This summer, I completed a challenging yet rewarding 12-week internship with the Document Cloud AI team at Adobe. I worked as a core AI product manager on Acrobat’s AI assistant. As I get close to completing my MBA at Fuqua, I’m reflecting on what got me here and some key lessons I picked up along the way. 

Tackling Tech Recruiting

Getting an internship in tech was no easy journey, even with a tech background. Before Fuqua, I transitioned from software engineering to product management (PM) within my company, moving into a technical product manager role.

The MBA recruiting advice from the Career Management Center (CMC) seemed simple: apply early, get referrals, and network so there are people who can advocate for you. When it came to Adobe, I used a referral to apply through a friend, but ultimately, I don’t think that helped me much. From there, different teams could access my application, and that’s how the Document Cloud team found me.

Here’s a cool detail — my resume ended up in the hands of a Fuqua alum, who was helping the hiring manager with shortlisting and decided to filter for Fuqua resumes. They were specifically looking for candidates with prior PM and technical experience, so he passed my resume along. This Fuqua connection was instrumental, and as it turned out, I met this alum during a trek to San Francisco that the Tech Club organized in October. I’d even had the chance to visit Adobe’s beautiful San Jose campus which helped me get a sense of the culture. This connection helped later, as he could advise me on the direction on the interview process and tips to prepare. 

Acing the Interview

My interview process started with a behavioral interview in December and a root cause analysis product case with the hiring manager. Then, in January, I had four 30-minute back-to-back interviews with the team, mostly behavioral with some technical and strategy questions.

I always tell incoming MBAs looking to go into tech: don’t underestimate behavioral interviews — they’re critical! One tip that worked well for me was recording myself answering common behavioral questions using the CAR (context-action-result) framework. Recording allowed me to refine my answers and boost my confidence, and I highly recommend it. Landing at Adobe’s Document Cloud AI team felt like a perfect fit, as I wanted to work in AI. My role focused on improving Acrobat’s AI Assistant by enabling it to understand figures in PDFs — things like charts, graphs, and diagrams — and to predict how users might want to interact with these. Through customer interviews and competitive analysis, I came up with recommendations on how the Assistant should handle figure understanding. 

Here are some of my key takeaways from my internship: 

1. Adopting large language models (LLMs) requires more than just picking the latest model.

Quality, cost, and latency need to be carefully balanced, especially as new models emerge. For any team, finding the optimal mix is crucial to delivering reliable, cost-effective solutions. 

When implementing LLMs in production, teams must weigh the tradeoffs between using more sophisticated models that may offer better results but consume more resources, versus lighter models that might be more practical for real-time applications. This decision becomes particularly critical as organizations scale their AI operations and need to maintain both performance and cost efficiency. 

2. User interviews help build strong product intuition, but only if done right.

I conducted over 30 interviews with both Acrobat and non-Acrobat users to understand their “job to be done” around figures in documents. Diving deep into their pain points helped me define the problem’s scope, gain insight into users’ current solutions, and assess the potential value our feature could provide. 

3. Storytelling skills make or break a recommendation.

Toward the end of my internship, I presented some final recommendations to my vice president and other executives. My manager and I refined the storyline repeatedly to create a clear, compelling flow. Crafting memorable presentations means thinking about the audience as the hero. I put myself in the executives’ shoes to highlight the aspects they would care about most, which strengthened my message and made the presentation memorable. 

I’m grateful to my managers and teammates for their guidance and support, and to the MBAs@Adobe group for making the experience unforgettable. I’m excited to carry these lessons forward as I dive back into my final year at Fuqua!