Celebrating the Amazing Work of Our 2021 Interns

We had a wonderful summer as interns at Catchpoint. Our time together has now come to an end, but before we completed our journey, we were given the exciting opportunity to present our work to our managers and the executive team. Each of us - in different fields - worked on many projects throughout our summer here.

Fun fact: The Catchpoint internship program started in 2009 when the company was being run out of the apartment of Dritan Suljoti, our co-founder and CTO.

In our own words, here’s a short overview of what we each presented to summarize our summers at Catchpoint.

Amina Jaffer, Marketing Intern

During my time here at Catchpoint, I have been able to dip into many different areas of Marketing. I learned about display ad copywriting, which was very new to me. I was also lucky to be given the opportunity to write a blog introducing my class of interns and now tell you in this blog about how hard we have all worked to learn and contribute to Catchpoint in a meaningful way.

This summer, I also worked on many of Catchpoint’s landing pages, including helping to put together information about the How-To video tutorials on different features and capabilities that some of my fellow Catchpointers regularly put together. Additionally, I worked on updating workflows on our website and making sure all the landing pages were relevant to our customers! Finally, I’ve worked on other little things here and there to make things easier for everyone else on my team.

The highlight of my time at Catchpoint would have to be meeting so many wonderful people and being able to work with them every day. I wanted to give a special thanks to a couple of people, but then I realized this blog would go on forever if I listed everyone. So, to Maria, Holly, Anna, Peter B., and Peter M. - thank you all for all the time you have spent helping me and thank you for the opportunity to work with each of you!

Zari Page, People Operations Intern

During my time at Catchpoint, I have been able to work on a couple different projects, which included building out sales onboarding within Catchpoint’s Learning Management System (LMS), creating content for new hires, redesigning the Learning and Development site on SharePoint, and developing plans for employee programs and groups.

As for tasks, I’ve sourced candidates for open positions, planned and hosted organization-wide events, completed executive reports, and assisted in developing enhanced benefits for remote employees.

I would say that the highlight of my internship was being able to work hands-on in the field that I am passionate about: Human Resources! Working in many different areas of HR and beside people in different HR roles has helped me to get a better understanding of where I best fit in this field. I feel more equipped to begin my career and I look forward to seeing what doors will open for me with the help of everything I’ve learned as a Catchpoint intern!

Lars Chiang, Front-End Engineering Intern

During this internship, I worked on User Role and User Role Details pages in the new stack, and the code that will be merged into production. I’ve worked on both the front end (client-side) and the back end (server-side).  For the front end, I added new features to the existing components and added some new components which could be reused in the future. For the back end, I created new queries/mutations for selecting, inserting, updating, and deleting user role data.

The highlight of this internship for me was being able to be so hands-on in my work. It’s exciting that, having been able to build the user role page in the new stack, it will be merged into production, and you will all be able to see it in the next release!

Will Long, Back-End Engineering Intern

During my time at Catchpoint, I’ve worked on three main projects. The first two have to do with data storage and aggregation, and the last has to do with reporting delays in information transmission between different parts of Catchpoint’s architecture.

The first project I worked on was implementing a data structure called a t-digest, which attempts to estimate a distribution of data, particularly maintaining accuracy at tail percentiles. The second project was a mechanism for estimating the number of unique elements in cross-partition queries. Finally, the third project is a mechanism to report latency in data transmission between Log Servers and Log Accumulators in Catchpoint’s system architecture.

I am very satisfied to say that both the second and third projects will be used in Catchpoint’s product; one of my goals for this internship was to write production code. Finally, I feel that these projects adequately fulfilled my desire to work on both data engineering projects and systems-oriented projects.

Harris Greenburg, Product Management Intern

During my time as a product management intern, I learned a lot about an important tool called PRFAQ. Now used industry-wide, the PRFAQ document once written can serve as a product framework for team members of all different specializations to branch off from.

At Catchpoint, we like to write the press release part of the PRFAQ early in the process to ensure we think about the customer first. A press release is usually concise; thus, it will contain only the core problems and justifications that a consumer cares about and the most important points of your product that will sell the solution. The result is a problem and solution definition completely prioritizing the customer.

The FAQ portion is a place where the consumer who is interested in your product (who therefore needs finer details than provided in the press release) can go to make their decision. Because it is written so early, this document also serves as a place to get questions from a variety of sources, including potential customers. By answering those questions, you can further define your solution.

I personally used PRFAQ when working on a new feature for our Endpoint Employee Experience. When I first sat down to write a draft, I was overly confident that I had done enough research to write in a consumer-focused manner. However, PRFAQ exposed to me that I, in fact, did not have a good understanding of the problem or solution and thus had to step back and find additional resources. Through meetings with our customer success, sales, and engineering teams, and hearing feedback from customers who requested this feature, I was able to give a much more refined problem and solution definition that I knew better aligned with the potential future users of this feature.

Using the PRFAQ as a framework, I created a presentation for additional teams to be brought on internally. By doing so, I knew that even in internal discussions, the customer would still be front and center.

The highlight of my time here was getting to work with so many amazing teams of people from all areas of the company to discuss and develop such a feature.

Jessica Yu, Product Management Intern

Before my internship at Catchpoint, I envisioned product management to be in the cross-section of technology, business, and design. Product managers form communication channels across different teams, capture the problem, write requirements, do user research, and eventually take responsibility to drive the product processes.

Indeed, Product Management is about product, process, and people. A product manager's role sits among the strategic, executional, business, and technical expertise. Among these qualities, I believe a valuable contribution of a product manager to a business is to effectively communicate and lead the team to drive the product process forward.

Throughout my internship, I have learned a lot by diving into one of the most exciting and challenging projects of digital monitoring experience, working on various vital perspectives of product management, coming up with potential solutions, and collaborating cross-functionally with so many amazing people.

I applied many different practices related to product management, including conducting market research, user research, competitive analysis, interviews to identify the problem, customers' and end-users' needs, market opportunities, determining positionings, defining customer and business outcomes, and creating high-level designs.

It is essential to define the problem and understand the user’s needs before going into solution mode, and I found aspects of the backward-working methodology of PRFAQ helpful. It let me focus on the critical aspects of product development, and the iterative process further aided me in identifying the actual needs and challenges and driving the project forward.

Connor Power, Customer Success Intern

This summer at Catchpoint has been a very exciting time where I have gotten to learn far more than I could have expected this early on in my career. My experience with Customer Success sat right between the intense technological capabilities of the company and the quickly growing business dynamics of a SaaS startup. I became responsible for creating and maintaining the KPI, onboarding, and forecasting reports to constantly measure the team’s impact, but also map how it aligned to big picture company goals.

In addition, I was lucky enough to interview members from just about every other branch of Catchpoint, finding opportunities to improve or introduce more cross-functional work (which is difficult when the folks here are already excellent at what they’re doing).

The most difficult project I ended up taking on was drafting a white paper to link our success criteria to a return-on-investment metric for customers. Although challenging, this was by far the most valuable experience I am lucky enough to have had - albeit with minimal resources - as this is a task our industry has yet to innovate on. It meant I needed to do a lot of technological research paired with high-level conceptual thinking of how to assemble it, since there is no existing framework out there.

I could never have expected a few months ago that something I would be working on could be instrumental for how business is done at a company like this. I’m certain with the experience I’ve gained here, I can discover something just as valuable in the future.

Thomas Sampson, Sales Operations Intern

Over the course of the last few months, the Sales Ops team has challenged me with a wide variety of projects and assignments. The project that helped me understand Catchpoint and Sales Ops the most was working with Salesforce dashboards for our Sales VPs. I led meetings with the VPs to discuss what the old dashboards were doing right and what needed to be improved.

Going forward from there, I was tasked with taking their feedback and building out a full dashboard of visually depicted KPIs. I was constantly asking myself, “If I were a Sales VP, what would I need to do my job more efficiently and accurately?”

Upon completion and review of the final drafts, I was able to present the dashboards to the VPs and walk them through what each component’s function and role was. This project drove a lot of high-level thought for myself and allowed me to start understanding the metrics that drive decision-making at Catchpoint. This project was undoubtedly the highlight during my time here, as well as being my personal favorite to work on!

Ryan Winsor, Finance Intern

During my time here at Catchpoint, I worked on various projects. As the Finance Intern, I was able to see many different aspects of financial planning and analysis, as well as accounting. Most importantly, I got to experience the day-to-day interactions that finance has with the rest of the company.

One of the projects I was included in was the cash-in tracker. This tracker was created with the purpose of streamlining the process of tracking week over week variances in our cash-in forecasting activities.

I was also able to assist in the pulling and creating of reports for the fiscal year 2021 audit. This was an important task to be included in because the audit is what proves the accuracy of our financial reporting, which can play a big factor when attempting to do things such as secure investors.

Along with the two projects I mentioned above, I was able to partake in many other projects and tasks including some of our month end procedures, commission reporting, and an audit of our key metrics or calculations we use in Adaptive when creating forecasts.

The highlight of my time here at Catchpoint, aside from meeting all the totally awesome people that work here, would have to be the interns beating our managers in trivia!

Regan Minor, Legal Intern

I feel incredibly lucky to have interned with Catchpoint as my first foray into legal work. I specifically chose to work for a tech startup this summer because I wanted to gain experience interacting with a range of different legal issues in a fast-paced environment. Each day this summer brought new, unexpected, and exciting puzzles to untangle. I dabbled in trademark law to better understand what constitutes a fair use of the company logo, drafted responses to a so-called “ethical hacker,” researched and came to better understand the European General Data Protection regulation, and analyzed numerous non-disclosure agreements to ensure their compliance with our ideal terms.

Over the course of this summer, I also created a Staffing Vendor Agreements Playbook, in which I consolidated the key terms contained in these agreements, noting our preferred fallback and no-go terms. Anna and Manju can now compare future staffing agreements they receive against this document to ensure Catchpoint gets the best possible outcomes. I also drafted an external-facing Code of Ethics, which we can send to future customers and vendors to ensure that our values align and will not cause issues later in the companies’ relationship.

Above everything else, I am proud to have been a part of an all-female legal team working with cutting edge technology.  With Manju and Anna’s guidance, I learned how to work independently, ask for help when necessary, and be a kind and careful counsellor. I hope to carry these values throughout my career and will always look fondly on my summer at Catchpoint.

Until We Meet Again

After each presentation, the managers took turns to say a few words to thank each of their hardworking interns for everything they have done this summer. Several of the interns are continuing their internships throughout the fall semester, so look out for all the amazing things we will accomplish next!

Learn more about the intern class of 2021 and check out our Careers page here to see job openings and find out what it’s like to work here!