Internship Spotlight: Adedoyin Lawal ’20
What did you do this past summer? We asked rising second-year MBA students to check in from their summer internships, where they applied the lessons of their first year at Yale SOM.
Adedoyin Lawal ’20
Internship: Loon LLC (an Alphabet Company), Mountain View, California
Hometown: Lagos, Nigeria
Favorite Yale SOM class: Modeling Managerial Decisions
Clubs and affiliations: Technology Club, Africa Business and Society Club, And Society Club
Favorite New Haven eatery: Bonchon
This summer, I was a product manager intern at Loon LLC (an Alphabet Company), which uses a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space to provide internet access to unserved and underserved communities around the world. My work focused on helping the company explore new business opportunities. This role really provided the opportunity to work with cross-functional teams across the company, including engineering, sales, and finance teams.
My work started with driving the effort across various teams to create a long-term, market-size analysis for potential new business opportunities, and suggesting markets the company should pursue in the short to medium term. The second half of my internship was focused on defining market needs and prioritizing specific features/capabilities for different markets. This involved identifying user requirements and identifying specific regions to focus on. I also created a product roadmap for the business and made sure this aligned with the company’s overall technical roadmap.
The people at Loon are extremely smart and humble. Everyone was always willing to support me and helped answer my many questions. I also really liked that my opinions and recommendations were not only considered, but acted upon. Access to the Google network was super helpful. I had the chance to meet several senior leaders at Google and also had coffee chats with many teams to learn more about the breadth of work done within Alphabet. This summer internship provided the opportunity to stretch myself, put to use some of my class learning, build new product management skills, and learn from the very best in the industry.