How the Dropbox New Grad PM program helped Devangi, Sara, and Joey grow their skills

For many college students, the post-grad job hunt can be one of the most challenging and exciting times of their lives. We love bringing on these hungry recent graduates and helping them get the experience they need to succeed in the tech industry. One of the ways we do that is with our New Grad Product Management Program. With this program, we onboard people straight out of college and teach them the ins and outs of being a product manager, which entails leading cross-functional teams from a product’s conception all the way through to its launch. Devangi Vivrekar, Sara Wiltberger, and Joey Loi are three of our most recent PMs who’ve found the experience the perfect way to transition into the professional world.

While many college graduates are eager to rush straight into a full-time professional role, that wasn’t the case for Devangi, a PM on our ecosystem team. She has a bachelor’s degree in physics and just completed her master’s in cognitive science, but she was looking for more education after graduation to help her become a strong PM.

“The reason I wanted to do a new grad program was because I saw it as another degree in a way. It’s training school for how to become a really good PM. At Dropbox, I was hoping for good mentorship and ownership over my project, and to hone all the parts of my craft. So far I’ve been really happy with how those expectations have been met. The program matches you with a mentor from the get go and they work super closely with you. It isn’t rotational so you’re really embedded in your team, and since they know they’ll have you for the long run, they really invest in you and give you more ownership as time goes on.”

“During the onsite, you start to get the sense of how thorough the experience will be. You have to context-switch so much; you’re there for four hours and you have to have four very different conversations back to back. You’ll be in a room with an engineer, and then you’ll have to put on your design hat, and then you have to have a more vulnerable, personal kind of interview conversation, and then give a presentation in which you’re polished and present yourself as an expert in the subject matter. I think that was also really good practice for what a PM’s day-to-day life is like.”

Sara, a computer science and business major, was also hoping to gain some major experience from the program. After what she felt was a disastrous first phone screen with her recruiter, she studied up and prepared for the next one and nailed every interview from then on. She was accepted into the program.

“Something that kind of surprised me in a positive way was that you get ownership so quickly! You have to hit the ground running and be an actual PM. It’s different than other programs; at Dropbox, you’re a full-fledged PM and you’re expected to do PM work right away, which is cool because you get to learn by doing.”

For Joey, a systems design engineering graduate and PM on the mobile team, one of the major benefits of the program was the relationship building it fostered. He developed close bonds with mentors along the way who he felt always advocated for him and supported him. He was also able to build strong friendships with the other people in his program “class,” which was only eight people deep. By becoming so close to all these people, he came to find that great PMs can really come from anywhere.

“There’s a huge focus on getting people with diverse experiences into our program. Some of the most respected and high-achieving PMs who have been here the longest don’t have traditional PM backgrounds. There’s a premium placed on people with nontraditional backgrounds; maybe they didn’t study CS or engineering or design, but those kinds of people bring a lot of unique perspective and skills to the table that we crave here. As a college grad you often don’t have PM experience or deep experience anywhere, so don’t worry about that. As long as you demonstrate excellence at something, whether that’s an extracurricular activity or a particular skill or side project you worked on for years, anywhere you show that you’re able to be a self starter and passionate about learning something is a really great signal that you’ll be a great PM here.”

Want to learn more about what a PM does at Dropbox and what skills might make you a perfect fit for our program? Check out our jobs page to explore this and other opportunities for new graduates.