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Christian
Guillermo

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Internship Description

Christian Guillermo, ’19BUS, interned at Critical Ideas, Inc., doing business as Chipper Cash, a venture-backed early-stage financial technology company that aims to make Africans more financially-included, and offer a more affordable, reliable and secure money transfer platform for Africans. As a Product and Business Intern, he led the initiative on the rollout and adoption of Chipper Cash’s new product, Chipper Checkout, a merchant-focused consumer-to-business payments product. He also performed data analysis techniques on both quantitative and qualitative feedback of Chipper Checkout’s product performance. With insights from the data analysis, Christian provided Chipper Cash’s founding team with recommendations on how to improve and further optimize the product.

Personal Essay

My summer internship was a product management (PM) internship. As a PM intern, I oversaw the product, which is a modern pan-African mobile payments app that aims to make Africans more financially-included, and offer a more affordable, reliable and secure money transfer platform for Africans. I did so by being at the intersection of business, tech and design. Thus, I worked on several diverse projects such as:

  • Business Analytics: Extracting and transforming raw data into actionable business insights and strategies using SQL, Python and Amplitude.
  • Strategy Formulation and Implementation: Insights gained from the analytics allowed me to develop creative and logical solutions to product-related problems. Such solution recommendations guided the direction and prioritization of the growth, brand/marketing, customer support/operations, user interface design, and software development teams.
  • New Product Launch: Identifying and implementing key functional and user interface design features for a new product recently launched, called Chipper Airtime, that allows users to purchase mobile top-up at the most affordable prices compared to ones being offered elsewhere in the market.
  • New Product Development: Leading the product development of a new product called Chipper Checkout, a merchant-focused consumer-to-business payment product, by:
  • Defining both the consumer and merchant personas to identify groups of people who would be interested to use the new product;
  • Working cross-functionally with brand/marketing to develop one-pager advertisements to be used when reaching out to prospective merchants;
  • Developing the Product Requirements Document that details the product features that the software development team should build.

Such projects fit well with the organization’s mission because such product improvements and optimizations would make the payments experience even more seamless, secure, swift and simple for the Africans.

Back when I was in business school, I took several technology-related business courses, both technical and non-technical, such as:

  • Business Analytics I taught by Santiago Balseiro
  • Introduction to Product Management taught by Paul Canetti
  • Introduction to User Experience taught by Paul Canetti
  • Introduction to Programming Using Python taught by Mattan Griffel
  • Introduction to Programming in R taught by Mattan Griffel

My background in performing data analysis using both Python and R helped me in performing the analytics-related projects in my internship. Such courses developed my intuition on which aspects of the data are relevant and important in producing the insights I would like to gain. I was also able to apply the lessons in my product management and user experience courses in overseeing, optimizing and improving the product.

The challenges I faced are the following:

  • Remote teams: We have teams or team members that are based in California, New York, Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa. I honestly felt that the differences in time zone made implementing work initiatives immediately challenging. For example, by the time I accomplish something, that is ready for immediate implementation in Africa, at around 3 or 4 pm ET on a Friday afternoon here in New York, that would have been 11 pm in Nairobi already, and nobody was expected to implement such initiatives at that time. Thus, such initiatives would have to wait until Monday morning Nairobi time, unless some people decide to work on them during the weekends.
  • Lack of prior SQL background: My internship truly developed further my technical analytics skills. Prior to my internship, I did not have any background in the programming language, SQL. I am still thankful, though, for having some background in both Python and R, because it helped me learn SQL much easier. There are many similarities in the syntaxes of Python and R with that of SQL. Thus, the learning curve was not as steep. Of course, I still would have preferred taking Mattan Griffel’s course on SQL called Introduction to Databases for Business Analytics. Now, I am truly confident and comfortable with performing complicated SQL lines of code to come up with the best insights to solve problems.
  • Very small teams: For example, if the software development team were larger, then, together, we would have been faster in implementing new product features and improving on the existing product. Such a small team meant that people had to make tough prioritization decisions on tasks, putting some tasks, which were felt less important and urgent, on the backlog.

    • My career goal, ever since I was in business school, has always been to transition to a career in tech. It was the main reason why I took technology-related business courses and took an active leadership role in the business school’s Technology Business Group. This internship experience truly enhanced further my passion for technology. Also, being able to provide the relatively young company many creative, strategic and logical solutions to the product-related problems was truly an incredible opportunity. And, I am happy to announce that the company eventually extended a full-time job offer because of the work I have done during my internship. I am excited to sign the offer and continue working for the company as a full-time Product Manager.