Career Path of a Program Manager M&A Integration at Google

I went to the University of Arizona and double majored in business management and entrepreneurship. During my time there, I only had one internship. I wanted to follow my passions, and sports was my passion at the time.

I was able to obtain an internship with the San Diego Padres in their corporate partnerships department. I had a great experience and got to go to a lot of baseball games. But when I was thinking about my future, I ultimately did not see sports as a business venture for me.

So when I graduated, I shifted my focus to looking for jobs in sales. I landed at a startup called Business Talent Group, which focused on sourcing projects for independent consultants. I spent two years there, and during that time, I really got to learn how to navigate tough business conversations and build relationships in the workplace.

I also garnered interest in consulting in general and the type of work that the consultants were doing. At one point, I said to myself, "I'm really interested in trying to do that work myself instead of selling it." So I started to look for jobs at consulting firms.

That's when I landed at PricewaterhouseCoopers. When I joined, they said, "Hey, you have great experience in sales. You should focus on the Go-to-market strategy part of our practice." At PwC, I was able to get exposure to some of the world's largest technology companies in a variety of different functions, but primarily focused on Go-to-market strategy.

The projects in consulting were always very fast-paced and ambiguous, and that made learning come naturally. You're forced to learn when things are so complex and fast-paced. At one point, I started to shift my project focus in subject matter area to what we call "lead to cash." This is typically a fancy way of saying or summarizing a company's business processes and systems that go into its go-to market functions, from marketing to finance.

I'd say 90% of my work was in that area. We would go into companies and do assessments of their lead to cash business processes as well as systems. At one point, I was approached by a director at PwC with an opportunity to do a lead to cash assessment at Google. Google was a client that I always coveted and wanted to work for.

I went on to do a few different projects at Google. On my last project, I really jived well with my client. They said, "Hey, like, you do this, would you be interested in applying?" I went through the interview process with Google and was able to leverage my experience there as a consultant to successfully navigate it. After almost six months of interviewing, I landed a job at Google, which brought me where I'm at today as a program manager for our mergers and acquisitions integration team.