience this summer for myself, but when it was suggested to also share my experience with the mentors, colleagues, and friends who made my previous internship, work, and education experiences so amazing — I immediately knew that’s what I had to do! To everyone reading these updates, I hope it will help us stay connected (or perhaps reconnect!), give you a smile, and maybe even help you learn something new!
#WelcomeToTheFlock (Week 1)
After two weeks of catching up on sleep and regular meals (online finals seem to zap more energy than in-person finals!), I was feeling refreshed and ready for my first week of being a product management intern at Twitter. All Twitter interns are working fully remote this summer, so I started my internship on June 1st in my family’s dining room turned personal home office. My first week was focused on going through Tern Flight School, which is Twitter’s onboarding program for all interns (fun fact — all Twitter interns are called “Terns”!). Flight School was one of my most positive onboarding experiences ever because it was a great mixture of learning about Twitter’s culture, how to succeed as a Tern, and meeting other Terns.
Two parts of Flight School really stood out to me. The first was learning about Twitter’s history, specifically the events that helped Twitter develop into the ubiquitous social media platform that we know today. I had no idea that the emergency plane landing in the Hudson River was the first breaking news event on Twitter or that in the early days of Twitter, engineers had to anticipate scaling the servers for any FIFA World Cup because usage would always drastically spike. Learning about these events resonated with me because I believe they highlight Twitter’s essential role in promoting the public conversation, such as breaking news or world-reaching events, that we almost take for granted nowadays. Now, I feel Twitter’s new challenge that it’s currently dealing with is how to maintain that public conversation in a healthy manner. Helping Twitter to promote and further serve the public conversation is a big reason why I wanted to work here, so I’m glad that I was able to take a step in the past to better inform my work on Twitter’s future.
The second part of Flight School that stood out was learning about Twitter’s infamous motto for terns — #BringTheFries. The story behind this hashtag is an intern is going out to lunch to get burgers and asks if her manager would also like a burger. The manager says yes and when the intern comes back from lunch, she gives the burger to her manager. The intern is feeling great because she did a nice thing for her manager. However, when the manager opens up the takeout bag and just sees the burger, they ask the intern, “Where are the fries?”. You might be thinking, “Well, the manager should have just asked for the fries,” but the message of the story is encouraging Twitter interns to think about doing more than just what they are asked to do. Whether that is proposing a brand new Twitter feature or simply taking notes when sitting in on a meeting, #BringTheFries embodies having the courage and mindset to go beyond expectations. As someone who always tries to do 110% in my work, #BringTheFries really spoke to me and it is definitely a mindset I’ll be adopting this summer.
#LearningToFly (Week 2)
Week 2 at Twitter was like hitting the ground running, or since I’m a swimmer, a better analogy might be diving into the deep end of the pool! On the first day, my manager, Smita, and I kicked off my first project — building upsells for Twitter Blue. If you’re thinking, “Twitter Blue, what the heck is that?”, don’t worry, that was my initial reaction as well! Twitter Blue is Twitter’s first-ever subscription offering and it allows users who heavily use the platform to gain access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience to the next level. Twitter Blue was released on June 3rd and it is currently only available to users in Canada and Australia, so that is why it is not available on your Twitter app today.
Twitter Blue currently consists of three features: Bookmark Folders, Undo Tweet, and Reader Mode. These features provide solutions to some of the most common pain points that heavy Twitter users have been talking about for years, therefore having a lot of potential to elevate many users’ experiences. However, there is no way to discover these features without going straight to the Twitter Blue sign-up page, which leaves a lot of potential subscribers without the knowledge that Twitter Blue even exists. Upsells will help inform non-subscribers with the potential to gain a lot from using Twitter Blue about the many benefits of the features included in the subscription. For example, if a user spends a lot of time on the bookmarks timeline, they should probably receive an upsell prompt about Twitter Blue’s Bookmark Folders.
From my past experiences as a PM, I knew the first step towards gaining clarity on the requirements of building upsells was learning as much as I could about Twitter Blue and gathering information on the work already done for upsells, such as research and initial designs. Luckily, this first step went hand in hand with my goal of getting to know as many Tweeps (Twitter employees) as possible during my second week! Each Tern is given a manager, mentor, buddy, and team for the summer to ensure lots of mentorship opportunities. Smita and Aria, my manager and mentor, created awesome onboarding documents for me with recommendations of Tweeps to meet with and learn from. I spent the rest of my second week chatting with Tweeps- learning about their journeys in tech, gaining advice on how to make the most of my time at Twitter, and of course, asking about upsells!
Not only did I learn a lot about the initial research and brainstorming around upsells, but I felt really immersed in the Twitter culture. Each Tweep I spoke with gave such thoughtful advice about interning at Twitter/working in tech that I was reminded of another reason why I wanted to join Twitter in the first place — the people. From my first interview to Smita and Aria reaching out even before my official start date just to say hi, and now during my second week at Twitter, I’ve been in awe at the authenticity exhibited by each Tweep I’ve met. I think we all can attest to the positive impact of being surrounded by awesome co-workers and from my two weeks at Twitter, I can confidently say that #LoveWhereYouWork is alive and well in Twitter’s culture.
#LearningGrowingFlying (Week 3)
My third week at Twitter was definitely when I felt like I was putting all my previous product knowledge and skills up to the test. I spent week 2 talking to multiple Tweeps in research, design, and engineering who had done some initial brainstorming around upsells, and learned there was still a good amount of exploration to be done around three overarching questions:
- What is the technical feasibility of upsells?
- What are the different upsell use cases?
- What will the upsells look like and how will they be presented to potential subscribers?
I decided to tackle questions 1 & 2 first since I assumed the technical feasibility on which upsells we could and couldn’t implement would inform the design. Very quickly, I realized the task of building upsells was more complex than just coming up with a few different upsell use cases and scoping the engineering work due to some crucial technical dependencies.
For background context, each upsell is technically an in-app prompt that we will show to users who may find a lot of benefits from the subscription, such as users who delete a lot of Tweets or spend a lot of time in their bookmarks. I learned from conversations with Manuel, a PM on the Customer Journey team, that there are different types of in-app prompts for upsells which can be technically implemented. The first type is reactive injection prompts, which are reactive prompts in direct response to a user’s action, such as liking or deleting a Tweet. The second type is inline prompts, which are passive prompts that are triggered based on a user’s past actions or behavior.
At first glance, the reactive injection prompts fit most of our brainstormed upsell use cases since we want to target users immediately after they do a specific action. However, a key dependency was that we could not currently support reactive injection prompts in the Twitter app. The Customer Journey Team, which is an entire team dedicated to helping other Twitter teams deliver for customers by building useful frameworks and technical implementations (so awesome, I know!), was working on a project to enable reactive injection prompts, but it would not be ready until mid-late July.
This was an important learning moment for me because as a PM, I’ve never experienced a situation where my team’s work was dependent on another team’s separate work and timeline. However, another reason why I wanted to work at a large company like Twitter was to gain more experience in these exact situations with multiple stakeholders and dependencies. Previously, I had only been in situations where I needed to collaborate with a handful of people in order to build and ship a product. Learning that in larger companies there are multiple teams depending on each other and as the PM, you need to know how to navigate these overlapping dependencies to drive forward the project was a super valuable perspective for me.
Knowing that the reactive injection prompts could not be executed until July, I set my focus on implementing inline prompt upsells first, and leaving the reactive injection prompts for a later version of upsells in the roadmap. However, there was still a lot of clarity needed around what it would take to implement inline upsell prompts. To help better inform the team’s next steps and break down the work on inline prompts, I…
- Met with Manuel and backend engineers from both the Twitter Blue and Customer Journey team to discuss the technical feasibility and timeline of our brainstormed inline upsell prompts.
- Discussed the initial upsells backend scoping work with Gloria (a Twitter Blue backend engineer) and organized the inline upsell prompts into the three most feasible implementations (one for each of the three Twitter Blue features).
- Discussed with Morgan (Twitter Blue researcher) about the research done on Twitter Blue customers and the three features to gain a better understanding of our upsell use cases.
- Collected all the technical and research information I had so far about our implementation of upsells, and documented it on a brainstorming document. I also created a spreadsheet to better outline the requirements of each brainstormed upsell, both inline and reactive.
- Once I felt like I had enough initial information about implementing upsells (and honestly, once the brainstorming doc got too complicated to maintain!), I then organized all that information into a more detailed product requirement document (PRD). This PRD was then shared with the entire Twitter Blue team to get everyone aligned on the status of upsells.
- Finally, after having a better understanding of the three upsells we were trying to build, reviewed the upsells v0 designs with Tegan and Mai (Twitter Blue designers) to discuss how the next version of designs would look with this new technical information.
It was very exciting to be discussing tradeoffs and brainstorming with different Tweeps every day, even if the rate at which I was learning new information felt like drinking water out of a firehouse at some moments! I felt like my product knowledge and experience grew 10x alone this week because of the initial scoping work around upsells, which was both exhilarating and a bit challenging to comprehend at the same time. However, this experience did reaffirm my belief in the importance of being in situations where we can apply our existing knowledge and be challenged to consider new perspectives so that we can grow as professionals and individuals. As Ginni Rometty (former CEO & Chairwoman of IBM) perfectly stated, “Growth and comfort do not coexist.”
Stay tuned for the weeks 4, 5, 6 update next week!
