Inside AWS Product Management: A Conversation with Gigi Boehringer ‘18

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Engineering Career Conversations. I'm Krista Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University. - And I'm Tracy Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications Program. We are excited to bring you this forum where we will host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you. - We had the delightful experience of interviewing Gigi Barenger, Class of 2018, ISST major. She currently works for Amazon Web Services as a senior technical product manager. Her time at Cornell was full of amazing classes and supportive professors, engaged project teams, and she was on the university sailing team too. We hope that you enjoy learning about her fascinating work at AWS and how her Cornell experience shaped that work. (upbeat music) - Good to have you here today. Maybe start by telling us more about your current work. - Yeah, so currently I am a senior product manager at Amazon Web Services. I am a technical product manager, which means that I work directly on one of the AWS services. As for me currently, it's a one particular product that I own called Amazon Workspaces Core. It's a third party integration API for virtual desktops. So AWS, I think about 10 years ago, released Amazon Workspaces, which is a fully managed virtual desktop offering. And a couple of years ago, we released what I call a baby out of it. That is the everything, but I call it like the Lego head of the virtual desktops. So not only are you able to have fully managed desktops through AWS, but now you can bring whatever your preferred virtual desktop offering is, whether that's Citrix or Horizon 8 or WorkSpot, LeoStream, a few others that are third parties that are very similar to our native offering, but you can run that third party on top of the backend and the managed APIs that AWS offers. So at times it can be very technical. At times we're very go-to-market focused because it is a newer product. So as a PM, it's a balance between the two at this point in time, but normally the PM role that I'm in would be almost entirely focused on just the product features and development. - I really find it interesting because so many of our students want to become product managers just like what you're doing. I mean, they talk about it constantly. And so I think it would be super helpful for them to get a view of like what, I don't know if there is such a thing as a normal day, but what does a day look like for you trying to balance all these demands? - Yeah, so I think that's the root of what being a product manager is, is balancing all the different pieces more than it is just one skill set. So a normal day as a PM at AWS consists of meeting with your engineering teams, meeting with legal potentially on some sort of new licensing thing you might be working on, or meeting with your business development and go to market team if it's a newer product and seeing how that's going. For me, because my product integrates with other technology providers, I meet with at least one of them every single day to talk about our integration and talk about features that they need in order to offer the end customer, what the customer is asking for, but also features that maybe could it be improved on that already exists today? And so it's a range, definitely. Some people say being a PM is like being a mini CEO. I think of it sometimes as kind of like herding cat. Like everybody is going in the same direction generally, but there's a lot of competing tension between all the different PMs, especially at a company like AWS where there's about 10 of us focused on this larger org's product, making sure that engineering is able to prioritize and keep moving forward on the pieces that impact your features, but then also as a team lately, it's been in addition to that road mapping for 2025. And so you get to work with those other PMs, but simultaneously wanna make sure that your features that you've identified are the ones that are moving forward. - Thank you for that. So as a PM, do you typically just look forward nine, 12, 18, 36 months, how does that work out for you? - It depends on the company at AWS specifically. We really like to only set a roadmap for nine to 12 months out. And it's constantly changing. Some companies that maybe are smaller are looking at an even shorter duration because it's very much meant to be a reactive. We have a customer asking for something. We can do it in a few weeks. Let's get it out. And then you're able to onboard that new customer to your product. For AWS, we have kind of a massive backlog of requests from customers because we have so many. And so a lot of times we are ranking things based on how many customers have asked for something. And it's a version of if you've heard of rice scoring, that's what we use. So it's partially a judgment call and product sense call, but then partially using the data that we've collected from those customers to plan ahead. I think what's interesting particularly about the way AWS does it is right now we're planning for the first half of 2025. And we're making a long list that we are currently ranking and people are kind of pitching each other on why we should be ranking one thing over another with the data that we've collected. But then at some point there's a cutoff on that list. And it might be number 45 out of 65 that we've listed for the first half of next year. And those items then can be considered for the second half of next year with the understanding that a lot of things do kind of extend out longer than you might expect when you are solving new problems with the engineers. So it's definitely an interesting time, but it's what I've been told is it's a peculiar process. I've only ever been a PM at AWS, but I think the fact that it is quite malleable throughout the year based on customer needs is peculiar to us. And one of the ways that we stay customer obsessed is kind of our slogans. It's quite fun, but definitely ever-changing. - Excellent, what a great opportunity. What's been the most significant challenge you faced in your work and how did you overcome it? - Yeah, so I think for me the most significant challenge has been helping launch this new product over the past few years and making sure we are continuously iterating on the initial idea of the product and how we could continue to bring it to life over the next five to 10 years. 'Cause it's not a product that's gonna be exactly the same the day it's launched. A lot of times all of the larger tech companies are releasing something and they call it minimum lovable product, minimum viable product. But the idea is that you have a lot of room to grow into being more loved than, you know. And so we have all these, we have a laundry list of features that different partners have requested. We've seen the way that customers have interacted with it now in production environments and are now getting really good data on how to improve the product. So it is truly an enterprise-grade product that more customers can launch into their production environments without necessarily needing us to be right alongside them and kind of get that flywheel going of onboarding that comes with a little bit of time and love our new product. - You all are pulled in a lot of different directions with all the best, you know, with really great outcome. I like your word malleable there for, you know, like how responsive you are to what the customers are asking for. And so I just kind of wanted to link that up to how does this work then going through all of these phases and all this input, what do you do as a team to keep contributing to a healthier or sustainable, more equitable sort of workspace or outcome or product features, whatever it might be. How do you frame that up at AWS? - Yeah, I think when it comes to the root of it all, having the customer be the absolute primary focus helps a lot with how equitable it is when maybe you're going through that healthy tension of trying to figure out which features to do next, but also the idea that those customers are giving us a lot of feedback on how things are going. And so we all are tasked with listening to the customers and it's not necessarily an environment of one person has an idea, they run with it, they get to be the star. It's more like, I don't really care where the idea comes from. I just want the customers to be happy and I just want to see that positive feedback. And so I think having a lot of people on that same page focused on the end goal being the customer and not necessarily other potential variables to focus on, you end up with a much more equitable environment because of the way that the customer is driving the decision-making versus it being personal decisions. So it's very data-driven, I love it. I love the level of data-driven decisions that are being made because it makes it much more clear and concise and it's less about preference and it's more about while the data is saying this. So we're going to move forward here and it's easier to, I think, put everything on the table and people are not looking at you for your idea, they're looking at your writing and your data that you brought to the table to make the decision on whether or not it's the best path forward. - Can you give a little more insight into what people and organizations are important collaborators for the work that you do? - Yeah, so it's pretty amazing. It's hard, I think, at times to understand how large the organizations are, especially at AWS on the service team side. It's truly amazing how many people we have focusing on different pieces of these products and my product is not even close to being one of the largest ones at the company. But the collaboration comes from, right? We have solutions architects that are speaking to customers every day understanding their feedback, helping them solve problems, helping them solve around their own requirements within the customer's organization for maybe IT requirements that have been put in place that might be old, might be new, might be based on concerns security-wise or it might be based on the way that networking was done 15 years ago and they just haven't been updated. But you do have to work within those bounds. And so those solutions architects are like the forefront of all customer-facing interactions. They work with account managers and sales teams, but they truly are meant to be the technical advisor to the customer. So they are one of the best places to get customer feedback because they can speak to me about what they're hearing. They can have opinions because they see lots of different customers, not just one person that they're speaking to for the product use. But they also are able to then share with the customer what's happening on the service team side and what they've been told on the roadmap. And it builds this relationship bridge, the customer that makes a really big impact, I think on the level of trust that we earn. So I think solutions architects are one that I collaborate with every single day and I talk to them on Slack every single day. In addition to that, it's my business development team. So I have two that are focused on my product alone. And so they are like business partners to me. And we're talking about onboarding either new managed service partners or we're talking about customer feedback that they heard during some maybe executive level conversation. In addition to that, we have sales specialists that own the entire org's products that they sell and they get a lot of feedback from the field as well in a slightly more sales focused way than from the solutions architects. And then once you go inside of the actual service team, that's when you have engineering and with an engineering project managers and program managers that are seasoned in ways that only I can continue to work towards being because I am earlier in my career than a lot of people but they have really, I think strong sense of product sense and judgment when it comes to the way that, either launches have gone based on the way that we're sharing this pricing with a customer or based on just engineering hiccups that can happen and delay things and the way that I should be communicating that to customers are really helpful in addition to solving problems that I really lean on them to help me solve with new feature ideas. So the collaboration spans, I think, quite a range of types of people and types of backgrounds but it all feeds into this kind of flywheel of feature development that I try to keep pushing forward from my problem. - Just pause. So Tracy mentioned we have so many students who express an interest in this work. I'm not sure how many of them fully know what they're getting into when they say this on paper. Maybe it makes sense or maybe they've managed a product here on campus. And as I hear you speak, I'm reminded of how much responsibility you have and how much you're working with people who have so much depth of knowledge and experience in their particular field. And so I'm curious to know what prepared you for this level of responsibility and coordination and what might you recommend for others either to build up that type of experience or to evaluate whether or not this is a good fit for them? What would you say to that? - Yeah, so I think one of my favorite experiences, especially at Cornell was being on a project team. It was something that when I was five years old, I wanted to do at Cornell. It was something that when I got to Cornell, I was excited to do when the chance, when it was time to start looking into that. And it really did help, I think, build those muscles with communicating with different types of engineers around me and different types of people around me in a way that was very collaborative and mission-driven on a singular path towards success. It was very clear where we all wanted to go, but we all had very different brains with different experiences, maybe different internship experiences as well that we were bringing to the table. And it was, I think, one of the best things that I did just to build those muscles early on. I was able to be a business development lead for Cornell Hyperloop Junior year, and then I was team lead of Cornell Hyperloop Senior year with two close friends. And we each had very different skill sets, but the management experience of the people and of engineers that we knew as we had gone through during freshman, sophomore, junior year, how difficult it can be at times, going into senior year, you're a little more comfortable. But understanding the workload and understanding the balance that everyone was trying to keep. And so the people management skills, I think, were really developed in that type of situation where you're trying to take into account that people have this big life that they're living and your team's goal is just one piece of a lot going on in everybody's life. So I think that helped a lot with just interacting with different types of people and understanding the way that product development can occur through agile workflows. And that was helpful, especially when I was started interviewing at different companies. I also think internship experience helped a lot going into the full-time work. I interned at an app dev agency my sophomore year and then interned at a blockchain financial technology company going into senior year and spent junior summer at Cornell. And through those internships plus Hyperloop, it felt like I had a pretty clear picture of what I wanted to do and knew the skills I needed to keep building in order to do it. And so that for me, I think was really helpful and understanding, I wanted to do maybe an APM program, the associate product manager programs at a tech company if possible after senior year of college. But I ended up really falling in love with the solutions architect role during my internship summer at R3, the distributed ledger finance platform. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna do this. This is what I wanna do. And so I was lucky enough, AWS had a program at the time for solutions architect, not in trail, solutions architect like entry-level roles where you would do a training program and then get placed on a team. So I did that. And as a solutions architect, I really leaned into being as deep as possible on the technology knowing that every year after college, it's harder to stay as deep as you were when your only job was to learn about new technology. And so I really leaned into that. I loved it. And then when the opportunity surfaced to move over to product manager, that was the time I was like, okay, I did the work. I understand the role. It's gonna be really hard. And it was really hard to transition, but all the different experiences balanced out. I think a lot of skills that were needed. So I could really focus on the tactical PM work that I needed to learn when I moved over to the product manager role. So many moving pieces, right? And so of course we're asking this of everybody as of late, but what about AI? What's going on with your work and is AI having an effect there at all right now? - Yeah, so I think with my work, the way that it's having an effect is it's definitely of interest. It definitely gets a lot more marketing budget towards it at any tech company right now. The question is how can you use it and be effective and how can it truly make an impact on the customer? And so ways that we've looked into doing that and I think we just released it a few weeks ago was partnering our product with other AWS products that are AI focused like Amazon Q developer, which is like a chat bot to help you code where you can ask it to build snippets for you or larger code bases and it will give you drafts that you can use in years. And so I think that's a really good example of it's not necessarily replacing anyone, but it is making it a lot easier if you're not as adept at some pieces of code or if you want to learn more or are pushing yourself more into an area that maybe you don't have the schooling in or haven't, you know, you're spending a couple of days researching it before being able to do it. This is a tool that can help you get moving a little bit faster, save some time. A handful of cycles of getting errors. And it's something that as our product moves forward, we say, okay, well, maybe this is something people might want offered inside a desktop. And maybe this is something that we can integrate with in that format and not just have it be a paired sales offering. So I think there's a lot of room for play there. I love the democratization of artificial intelligence, tooling and the way that every company right now is looking to, you know, ride this wave of excitement and benefit from it and also, you know, bring it to a larger audience in a way that, you know, when we were in college, we were learning about it, we were using it, but we weren't necessarily talking to our friends that were in other colleges on campus about it. And so now it's definitely a level of democratization that I think is gonna help everyone and is a lot of fun to play around with. - What do you wish you knew when you were a sophomore? - So when I was a sophomore, I was trying to figure out still, not well, how to balance being on the varsity sailing team and being in engineering, seeing how freshman year went, which was not easy for me. I, you know, I struggled many times throughout my engineering career. And I think that for me, I just wish that I had used every resource possible. I think a lot of times it's a hard tension, especially as a student athlete, to get to practice and be at practice all afternoon and schedule your classes around it and then go to morning workout and not fall asleep during class after waking up at five a.m. for a workout. Right, there's, it's a hard balance and it's a hard balance. It's very different than being an athlete in high school. And so for me, I just wish that I think I had trusted that I could do it all. But instead of prioritizing practice every day, maybe prioritize office hours a little bit more and use those tools on campus to make sure that I was really getting the most out of my studies as a strong base for the future, that I would then have to pay for by making sure I studied more, but I am not going to them. So I think for me, it was, I came in really prioritizing trying to do both perfectly and I ended up slipping. And so prioritizing time on campus with professors that are amazing and with office hours, with friends and TAs that are so, so helpful. Being in that environment is the most important thing you can do while you're on campus. Athletics is, it feels really important, but for me, I think it quickly was clear that engineering was my future profession and not being an Olympic sailor. So once I accepted that, then it was time to move, move towards engineering a little bit more and sailing a little bit less. But I think it's a really hard balance and it's hard to be a freshman in a sophomore on any team when you're trying to figure out where you fit in, you're trying to figure out what your future looks like in this sport. Maybe it is something that you wanna take full on after college and those years feel really important to see whether or not you're gonna be able to do that. But there's nothing better truly than the friends and the hard work that pays off in engineering school. I think it's just such a special environment that I loved soaking in once I made that reprioritization. - Like you, I had a first year that was a little bit rough. So I completely identify with that memory, absolutely. So thinking back to all of that, you were just mentioning the professors and making friends and doing all these things together. And so are there any classes in particular that you enjoyed, not necessarily even engineering, but something else that you absolutely enjoyed and would recommend? - Yeah, I actually, I would say all my favorite classes were definitely in engineering. I really enjoyed rapid prototyping. I think that was senior year. We made a cocktail making robot for our final project, which was a real hit at parties afterwards and lived a good life until it was left on the sidewalk in college after the garbage trucks to pick up. But that was a really, really fun class that I think expanded the hands-on work in engineering, that being an engineering InfoSci major did not give me and was kind of something from growing up that was the reason why I wanted to be an engineer in the first place. I also really enjoyed, what was it, text mining in Python, with, I think it was with Mimno, Professor Mimno. And then he had one other course that I really enjoyed, which is a data visualization course. I really think though junior and senior year, every class is just so much fun. And that's like the best part of colleges, all those classes where you feel like you're starting to dive in, it's actually not as hard as you thought because you have a good base and you can just lean into learning a lot of really cool things and really take advantage of all the resources engineering school has to offer. There's not a lot of places like it when it comes to the level of resources given to students or project teams, for research labs, the devotion to the, I think the diversity and offerings in engineering school really is just so special. It's amazing. - I love the picture that you're painting. You know, just how to prioritize, how to piece this together, how to make sense of all that's available and the possibilities here. I think students will appreciate this. We now have sort of a fun or speed round and the first question is where do you go for information to stay current in your work? - Honestly, internal resources 'cause I think there's a lot of really cool service teams at AWS that I don't get to hang out with every day and don't get to work with that I love, but also I'm actually a host on AWS on Air which is a Twitch channel that we have. And during those sessions, that's where I learned the most. So on Fridays, we interview product managers that have released a new products in the past week or two and I get to ask them all the stupid questions I ever want for the sake of everyone else, of course, and not myself. And so we get to do a live streamed Twitch episode on Fridays where we just learned about new cool technology. And it's like my favorite format, it's so much fun. We get viewers interacting in the chat, asking questions for their own AWS environments. And it's just such, I think, a pleasant way to consume new technology information. I could read, but my eyes staring at a computer for another couple of hours during the day is unlikely at this point in time as they get worse with age, but I can watch a Twitch live stream about new technology any day. The live demos are amazing and so much fun and you really feel connected to either that feature or that product that PM worked much longer than probably anyone knows on getting out, which is cool. - Excellent. Is that an internal channel or in the audience? - Yes, you should absolutely share it with your audience. It's external, it's on Twitch. We're on the AWS main Twitch channel and then also AWS on-air, which is featured on Twitch, YouTube, sometimes LinkedIn and other social platforms. - Great, we'll have to get that link from you, thank you. - And if you weren't doing this work, now you said early on, you were already thinking about project teams when you were five. - Yes. (laughs) - I am. - But what else was in the mix when you were a kid that you thought you might pursue? - So there was a strong pull towards chemical engineering that was quickly redirected by my grades in chemistry for engineers and freshmen here. So there was a strong pull towards that. I loved chemistry in high school, I loved AP Chem. I just, it was really enjoyable for me. So that was one. I did have a dream for a while of going to the Olympics for a sailing that has not happened, but I'm so excited for all the people that showed up at the Olympics this year for the sailors. It's just so awesome to see the US sailing team doing really well and seeing familiar faces from college athletics and growing up. That's just amazing. What else? One second, let me think, I can think of something. Probably the last one would be something within the mechanical engineering range. The focus was engineering and it wasn't necessarily anything else. So it was always going to be engineering, it just was which kind. And for me, I really ended up enjoying the balance of the operations research with the computer science classes that at the time ISST offered. - Great combination, right, bringing? - It is, yeah. It's been really helpful actually in my career, which was amazing that I found a path that at the time felt kind of hard to identify, but it worked out the way it's supposed to, as it always does. And I think if I could spend more time hosting live streaming or TV shows or something, that is like a newfound passion that I just love it so much. So we shall see in time. - Excellent, good, I look forward to following along. So along those lines, hosting TV shows, sailing, building robots, tell us what you do these days to relax, have fun or re-energize. - Yeah, so these days outside of work, I have gone into the classic college athlete looking for endurance sports to fill the need. So I've been, I guess, dipping my toe into triathlons, which has been a lot of fun, as a very different world that I had to retake swim lessons because I had no idea how to swim laps the way that I might have on swim team when I was 10, and learned how to ride a bike in a way that is like true road cycling and not just around the neighborhood. So it's been a lot of fun to lean into, I ski a lot and try to get out into the mountains whenever I can outside of New York City just to get a little bit of a reprieve from the pace of the city. And then I also spend a lot of my time doing charity work through the New York Junior League. And so that's something that I'm really passionate about. I'm on the fundraising side, and it just brings me a lot of joy to support different charities in New York City that are focused on women and children. - That's great. Thank you so much, Gigi, for joining us today. We really appreciate your time and insights. Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying these conversations, please follow, rate and review on your favorite platform. Join us for the next episode where we will be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable and more sustainable world.