My Redfin Summer Internship: Celine Cuevas

Redfin Engineering
Code Red
Published in
3 min readOct 8, 2014

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Redfin intern Celine Cuevas

Guest post by Celine Cuevas, Redfin intern

Get Myself Together

I came into this summer with a plan.

Like many college students entering their senior year, I became hyper-aware that this would be my last summer before entering the real world. Before I’d become a “real” adult.

Having interned at Redfin last summer, I pretty much knew what to expect — of Redfin, of San Francisco, of product management. This summer was about confirming that this is what I wanted to do after college. A trial run of my post-college life, if you will.

But I realized that maybe I didn’t need to have it so figured out. The writing and rewriting of plans is just how life works. And, as I learned this summer, it’s at the core of product management.

As a product manager intern, I learned how to write specs and create mocks. But perhaps more importantly, I learned how to change them.

Both of the specs that I wrote this summer went through multiple rounds of comments from developers, designers and other product managers. I presented different mocks and UI ideas to a group of our real estate agents, and afterwards re-prioritized the future progression of that feature. I presented a spec to our executives during a design review, and afterwards redesigned my mocks for an entire iteration. Even as one of my features went into development, I continued to make changes while working alongside the developer.

Whether it’s designing a product or living through life, nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. There are so many competing variables and interests, so many events that you can’t anticipate. But there’s a balance to strike between making and committing to a plan, and being willing to change it.

And I realized that that’s what I struggled with at the beginning of this summer. I came in with this mindset that I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve spent the past 21 years always working toward a clear next step in my education, and post-college life was this foreign, new chapter with no defined end dates.

But I learned that it’s OK to not have it all figured out, and it’s OK to make edits to my plan. My past two summers at Redfin have given me a spec of where I currently want to take my career. Working as a product manager has given me the tools to navigate all the edits and changes that I’ll inevitably have to make.

And with this I’m ready to head into my senior year, and whatever may come next.

About Celine Cuevas
Celine will graduate in 2015 from Yale.

This post is part of a series titled “My Redfin Summer Internship.” Check out other posts in the series to learn more about what’s it like to intern at a growing technology-powered real estate brokerage. For more information on Redfin, and to check out job and internship opportunities at the company, visit Jobs at Redfin.

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