TIKTOK INTERNSHIP
Over summer 2021, I was lucky enough to join the Spark Ads team to bring the new ad product to the market and truly enhance the ad experience between multiple stakeholders. The goal of our product was to bring a natural video ad experience to TikTok users in order to increase advertisers’ retention rate and improve user experience.
Duration
May 2021 – Sep 2021
4 months
Tools
Figma
Role
Product Manager Intern
Team
Jiahui – PM, Mentor
Wei Xiong – PM
Yi Dai – UX Designer
Project Overview
During the summer of 2021, I was an intern for TikTok’s Monetization Product Spark Ads team. On a macro level, I was working closely with cross-functional teams of PMs, UX designers, operations, and engineers to build up Spark Ads infrastructural capabilities and monitor the go-to-market launching pace. I also self-led the Ads Only key feature construction and created multiple dashboards for monitoring performance and summarized product logic as core information assets. While I cannot disclose the details of my projects due to the NDA, feel free to contact me if you would like to learn more!
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Key Takeaways
This was a genuinely fruitful summer. As a PM intern, I learned, grew, and absorbed much knowledge about project management skills, tackling business needs, and being a team member in a tech company – it was a truly transformative experience. I have met and connected with many kindred spirits from multiple departments and they have inspired me through actions and words. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from my internship.
Communication with Efficiency
As my mentor, Jiahui told me on the onboarding day, “you should find the right person to ask questions and keep asking until you understand.” The wise sentence constantly echoed in my head and led me from the onboarding period when I self-led projects and communicated with cross-functional teams.
The essential idea for this sentence is to communicate with efficiency. In a cooperative and fast-paced working environment, getting your message across accurately and receiving what you need is crucial. Interpreting and transmitting accurate and thoughtful information would reduce the time spent on ambiguities and maximize the team efficiency.
Multi-tasking
and Comparing Priority
It is not unusual to have 5-10 projects simultaneously during busy work hours. Without a good project list with priorities, I could hardly manage everything and keep projects on time. During the internship, I learned to dissect big tasks into smaller and practical steps and group them by type in order to connect with cross-functional teams with efficiency. Moreover, settling down the timeline for top priority projects first and filling gaps with less important ones would help manage the entire schedule and step towards OKR.
Be Data-informed
and Do More Testing
The main job-to-done for product managers in the team is to answer the WHY question. During the internship, I learned how much data affected and supported decisions. After doing quantitative and qualitative research and making A/B testing, I found out that it was always data that helped us to analyze our products and make the final decisions. While data might not always be the answer to the problem, it allowed us to eliminate those not functional ideas. The final decision is always a trade-off between multiple stakeholders.