Career Path of a Product Marketing Manager at Walmart

I've been working for a long time, so there's a lot of history. In college, I studied hospitality, specifically hotel management at Cornell.

At that time, I was really exploring my interests. My first internship was at a restaurant in New York called Tribeca Grill, which is part of a restaurant group. They called it an internship, but I was actually a hostess. I realized then that I wasn't very good at the operational side.

So, my next internship was at a hotel development company in Hong Kong. After that, I worked for another hotel development company, a consulting firm, in New York.

I graduated around the financial recession in 2010. I was initially looking for jobs in hotel development and consulting, but the travel industry was decimated, and there were very few jobs available. I also wanted to take some time off.

I took a year off to teach English in Japan through the JET program, which was a really cool experience. Afterward, I felt like I was still soul-searching and didn't quite know what I wanted to do. However, I knew my degree was in hospitality.

I relied on my hotel network, the Cornell Hotel Network, to find a job. I found a position at a wine distributor because many Cornell Hotel alumni worked there in business analytics. Honestly, I was still very new and didn't really know what I was doing then.

I knew I wanted to work for a larger company. Through Cornell's network again, I found a job at Expedia and was able to relocate to Hawaii, which was something I wanted to do to try something new. I worked at Expedia as a market manager for a year.

That was sort of the beginning of my career where I took it more seriously and had more direction. I knew I was still interested in travel, but I had a sense that my strengths were more on the strategy and pricing side.

While at Expedia, I met many revenue managers who worked as pricing strategists for hotels, and I became very interested in that. I also wanted to return to New York. So, I talked to many other revenue managers.

Through networking, I found a job in revenue management at a boutique hotel company called Dham. This was a formative experience for me. I learned a lot of business skills, like how to manage a P&L, work with marketing, sales, and finance, and really run a business. This felt like the beginning of my growth.

I worked there for three or four years. After all those years in hospitality, I questioned if I wanted to do it for the rest of my life, so I went back to business school to explore different things. I initially thought I wanted to go into brand management because it was similar to revenue management for hotels, with P&L ownership.

I tried CPGs, consumer package goods, for brand management. I liked the role, but I found that the companies or the industry were not a good fit for me. So, I decided I still wanted to focus on marketing strategy.

I then joined Adobe, an amazing tech company, and worked in experience for five years. Now, I'm finally in product marketing, which is what I've always wanted to do. I've finally gotten my foot in the door.

I now work for Walmart's tech incubator, Store No. 8, doing product marketing. That was a long answer.