Benefits of becoming a host organization
PM Lab offers an invaluable opportunity for students to work on a real time PM project over January through Spring semester, while also providing companies an opportunity to build connections with MIT Sloan students.
Some benefits of hosting a PM Lab team include:
- Support on company product strategy (e.g. understanding the market landscape and analyzing competitive products for an enterprise e-commerce company, then developing a prioritized product feature roadmap)
- Support in implementation and execution (e.g. validating product-market fit, funnel and conversion impact analysis, creating epics/user stories for an MVP)
- Creates opportunity for recruiting process for summer internships and beyond
- Improved presence and reputation on-campus at MIT
Roles and Responsibilities
Host companies must be able to:
- Identify and scope PM projects for at least 3 students by October
- Support project work between January and early May
- Submit description of host company and project on our host portal to be included in a project viewer by late October
- Attend virtual Pitch Night in November to pitch your project to students
- Hold an orientation call for your student team in early December
- Delegate a project coordinator (preferably a PM) for the students through the duration of PM Lab and have biweekly check-ins with student team and teaching team
- Engage in biweekly surveys in which students and faculty can receive feedback
- Complete a post-program survey
Interested in becoming a host?
If you are interested in hosting a PM Lab team, please contact Yvonnecp@mit.edu.
Host testimonial
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Dan Barnes, MBA '19, Product Manager at Toast
Based in Boston, Toast is an all-in-one restaurant point of sale and management platform, offering a suite of hardware and software products that handle everything from payment processing and payroll to reservations and online ordering. Restaurants around the country rely on Toast to help them improve operations, increase sales, and create a better guest experience.
To stay competitive, the technology company is constantly innovating and offering new products. When it launched Toast Tables Experiences—which allows restaurants to create specialized, bookable events (like brunch specials, tasting menus, or holiday parties) on its platform—the adoption rate was lower than expected. To find out why and what to do to increase it, Toast turned to a team of MIT Sloan Product Management Lab (PM-Lab) students.
The students approached the problem by engaging with cross-functional team members across Toast to test different strategies, from scaling outbound messaging, to offering financial incentives, to visiting restaurants in-person in the Boston area and leveraging existing relationships.
"This project accelerated our understanding of the reasons customers are adopting, and not yet adopting, Toast Tables experiences. The project met our needs, and gave us actionable recommendations and next steps that we're currently executing against. This gave us more conviction to accelerate building our new Toast Tables ticketing product, which will be launching in the coming months."
Host timeline
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November
Company presentation and Pitch Night with MIT Sloan.
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December
Student matches are confirmed with host companies.
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January
PM Lab experience begins.
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Spring Semester
Continued project hours
Final deliverables due by end of semester (early May)
Application/matching process
- Students can apply for the lab in October - application will be uploaded here
- Students can review projects in canvas before a virtual project pitch night with the companies. They will rank projects they would be happy working on using a scale 1 to 8 (one being the top preference)
- Sloan teaching team review applications and match students with projects based on interest
- Students can accept or reject their project match. Students may have the ability to be rematched with an open project