Working as a Product Manager Intern at Oracle
By Carina Ly
Hi! My name is Carina Ly, a rising junior at Stanford University studying Computer Science and Economics. This summer, I had the opportunity to work as Product Manager Intern at Oracle on the Visual Builder Studio team in the Corporate Architecture organization. Interning at Oracle has been one of the most educational, fun, and fulfilling experiences for me, as it has taught me so much about working in the real world.
With the diverse set of responsibilities that Product Managers had, I knew that this role would be perfect for me. Going into this internship, I was interested in many aspects, such as UI/UX design, user research, and the business side of tech. From previous internships at tech companies, I knew that Product Managers have an interesting and unique role within engineering teams. Product Managers drive the product life cycle, design go-to market strategies, and manage features within the product.
After spending the first couple of weeks onboarding, which included listening to tech talks hosted Oracle’s top executives and learning about the company’s culture and history, I was ready to dive into my projects within Corporate Architecture, the organization that is responsible for Visual Builder Studio, the application development platform for all of Oracle’s new cloud applications. After connecting with my managers and mentor, I began attending a ton of meetings to onboard onto the team. This team drives the product direction and feature set that enables customers to take the Cloud Apps that Oracle delivers and use Visual Builder Studio to configure, modify, or add to them to meet their unique business needs. From visual standups to tech scrums to vision discussions, I learned about the Visual Builder Studio and its importance in the Oracle ecosystem.
Since then, I have been working on one main project and many other side projects. One of the newest features in extensibility will allow customers to deliver brand new capabilities into the Cloud Apps using the same tooling, templates, and components that Oracle developers do. With this new feature, Oracle Cloud Apps and customer-created apps will coexist seamlessly in a unified ecosystem. Because this concept is new, I created a presentation that would simply and accurately define this feature to Oracle teams. Most of the work consisted of scoping out use cases, preparing demos, and identifying important benefits for Oracle’s customers. At the end of my internship, I presented this slide deck, alongside some short tutorials that give app developers a walkthrough of the new capabilities that are enabled by this new feature.
In addition to this slide deck and set of tutorials, I also worked on other related projects, which have also been very eye-opening and super interesting! I was able to use my fresh perspective and provide feedback to the organization’s talented design team on the forward-looking UX vision for how customers will achieve key extensibility use cases in Visual Builder Studio. From conducting market research to compiling a competitive analysis, these projects truly helped me understand the world of corporate architecture and gave me ideas to improve Visual Builder Studio to make it the most user-friendly visual development environment on the market.
Overall, I’ve had such a wonderful experience working alongside Oracle’s brightest product managers and have learned so much. Because of this internship, it has convinced me to pursue a career in product management.
