Spring Updates - Product Space @ Penn!
Introducing Product Space @ Penn - restructuring, leadership, and more!
Happy February everyone!! Hope everyone is having a great semester so far :) love is in the air…
We wanted to take a moment to reintroduce ourselves as Product Space @ Penn (formerly Penn Product Group) and what changes we’ve made to our club structure and leadership since last semester!
TLDR:
We joined Product Space, a multi-university organization for product management clubs. We are changing our name from Penn Product Group to Product Space @ Penn.
We now offer two types of membership: General Members and Core Members.
Everyone on this newsletter is a General Member. We plan to host a number of open Product Management (PM) events for General Members.
People on the administrative committees or on our Fellowship and Consulting programs are Core Members. Core Members can join our Slack.
We’ve welcomed 11 new Fellows this semester after an application and interview process. We’re looking to improve this process for next year.
What is PS@P (Product Space @ Penn)?
As you may have noticed, we are now Product Space @ Penn! Product Space is a multi-university organization, and we are excited to join their ever-expanding network. More information about Product Space can be found here:
https://www.productspace.org/
Why the shift?
One of our most important goals is to create a tight-knit community of individuals interested and passionate about product, and becoming a Product Space chapter is an important step towards this goal. Joining Product Space will also allow us to serve our community with more resources, including improvements to our semester-long Fellowship program (formerly called the Projects committee) which helps students break into and recruit for product management and a better alumni network filled with individuals working in and around the technology industry.
Focusing on those points will allow us to become more professionally oriented as a club, allowing us to have more programming come to life (such as recruiting help events, skills workshops, and other fun social events)!
Although we will be using a new name and logo, we continue to pursue our mission of helping Penn students break into product management and provide a community for everyone interested. Our values have and will not change.
Structural Changes
We decided to provide two membership types for everyone wanting to get involved with product management. General membership is open to every student - by signing up to this newsletter, you are already a General Member. We plan to host a number of events on product management basics, careers, recruiting, and skills for our General Members.
We also look for committed students to join our Fellowship program (formerly the Projects committee) every semester, which has a short application and interview process. By becoming a Fellow, you will gain access to our integrated curriculum which will help you gain a strong foundation of the discipline and break into product management. We have welcomed 11 new Fellows for this semester, and we plan to reopen applications in the fall. After completing the Fellowship, Fellows will be invited to join our Consulting program as Associates, where they can gain real-world experience working on a product management project with an innovative startup. People on the administrative committees or on our Fellowship and Consulting programs are Core Members.
We’ve reorganized our leadership teams to better suit the needs of General Members and Core Members. To maintain greater transparency around our club leadership, we’ve included a diagram that outlines the new leadership structure of the club.
Fellowship Applications
We were fortunate to receive exceptional amounts of interest for our Fellowship this semester. This is our first Fellowship cohort as PS@P. Due to Product Space National requirements, we were required to adhere to membership limits and faced extreme difficulty in running the application process due to an unexpectedly high amount of applications received and adjusting our procedures to said volume. As such, we also wanted to share what we’ve learned and how we plan to improve:
1st round - We found many were confused about the meaning of some application questions as well as what we were hoping to see illuminated in the answers students provided. Moving forward, we’ll be better defining our questions as well as providing more room (in this case word count) to allow for better self-expression.
2nd round - We found that many people had misconceptions about what we were asking in our interview questions. Moving forward, we’ll offer more specific resources for interview prep as well as greater time between interviews to prepare.
Overall - We found we didn’t prepare frameworks for the different students applying (i.e. Freshman vs Sophomores vs Juniors vs Grad students). Moving forward, we aim to create said frameworks as well as provide greater transparency on what we’re looking for. We’ll also aim to advertise our info sessions and other events across clubs to build greater awareness for those who found out late.
New Board
We are happy to announce that Natsu Ozawa will now serve as Co-President along with Frank. We are also excited to welcome Lindsay Park, Vincent Lin, and Tina Kong on our Board as new VPs of Fellowship. Having previously completed the Projects committee, they will help us with the day to day operations of our new Fellowship program. Here are the other board member updates:
Nancy McSwain will now serve as our Managing VP of Community
Vish Dhar and Christine Kang are our new VPs of Consulting alongside Hillary Lim
Marcos Ruiz is now VP of Events
Stay on the lookout for opportunities to engage with us this semester! As always, feel free to reach out to us at pennproductgroup@gmail.com with any questions, concerns, thoughts, or other stuff!
All the best,
PS@P Exec
