Pivoting from consulting to tech
Amna Mahmud ’23 MBAi built a successful eight-year career as a consulting manager with PwC Advisory when she decided to go back to school to enhance her technical proficiency in artificial intelligence (AI) and learn how to communicate between both business and technical teams.
Mahmud chose Northwestern's MBAi Program, a joint-degree program offered between the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering. The lessons she learned in the program helped Mahmud pivot to Amazon, where she is a senior product manager.
“I learned the importance of relationships and how to influence without authority,” she said. “MBAi taught me in practice how to have a long-term perspective on relationships and not be transactional.” Many of those relationships involve those on highly technical teams. In her role with Amazon, Mahmud uses AI and machine learning (ML) to help the retail giant smooth the supply chain and come up with new business ideas for customers ordering heavy, bulky items like kayaks, furniture, and refrigerators.
“My team is an incubator think tank group focusing on identifying new ways to delight Amazon customers,” Mahmud said. “In any given week, I’ll talk to sales, vendor managers, operations, finance, and tech teams to define customer problems and build minimal lovable product prototypes with viable financial models and proposed technical solutions.
During the summer of 2022, Mahmud served as a senior product manager intern on the same team she works with today. Over those three months, she interviewed data scientists and project managers to help develop strategies to enhance existing AI models and worked to persuade leadership to add new product features.
Mahmud said the MBAi program prepared her to excel during her internship. “The internship showcased the value I could bring to Amazon,” she said. “In the real world, we collaborate with a variety of different individuals. MBAi gave me insight on how to collaborate with data scientists.”
During her MBAi journey, Mahmud learned more than merely how to speak better to technical people; she learned the skills needed to become a technical innovator herself. That knowledge led her back to Amazon when she graduated. Her dream is to eventually use that knowledge to start her own company or work for a startup. She credits one particular MBAi class with preparing her to potentially make that dream a reality.
“The New Venture Discovery class gave me real-life experience on what it takes to go through the product discovery phase and find a product-market fit for a problem that you are passionate about,” she said. “I learned valuable lessons from that class that I carry into my day-to-day work with Amazon.” She's not in a rush to start that mission, though. For now, she's enjoying everything about Amazon. “I have complete ownership over my scope of work and I am encouraged to experiment and work backwards from the customer,” she said. “Delving into complex ambiguous challenges and innovating with the toolkit instilled by the MBAi brings me immense satisfaction.”
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