Hey everyone! My name is Juan Sebastian Zapata and I am a 2nd year at UCLA Anderson, Class of 2021 (time sure goes by fast!). I was born in Pereira, Colombia and moved to Summit, NJ when I was 8 years old, quite the cultural change but I loved every minute of living right outside of NYC. After graduating from Davidson College in 2012, I began my career in international consulting where I constructed market analysis reports aiding clients in the retail and manufacturing space develop strategic initiatives in new markets. After two years of consulting, I joined Privia Health, a healthcare start-up in D.C. assisting private practices succeed in value-based care insurance contracts, as employ 37. While at Privia I supported the launch of four new markets across the US, led a complete overhaul of their CRM and sales compensation packages, and managed multiple cross functional teams. In my last role, within the New Product Development Team, I oversaw the planning, development, and build of Privia’s Telehealth service line, this year long project allowed me to collaborate with all departments in order to establish a financially healthy service line that patients could utilize 24/7 (think of it as a virtual urgent care clinic).
With the support of Parker, I landed my dream internship as a Senior Product Manager for Amazon. I was part of a small but mighty team called the Payment Access Innovation team that is tasked to develop new payment access methods to all global customers that do not have an international debit or credit card to make payments (about 80% of the world population!). While I was unable to spend time in Seattle with my team, I loved every minute of my experience and learned so much in just 12 weeks. Although every day was VERY different, here is what I aimed to accomplish:
7:00am – Wake up and catch-up on emails with coffee. Since I was on such a globally focused team, even though I may have been sleeping, the rest of our stakeholders had been working all day and as a PM they needed my guidance on certain next steps for my project.
9:00am – Status report meeting on Project Paycode for country launch (when launches are made, we go country by country to be sure that everything is working smoothly and all stakeholders within that country are also in the loop)
11am to 1pm – Our team has established a daily two hour no meeting block to make sure we have time to be with family (some members had kids at home), do chores away from the computer, or just take a minute to breathe. I took advantage of this time two hour block to workout, run outside, and make lunch.
1 pm – Team daily standup. This was time for our team to do status report check-ins with our manager to see how things are going. I loved this as it allowed me to connect with everyone on my team on a daily basis and learn about how their projects were going. We also took the time to seek new perspectives if we were hitting roadblocks on our projects.
2pm to 4pm – Stakeholder calls. Since my project involved the launch of a new payment method within new countries, there were a lot of moving pieces and I leveraged by intern status to connect via phone calls with as many stakeholders as possible to make sure they understand what their deliverables were and that all pieces were moving smoothly. These calls also gave me the opportunity to expand my network at Amazon and learn more about the company culture.
5 pm – End of day call with Amazon buddy, mentor, or manager. I made sure to frequently connect with those individuals that ultimately made my full time hiring decision to make sure they were aware of where my project was and to be sure I received constant feedback on my performance. I didn’t want any surprises at the end of my 12 weeks.
8 pm – Complete to do list and send out emails with request for international team members so that they were able to complete tasks during their working hours.
9 pm – Amazon university. Amazon has incredible resources for employers on how to become a better Project Manager, how to work with international stakeholders, how to work backwards from the customers, etc. I would take an hour each day to do one of these modules or watch videos from leaders to see how I could continue to grow.
10 pm - Bedtime
ABOUT JUAN:
- Hometown: Summit, NJ
- Undergraduate Studies: Sociology, Davidson College
- Pre-Anderson: Manager, Strategy & Innovation, Privia Health
- MBA Summer Internship: Product Manager – Amazon
- Post-MBA Goals: Product Management/Strategy – Healthcare/Technology
- Leadership@Anderson: President – Admissions Ambassador Corps, VP of Strategic Partnerships - Healthcare Business Association, VP of Admissions - Out @ Anderson, VP of Social – Alliance for Latinx Management at Anderson,
- Activities@Anderson: Board Fellows, Wine Club, Outdoor Adventure Club, Women’s Business Connection Ally
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