Monday, October 25, 2010

Life after LGO: 5 Months Later

It’s been 5 1/2 months since I finished my last class at MIT, 4 1/2 months since I graduated and over 3 months since I started my job. In some ways it feels a lot longer and in other ways it feels like just yesterday...

For those who don’t remember, my full time job after LGO is at Apple as a New Product Operations manager and my first 3 months have been far from boring. Since I like bullet points, here’s a brief summary of the highlights.

Contributed to the launch of a the new MacBook Air:
  • In case you live in a cave: http://www.apple.com/macbookair/
  • I specifically helped launch this little device: http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/20/new-macbook-airs-come-with-software-reinstall-usb-drive/
Business Skills used:
  • Negotiations - RFQ and vendor procurement activities
  • Team & Relationship building - both with the internal Apple team and between the Apple/Supplier team
  • Communication - (effective) communication to upper levels of management
  • Project Management - prioritizing requirements, monitoring costs
Engineering Skills used:
  • EE stuff - USB drivers are way more complicated than I realized and now I know more about how they work than I ever cared to know
  • IE stuff - capacity analysis, supply/demand management, layout development, process optimization
Hourly work schedule:
  • Week 1: barely 40 hours
  • Weeks 2 - 5: ~55 hours
  • Weeks 6 - 13: avg 70 hours, peaking well over 80
  • Week 14: 40 hours
  • Week 15: <>

So, all in all, it’s been a really exciting time. Despite the crazy hours, I’ve enjoyed the work and I cannot even begin to tell you how cool it is to see something you’ve helped build being discussed and analyzed all over the web! (For good and bad).

What’s even better is I am finally catching up on lost sleep. :) And, the next few months will continue to be interesting because I get to move from the execute mode of product launch to a more strategic mode. Yup, that means lots of Keynote presentations and philosophizing!

While I miss the “carefree” days of grad school, it’s actually cool to reflect back on the work I’ve done and realize that I’m actually putting those 2 fancy degrees to use.

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