How I Spent My Summer: Sonal Shenoy '26, Google PgM Intern

By: Sonal Shenoy “Is the campus cool?”

“Are people really as nice as they say?”

“So do you really end up on calls with 100+ people?”

“How did you end up there?”

Are all questions I hope to answer through this piece about my summer as a Technical Program Manager (TPgM) at Google this past summer. Read on  to learn more about my time on the Google Home team, building an AI voice assistant.

But first, let me introduce myself.

Shonal Shoney (center, white glasses)

I’m Sonal, a 2Y MBA (now in my second year!) from Bangalore, India. I’ve been working with startups ever since I graduated university, and have been in roles across Marketing, Business Development, Operations, Product, Go-To-Market (GTM), and anything else non-technical that needed to be done. At my last pre-Kellogg company, a B2B SaaS startup building AI-first tools for small businesses, I was a founding member leading Product and GTM . I led our acquisition of the first $1M ARR right before I got my admit to Kellogg. It was a busy year! My goal in attending Kellogg was to experience how things play out at scale, using it as a forum to pivot out of startups and into big tech. Little did I imagine ending up at the epitome of what scale looks like–Google.

First thoughts–what was it like?

Arriving at the Mountain View office on my first day, I was stunned at the bubble Google had created in this “campus” the size of a little town. I had worked in single-room startup offices right before this—I was truly out of my element! At the Google Home building, I went hunting for my desk and my team who, to my relief, turned out to be the nicest people. My manager was warm, grounded, and took the time to talk me through the team’s priorities and areas where I could potentially make an impact.

The first day set the tone—I met a flurry of cross-functional teams and was also hit by a tsunami of acronyms that are probably super-specific to Google. Seriously, this is one of the many quirks that makes Google the fun workplace it is.

As a TPgM, your job is to make sure that PMs and Engineers are all working on the right things at the right time, and that they have what they need to do so. But before I could “do,” I needed to deeply understand the “how” and “why.” Most of my projects were classic MBA Intern territory: high-level, vaguely defined problems with unclear ownership boundaries. The kind of ask where, if you’re not careful, you either duplicate someone else’s work or miss crucial details. I spent the first week listening, mapping, and working closely with my team to shape the scope into something actionable. These internships are rarely plug-and-play. You don’t get handed a neatly wrapped project on Day 1, you carve it out. That ambiguity was intimidating at first, but it turned out to be the part I enjoyed most.

So, what did I really do this summer?

I was lucky to have a manager who operated with a very “I trust you to figure this out” mindset—which meant I had the freedom to explore, as well as opportunity to volunteer for things I wanted to learn more about. He honestly tried to make my internship as well-rounded as he could, and kept sending an assortment of mini and mega projects my way. Instead of one clearly scoped, ready-to-run-with project, I had a few initiatives that took up 12 weeks—some of which are still ongoing. Here’s a quick peek (in the vaguest wording possible, because NDAs are real):

• Project 1: Playbook for actioning user feedback

  
  

My first project focused on making the development process more iterative by listening to the feedback users were providing us—not just bugs, but feedback on what features might make the product more valuable, or what UX traits annoyed users. We already had surveys to collect this data but it was my job to make sure this data could become actionable by centralizing it, creating processes around evaluating it and then documenting feature requests for the future.

• Project 2: Launch-readiness

Next, I started working on ensuring that we were getting ready for launch—had we started getting approvals from Legal and Security? What about the AI Safety aspects? Bringing all these pieces together, I started getting teams to check things off their list in parallel to their development process so that we wouldn’t be held up by last-minute approval gates. I must have spoken to almost 100 people across business units at Google for this project.

• Project 3: TPM for user setup flows

Finally, my manager took a bet on me and asked me to shepherd the buildout and revamp of our OOBE and Settings flows—easier said than done, considering this involved several dependencies and complications in the code. This is a classic example of a meeting invite that initially had four people but got circulated around and ended up with 25.

Did my background help?

In some ways it did. Internships are short—10 to 12 weeks go by in a flash! If you want to make a real dent, you don’t have the luxury of waiting around for instructions. Thankfully, six years in early-stage startups trained me to work with ambiguity and partial information. I’ve learned how to move forward with a rough hypothesis, then refine the approach as more context emerges. My manager even called this out a few times, saying he appreciated that I didn’t wait to be told what to do, but just dove in.

That said, my background wasn’t all upside. I’m used to a faster pace and fewer layers, so things like process-heavy approvals or long paper trails (while clearly necessary at this scale) tested my patience. And I’m someone who naturally craves deep ownership—which, as an intern, is understandably limited.

What’s next for me?

The summer confirmed a few things about the kind of roles and companies I’d like to work with. I know now that:

• I like working cross-functionally: Being able to get the perspectives of not just engineers, but also PMs, UX designers, and researchers has been enriching for me. I enjoy learning from others.

• Tech is where I want to end up: The culture at Google was great—respectful and friendly while at the same time, encouraging open questions and room for disagreement. (Hard to find culture like this in investment banking or legacy corporate!)

Recruiting for Tech: Fav Resources?

• Job-Hunting: Linkedin, Company’s career sites (kept it pretty simple)

• Interview Prep: Blogs by ex-recruiters like IGotAnOffer have some great resources for the kind of questions you may be asked in a behavioral interview.

• Case Prep: Exponent (which Kellogg gives us access to) is great for casing.

• Other: I used ChatGPT extensively to help me with generating both, a list of questions as well as cases, and then for brainstorming answers to these.

Final Thoughts

Good lessons from the internship?

• Don’t be afraid to ASK—there is no stupid question. Companies onboard new employees every day, and if everyone hesitated to ask, no one would know anything.

• Document action items carefully—whether that’s your action items or someone else’s, hold each other accountable on paper.

• Finally, don’t shy away from responsibility if that’s what you crave. It can be hard to feel ownership when there’s 100K people in the company, but if you can even feel a sliver of it, that makes a huge difference to the way you perceive your job.

Have more questions? Google Chat me. Just kidding—my Kellogg Slack works too.

Read how other Kellogg students spent their summers:

Mafer Bohorquez, Boston Consulting Group Drew Kollmeyer, Molson Coors