hi Danielle we're so excited to have you on today's episode and to learn more about your career Journey so thank you so much for being here it's lovely to meet you lovely to meet you too and I'm so happy to be here as well thanks so much for having me of course I'm going to jump right into our first question for you Danielle so we're really intrigued by your career journey and your professional growth let's start from the very beginning how did your past experience and education at Ivy pave the way and lead you to
your present position as a product Partnerships manager at grammarly yeah and maybe I'll explain a little bit about what product Partnerships is and then work my way backwards a bit in my role of product Partnerships the way I explain it to folks who are kind of outside of the industry outside of maybe even Tech is with an example that I think everyone can relate to you have your your iPhone or you have your Android phone and your phone does some stuff on its own it has the hardware but it's really like all the different software
applications that give you the value of the phone whether you're sending a message on Facebook or posting something on Instagram or using the map app to get to where you need to go it's those apps and Integrations that actually provide you with functions for your phone to work on the product partnership side I work with apps but for businesso business or B2B software applications so I work on integrating and creating product ecosystems for these B2B software companies so that the customers that are using the the these software can do more with the product can connect
the the product to other applications that they're using and overall be more productive be more efficient be more effective in the different workflows that they're they're creating so that's like what product Partnerships is or how I describe it to be and how I got here is interesting from my time at at at business school at IV and University it goes one step earlier in in high school where I completed a youth entrepreneurship program called Junior Achievement program is about getting a bunch of high school students together to start a entrepreneurial venture start a business from
scratch so new product marketing it selling it into the community doing financial reporting everything that it takes to get a business up and started and that's what really opened my eyes to the world of business my role at the company was the the Vice President of Sales so I got exposed to like the business development world as well through this program and that was a formative experience that even led me to pursue the IV business school pursue a business education and then you know from there get connected within the tech space and one thing led
to another the rest is history from there awesome yeah it's great to hear that backstory to see how you got to where you are now and it's also great to have some context for what exactly product Partnerships is it can be a little unclear at times so thank you for clarifying that reflecting more on your current role how does your journey differ from your initial expectations did you always anticipate pursuing this specific career path or did your Ambitions evolve along the way yeah I think this is a great question because I didn't even know that
Partnerships existed as a function and product Partnerships is not the only function within the tech world or the business world there's Channel Partnerships there's all different source of of parnish but I really didn't know anything about that certainly did not anticipate this specific career path I would say my expectations definitely changed and evolved in my first two years of my undergraduate degree I was studying actually sociology before the IV Business program and um I was really keen on social justice and even entering IV I thought that that was going to be the path I would
take maybe like nonprofit management or something in the public sector on like the more business and administrative side I was really involved in things like the nonprofit Club at Ivy I did the sustainability program I did the community Consulting program which was a pro bono Consulting project for a nonprofit in the community so I really was going deep down that path until I got exposed from one of my mentors to the tech industry and she had just started a sales position at Shopify which would have been my first business job she spoke so highly about
the team there the company there where the company was going and she recommended that I check them out and I took her advice I checked them out I I started speaking with the team there and what I learned was that this is another industry that is rapidly creating change in in the world this is a an industry that is creating a lot of different solutions a lot of different ways for people to do business better in a really rapid pace and as much as uh I was still drawn to the nonprofit sector public sector uh
I uh I felt the pace that I was looking for was something a bit quicker so still very much involved in nonprofits and and social Enterprises and and different things like that but more kind of in a like volunteerism way versus what I do for my day-to-day work to to sum it all up it was very different from what I expected I would end up doing um and I'm really glad that I kept an open mind and kept keeping in touch with my mentors learning from them having them help me open up their Network to
me and and benefiting from some of the experiences of folks who are you know a couple years ahead of me and uh maybe had similar interests similar goals to me and and being able to see their journey and and use it to inform what path I wanted to take yeah definitely I really think it's important to emphasize that what you might expect for yourself in your career path isn't always exactly where you end up but that can be a great thing and as you said staying open-minded and seeing all of those other career paths can
be really helpful so I love that you touched on that so thank you you've also worked as a product Partnerships manager for Shopify as well as a team lead for partner management at zap year so I would love to know what your energy drivers are within these roles and additionally whether there are any energy drainers that you've personally identified for yourself for sure so on the energy driver side of things something that I've really enjoyed about my time in Partnerships is that not only do you become an expert at the companies that you're a part
of so at Shopify that was you know the e-commerce space and what we were building there at zapier that was software automation now being at grammarly they work on communication assistance so got got to get expertise on those particular companies but also you get to gain expertise and meet people when you're working with different companies as well so at Shopify I I was not only getting an expertise on the the e-commerce spacee but I was working really close with a lot of advertising platforms so this is folks like Pinterest and Snapchat Microsoft ads even got
exposure to to Google and and Facebook's um ecosystems as well which really allowed me to have a breath of different experiences and zapier in the software automation space they partner with every single software company out there so I got to work with folks that were building project management tools team communication tools like slack every single business software type of tool imaginable and then now being at grammarly we're kind of building things from scratch and learning about a lot of different areas as well so that is something that has always driven me another energy driver for
me is like those quick wins celebrating those little moments along the way product Partners have a lot of different phases to to to the project so going from like that early research phase who should we partner with what should we build then actually approaching the partner and understanding if there's an opportunity there maybe doing some negotiation actually then going to build and launch it and grow the application grow integration and there's so many different steps along the way to take you to that launch moment so you can't just be motiv like for me I can't
just be motivated by the launch modone I also have to be motivated like of all the little steps along the way like oh that was a great partner meeting like this was what was so great about it this is like a moment to celebrate those little things really do kind of excite me those little moments of progress along the way keep me really motivated on the energy Jers side of things in Partnerships I mentioned all the different phases of projects that we work on and not only are you working with one partner at a time
but you're working with maybe five 10 20 upwards from that as well each partner could be at a different phase in the kind of partner life cycle if you will so what that means is that there's a lot of moving parts and this is exciting because there's always different things to work on but it also Al means that you have to be really organized you have to have like good systems in place to track everything good documentation to even just remind yourself of what's going on let alone communicating it with with the rest of your
team and keeping everyone else informed and on track so for me the energy trainer is when there's a gap in operational excellence and maybe not the right systems and tools in place to keep me on track and keep everything moving forward because I want to spend my time doing the tough stuff those tough conversations or that really deep thinking strategic thinking and deep work I want to spend less time doing admin stuff so that's would be one of my main energy drainers yeah definitely that's awesome that you've been able to identify those positive aspects of
your work and then some that might not be geared to sort of fill your energy and drive you throughout the day but I love that as you mentioned throughout your entire sort of role there's those mini moments that you're able to celebrate that get you excited I think that's really important for everyone and I do think that energy drivers and drainers are unique to whoever is fulfilling that role so it's really important to try and maximize the drivers and obviously minimize the drainers so that's amazing yeah so another thing I'd love to ask you Danielle
are there any misconceptions you might have had before you had experience in the industry and is there anything you think should be discussed more in regards to product partnership management yeah I think one thing that should be discussed more is that partner ships is a really viable career path for business majors especially if you're considering like a generalist program like an IV like a queen's Commerce or other generalist programs Partnerships in general has a lot of different skills that are involved to to being successful there's the communication aspect there's the sales aspect strategy product and
being product minded I think a lot of people who are maybe more techsavvy or interested in that space think to product management which is another great field for for generalist business majors but Partnerships should also especially the product partnership side should also be very much considered there too so I think a lot of folks who are maybe in that mindset maybe in in school studying wanting to try something that has a lot of breath they might look to Consulting as a path management consulting which absolutely will provide a lot of bread of experiences as as
well but there are other paths as well to getting a generalist experience too so partnership should not be ignored on on that front I will say though that it's not going to necessarily be a place that you land from looking at the jobs that are posted on your school's career portal especially for breaking into the the space probably hidden job market for my first couple roles in Tech I never actually applied to a specific job for for my first role which would have been at Shopify it was all through referrals or networking within the company
to to land my my first and next opportunities there so that's going to require a little bit more creativity potentially to break into as a new grad or as as a student looking for an internship one other misconception I'll share is confusing Partnerships with sales and depending on the company depending on the role there might be some overlap or a ton of overlap but Partnerships at least the way my career has taken me has not been a sales role sales is another really great viable profession for business gr that I think is is often overlooked
for U marketing or accounting or or other types of functions sales can be a very lucrative career path too but it's not the same thing as Partnerships just a different motion different function as well um although there again might be some overlap there so if you're thinking of fields that require good communication skills maybe influencing skills definitely consider both but also understand the differences between the two functions yeah that's definitely great to point out I think especially the first point you mentioned people can sort of get tunnel vision in a business degree with just a
Consulting opportunities but it's really important to expand and to look outside of that so I really like that you mention that and I also have another question for you so what are some key skills that you have developed while working in this role or previous ones that you believe are crucial to sort of succeeding as a product Partnerships manager and how would you recommend young individuals go about home in on those skills yeah I've mentioned it a couple times so far but communication skills are really important both from a written communication being able to create
documents and briefs formal presentations like walking through a traditional slide deck as well as more informal just meeting facilitation owning an agenda driving it bringing different folks together and facilitating a productive conversation and the way I recommend for folks students or new grads to actually engage in that skill is just to like take on a lot of different opportunities I was constantly participating in public speaking competitions business case competitions different opportunities for me to practice just being in front of people and and talking and it's very nerve-wracking so I I totally get why it might
be not your first choice of something to do outside of your classes or outside of your extra cuties have going on but the more you do it the more you get comfortable with it and it really does help in building up your confidence if nothing else to be in front of an audience and be driving different conversations forward so that's one key skill is the communication skill another key skill and this helped me early on in my career and I think it would be helpful for others who are just starting off their career is being
a self-starter I went into this rule not knowing a ton about the the tech industry not knowing a ton about Partnerships of course you're new to the the space and these are not things that are really at this point taught too much in classes it is a lot of on the job learning that's changing I have some professors that I keep in touch with who are adding different things to their curriculum which they're amazing but this is generally a very new discipline that I became a part of so one thing that I did was just
finding different ways to add value in ways that I could maybe I wasn't the biggest expert on different topics early in my career but I was able to do things like plan A Team social event or organize the team's Google Drive and just different things that would maybe folks didn't have time to do or wanted to do but just didn't have the capacity for that was areas that I put my hand up quickly executed at off the side of my desk along with the other projects that had going on and was able to contribute to
the team culture contribute to the team's productivity one of the things that in my first job and my time at Shopify I ended up becoming the de facto team partner Ops person even though that was outside of my job description we didn't and end up needing a operations person because I was kind of running the show there so those two areas communication and self-starting and taking initiative are some key success factors for starting off in in a partnership's role yeah definitely I think it's really important all of those points that you covered on especially a
lot of cases when you're starting a new career it's very easy to feel like you don't know anything in comparison to people working above you and it's important to know that there's lots of different ways to add value when you're in that position and additionally I think it's really inspiring that you were so involved in so many different sort of extracurriculars outside of school even though they might have been nerve-wracking as you mentioned I do agree with you that it's the best way to sort of grow yourself and to get practice in a lot of
important aspects so I think our listeners will really benefit from that so I have one more question for you Danielle so if given the opportunity what's something that you feel you would have done differently in your career path and what advice do you wish someone had given to you at a young age yeah the one thing that I wish I did differently specifically going back to my my time in high school is I wish I asked for help more I thought I knew what I was doing I thought I had things figured out I was
humbled super quickly we talked a lot about the IV Business program and folks who are approaching that program will know how competitive it it was I did not get in my first try totally failed my my first time applying in high school and it was completely from an written application standpoint if I asked for help if I asked someone to read my essays for me give me feedback if I asked what worked for them for in their essays I would have completely avoided this misstep and just such a Miss opportunity at that point and I
learned really quickly that folks who have done the things that I want to do folks that are on path that I want to be on have more information than I do and I can benefit from that information so definitely would have asked for more help during that phase of my life and in terms of advice that I wish I would have gotten or that I would give to to someone else at that phase is you won't know what you do until you try something um you know we you talked about those different types of competitions
being the the best way to grow yourself you might try that and you might hate it and that's okay try something else there there might be something else interesting that resonates with you that you might say hey this was challenging but I actually want to do more of it so I really so happy to see folks who are listening to this podcast exposing themselves to different career paths being a part of the illuminate Universe community and program is such a great way to expose yourself to a lot of different things so um if you're here
you're probably already doing that so keep on doing it and the last piece of advice and we touched on this theme earlier as I was walking through my career path as well is that being open-minded doors will open very suddenly and unexpectedly and they might close very quickly as well so you have to be ready to enter an open door if it opens up and being ready might mean different things for different people maybe that means having your resume always up to date maybe it means having your interview skills sharpened up maybe the for the
key questions strengths and weaknesses tell me about yourself the classic ones so just being ready to present yourself in a way you feel good about for an opportunity should it come its way has really helped me in my my career in those moments where I was presented with something that I wasn't expecting or that I didn't plan for and being able to actually move forward and grab the opportunity and make the most out of it so I wish everyone who's listening to this podcast whether they're a student or new grad or in high school not
in University yet I wish so much good luck lots of Bright Futures ahead there's so much great knowledge shared and all the different podcasts that are are posted on on the site so hope you find what you're looking for hope you find a nugget or two in this conversation that inspires you or encourages you to look into something new of course thank you so much Danielle I'm sure that our podcast listeners Are One Step Closer now thanks to you to finding what they're looking for and I really appreciated everything you've shared today I think you
have a wealth of wisdom and it's really kind of you to share it with the listeners and thank you so much for being a guest today on the cast as I mentioned our listeners are at the prime age to soak in all of this knowledge so I think it'll be really beneficial and we really have appreciated your time oh my pleasure anytime of course
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