🚀 UWPM Spring 2025: Welcome Back!❄️🔥
Hello UWPM community!
Welcome to Spring 2025 - UWPM is thrilled to kick off another term of growth and connection! Whether you're starting a new co-op or returning to campus for a study term, we hope you're feeling settled and ready for exciting UWPM content.
Although it’s been a while since our previous newsletter, the UWPM team has been busy organizing some enriching events and hosting rather insightful podcasts, all while bringing a fresh enthusiasm and a keen passion to keep inspiring you all to engage and learn more about the world of PM! Like always, this term will be filled with insightful learning opportunities, meaningful networking, and hands-on experiences. Stay tuned to learn more about what we’ve been up to and look out for upcoming events!
🗓 Upcoming Events: Product Game Night!
We’re kicking off the term with an epic Product Game Night! Join us for a PM-themed bingo, Kahoot & Pictionary, as well as an informative PM 101 session! Free food, prizes, and loads of fun… what more could you want!
🎟️Save the date! Join us on Wednesday, July 2nd, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM. This is an event you won’t want to miss out on! Bring your A-game and get ready for a night of fun product-management related gaming!
🎙️ Latest Podcast Episode!
Curious to learn more about what really drives success in the PM role? In our latest podcast episode, we had the chance to speak with David Currie, a PM at the fast-scaling startup Pepper, who shared with us his incredible journey from engineer to PM and discussed the true power of deep customer empathy and how it beats technical expertise in the industry.
Some podcast highlights:
📖How product management echoes themes from ‘A Sand County Almanac’
🛠️His unique career journey from engineer to product manager and his key takeaways from each stage
📊An applicable real-life prioritization method: focus on REAL problems + align with business strategy
🎲Why PM’s should test small, fail fast, and learn fast – not gamble!
🧠The irreplaceable role of human empathy in AI-era customer discovery
Tune in on either Apple Music or Spotify for the full episode!!
Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eAY88wY3
Apple Music: https://lnkd.in/eDxDAzuy
📰 Tech News:
Is AI all what it seems? Apple’s new study challenges AI hype.
An article by the Guardian highlights the shortcomings of AI and how it struggles with tasks beyond pattern recognition. Large Language Models(LLMs) perform well on text-based pattern recognition but struggle at logical reasoning with problems that reach beyond the training data. Apple’s paper identifies a rethink of the prevailing hype around large models and a shift back to integrating robust algorithms for better intelligence.
Law Zero: Safe AI for Humans Launched!
Yoshua Bengio, a Montreal based leading expert in AI, an A.M. Turing Award winner and the most-cited artificial intelligence (AI) researcher in the world launched a non-profit called Law Zero. Law Zero is pioneering research and engineering safety-first solutions for AI technologies. This launch is important for aspiring PMs as initiatives like Law Zero emphasize the need to build AI products that prioritize safety and ethics with emerging standards.
🚨 PM Resources:
Check out Ken Norton's Product Management Blog called Bring the Donuts. Ken is a Product Management Leader at Google who wanted to address a gap on the web about what it really means to be a product manager in a client-focused company. He has numerous articles highlighting PM advice, exclusive startup jobs, and leadership techniques. Be sure to check out his classic essay How To Hire a Product Manager, which is claimed as a “playbook for a generation of product managers”.
🔍 Product Opportunities:
Looking to break into product management? Here are some fresh internship opportunities to check out:
Product Manager Intern – Rakuten Kobo
Work with a leading e-reading company on shaping the future of digital content in Toronto.Project Management Intern – Dayforce
Get hands-on experience in managing large-scale SaaS initiatives with a fast-growing HR tech company. Remote opportunity.Project Analyst Student Intern – TMX
Explore financial tech and capital markets while working with Canada’s premier exchange operator in Toronto.Technical Project Manager Intern – Nokia
Drive 5G innovation with a global telecom leader at the intersection of tech and infrastructure. Remote opportunity.Product Management Intern – 1Password
Join the team behind a globally loved security product and shape features for millions of users. Remote opportunity.
🧑💻 Thinking Like a PM:
Prioritization is one of the most critical skills for any product manager. Whether you're managing a backlog, choosing between features, or allocating resources, strong prioritization helps ensure you’re solving the right problems at the right time. To see how good you can prioritize, take a shot at this edition’s question:
Imagine you’re launching a new mobile banking app for Gen Z users. Your team has limited dev bandwidth and three major features on the table: social payments (like Venmo), budgeting tools, and gamified saving incentives. How would you prioritize which feature to build first, and why?
This question challenges you to weigh impact, user need, effort, and alignment with your product’s vision. Consider metrics like engagement potential, customer feedback, and competitive benchmarks. It’s all about thinking critically, making tradeoffs, and justifying your decisions.
Take a crack at it, and feel free to share your rationale with us—we’d love to see how you think!
📌 Join our Discord Community
Want to connect with other students such as yourself interested in Product? Join our Discord Community, Invite Link Here. Use our Discord Community to connect with other students and alumni to learn more about different opportunities in Product, practice mock interviews + resume critiques and more!
👋 Feel free to reach out
Thanks for following us along this journey! We hope you learned something from this edition of the newsletter. Feel free to drop a line to introduce yourself and reach out if you have any questions.
Until next time,
- UWPM Team