Product Manager Intern

THE SITUATION

BeautyNBrushes was preparing a relaunch across Canada, the U.S., Ghana, and Nigeria. I supported the product team by defining client and provider workflows, leading sprint reviews and stakeholder meetings, refining backlog items, and validating launch-critical features across onboarding, booking, payments, tipping, notifications, disputes, and policies.

WHAT I DID

• ▸Wrote and prioritized user stories, acceptance criteria, and feature requirements for 8+ core workflows.
• ▸Mapped client and provider experiences for onboarding, profiles, booking, payments, tipping, notifications, disputes, and policy flows.
• ▸Led sprint reviews and stakeholder meetings to keep product decisions, open questions, and delivery progress visible.
• ▸Acted as APM while the PM was away, helping manage day-to-day product execution and unblock sprint work.
• ▸Led UAT and release QA for sprint deliverables, documenting defects with clear reproduction steps and validating fixes before launch.
• ▸Produced market and competitor research across 4 regions to support roadmap decisions, feature prioritization, and go-to-market planning.
• ▸Onboarded new interns by walking them through product context, team workflows, backlog structure, and current release priorities.

IMPACT

• ✓Reduced launch risk across client and provider platform experiences
• ✓Improved backlog clarity for engineering execution
• ✓Kept sprint reviews, stakeholder updates, and day-to-day product work moving when extra ownership was needed
• ✓Helped new interns ramp faster into the product and release workflow
• ✓Supported multi-market product decisions across Canada, the U.S., Ghana, and Nigeria
• ✓Turned competitor research into product and go-to-market inputs

WHAT I LEARNED

• ◆Clear acceptance criteria reduce ambiguity for both product and engineering teams.
• ◆Leading sprint reviews forces you to know the work well enough to explain tradeoffs clearly.
• ◆Stakeholder meetings work best when decisions, blockers, and next steps are obvious before people leave the call.
• ◆Good QA starts with understanding the full user journey, not only testing isolated screens.
• ◆Competitive research is most useful when it becomes prioritization, positioning, or launch guidance.

CHALLENGES I FACED

• ⚡Ramped into an active relaunch while learning the product, team workflow, and market context at the same time.
• ⚡Took on APM-style ownership while balancing execution work across backlog refinement, QA, meetings, and intern onboarding.
• ⚡Balanced speed with release quality while validating launch-critical features across two platform experiences.

FUN FACT

"The work sharpened how I think about marketplace products, especially when one change affects both supply and demand sides."