MBA Student

Entrepreneurship and Product Management Classes

While Kellogg has a broad core curriculum, I've chosen to take many electives focused on entrepreneurship and product management.

My entrepreneurship classes have focused intensively on making sure that I know who my target customer is, and how to help them. I've gone deep into the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, using it to interview real customers on behalf of real startups that partnered with Kellogg, as well as potential customers for potential startups that we explored through class projects.

My product management classes taught me the core competencies that product managers need to succeed, including setting product strategy, creating roadmaps, evaluating problems and solutions, and stakeholder management.

Marketing Classes

I am a marketing major at Kellogg, where I've learned how to connect customer insights to create marketing strategy and creative execution. I've done everything from writing surveys and analyzing survey data in R, to writing positioning statements, creating growth strategies, writing creative briefs, and building brands from scratch. I especially enjoy taking what I learn about customers to shape how these products show up in the world.

Culture-Building Classes

I've seen first-hand how impactful a strong culture can be for both the success of the business and job satisfaction. Because of that, I chose to invest time at Kellogg into learning what makes workplace cultures healthy, and how to help when they're not.

In these classes, we covered topics like how to design organizations to meet business goals, how to engender teams with psychological safety, how to run meetings for maximum impact in minimal time, and how to increase creativity and innovations in teams.

Project 1: Creating a GTM plan for AI startup HIDENN-AI

In my Commercializing Innovations class, we learned how to take scientific innovation and bring it to market. I, along with two other Kellogg students, worked with startup HIDENN-AI to create their GTM plan.

HIDENN-AI was created by scientists at Northwestern to reduce the runtime of engineering simulations from days to minutes. When we started working with them, they had developed the theory for the technology and were working on building it out. They also had some ideas about who their customers would be and a rough idea of how they fit into the broader engineering simulation ecosystem, but they hadn't gone much further than that.

Our team completed a market analysis for them, including calculating the TAM and identifying their major competitors. We sourced and interviewed potential customers from Nike, Apple, Medtronic, and Ansys to understand their use cases, current workflows, and who the decision-makers were in their companies. We also created projected costs and milestones.

Once we'd finished, we compiled it into one comprehensive GTM plan. Unfortunately that plan is confidential, and while I can't share the specifics, I encourage you to check out HIDENN-AI's website to learn more about them.

Project 2: Creating a PRD/Pitch Deck for Neutrino

In my Product Management 101 class, we chose products we wanted to build and went through the process of creating a PRD, including a market evaluation, customer interviews, creating customer personas, and making low-fidelity mock-ups. My final deliverables were a comprehensive PRD and a pitch deck.

I chose to work on a product I named Neutrino. As a science enthusiast, I've often found that science content is either created for scientists or the general public, and is typically either too advanced or too simple for me. Neutrino provides science enthusiasts with interactive content at their level.

Deliverables:

While I am not currently planning on taking this to market, I am currently working on building it with the help of Claude Code. Coming soon!

Project 3: Creating a Brand from Scratch

In my Startup Branding class, we were placed in teams of five students and were told to create a brand for a fictional CPG brand that produced a high-fiber product. My team conducted research to determine market segments that would be especially receptive to a high-fiber product, and we found that Latin American immigrants in the US typically switch from a high-fiber diet in their native country to a low-fiber diet in the US (Manous et al., 2008, Van Hook et al., 2017). For Mexican immigrants particularly, this has been partially linked to diabetes prevalence, which increases drastically for the 10 years following immigration and doubles within 2 generations of immigrating (source).

We created a Brand Strategy Brief, where we evaluated our target customer, our competition, and our brand purpose, values, personality, and emotions.

Using the Brand Strategy Brief as our guide, we created a brand name, logo, and a mood board to help guide the creation of other brand assets. We compiled all of our work into a pitch deck (available below).

Project 4: Creating a Storyboard from a Creative Brief

In my Advertising Strategy Class, we formed teams of four to write the creative brief for a fictional campaign, based on a real company. We then traded creative briefs with another team, and used the brief we were given to create a six-panel storyboard for a 30-second ad.

We were given a creative brief that a team had created for IHOP, where they wanted to encourage college students to make IHOP their late-night restaurant of choice. We came up with the slogan "IHOP: It Happens Over Pancakes", and made a storyboard showing college students having important college experiences during late-night IHOP trips.

Classmates then voted on their favorite storyboards, and ours took third place.