As a member of the founding cohort of the Texas Honors Computer Science and Business (Texas CSB) program and its first student association president, 2021 alumnus Kevin Qi played a key role in shaping the program. After graduation, he joined Salesforce’s Associate Product Manager program, where he is nearing completion of the program. Qi spoke with UT Computer Science about the lessons he carried from college, his career path, and his advice for the next generation of students.
What attracted you to this new program?
It was for a couple of reasons. The first was the dual degree in itself. I've always wanted to explore computer science but didn't really have an extensive background coming out of high school. I only took one computer science class in high school, and that was AP Computer Science Principles. This was the perfect opportunity for me to learn something new and stretch myself. Being able to learn more, grow more, and expand the opportunities that I could get out of college was one reason. The other was the small class size and small cohort. I felt the learnings that I could get were going to be more focused, especially with time with the professor, and being able to learn better, as well as building closer friendships with a smaller class size.
How did CSB broaden your perspective and provide hands-on CS experience?
It was being able to blend the two kinds of roles and see what really is a career that helps me leverage both sides. I’m currently a product manager at Salesforce. CS helped me get the knowledge of how technology is built, the how part of it, and then the business side showed me the why and the who part of it. You really get the full 360 view of why you're building a software product, who it is for, and how it works. All three pieces are really crucial for a product manager to learn, to work with engineers, to work with customers, and to ultimately build what's valuable. Having that additional lens was really helpful for me to be able to leverage all these pieces in my job.
Which college classes or projects had the biggest impact on your career?
My first year, I took Data Structures. We did a variety of projects in that class. The one that stood out, we built a mini Google as our capstone project. It is a search engine, and we learned how to index pages, search pages, and then display the results if you were to crawl the web. I learned a lot through that. There were so many pieces like crawling a web, indexing a web, and then if you search a web, what actually gets returned. All of those were very important to how a complex system works. That one was pretty foundational.
The other side of the coin, in business, we took a business communications course, BA324H. In the business communications course, one of our projects was to give a TED talk of a subject that you felt passionate about and it could have been anything. I still remember I gave a TED talk on the myths of ‘healthy fast food’. I gave that TED talk, and I found it very insightful, because our professor at the time,Dr. Wilttaught us how to convey ideas in a manner that's entertaining and persuasive. Even today, you realize how important communication is in your job. You can't just do the work. We have to communicate it to leadership. You have to communicate it to customers. You got to communicate to engineers in all different ways. So how do you tailor your communication style to different people? I think it is a lesson that I inherently learned through this course. I didn't realize it at the time, but it did help me improve my communication skills.
How did you transition from UT to Salesforce?
It was all thanks to the UTCS career fair. I applied to Salesforce through the online job application, but I didn't hear back. I was looking for a point of contact to follow up with when I saw a Salesforce HR recruiter at the career fair. It was my opportunity to get in. I followed up with the recruiter, and the process went along from there.
If it weren't for the network that UT has with these companies and the ability to connect in person and follow up, it would have been very tougher. That's kind of what kicked things off. I went through the interview process, and thankfully, everything worked out, and got the offer.
I first interned as a software engineer at Salesforce during the summer between my sophomore and junior year. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't the completely fulfilled. I wanted to go beyond coding to understand "why" and "how", and work more for the customer.
The next year, I switched into product management, going through the whole interview process again. I had a lot of guidance from people who helped me prepare. A UT organization called TPEO (Texas Product Engineering Organization) gave me a lot of tools to learn product management, even without professional experience. I learned from people above me who were PMs and knew how to build products from a product-level perspective. I got my internship as an APM intern at Salesforce, and quickly, I converted to a full-time role.
Can you share a milestone or achievement you're proud of so far in your career?
I got the opportunity to speak at Dreamforce, which is Salesforce’s largest annual tech conference in San Francisco. We host tens of thousands of customers every year. It's a huge marketing event for Salesforce to promote our products and introduce new features and announcements, and also show demos. As an APM who was only a few months into the job, I was fortunate to get the opportunity to represent my product externally at such a big stage. I got the opportunity to speak at a few of the stages that they have to demo our products, announce new features, and show and interact with customers in a bigger light. I felt that was very special to me because it is not something you can take for granted and not every PM gets that opportunity. I also got the opportunity to speak again this past Dreamforce which happened in September. So a couple of months ago, I got to go back and also speak for my new team, since I'm on a rotational program. That's one thing I'm very proud of, amongst others, which is doing my job on a day-to-day basis and receiving good feedback from my stakeholders.
As the founding president of CSBA, how did leading the organization shape your college and early career?
Being part of the first cohort, we were trying to figure out what was missing and what would make our program better. We quickly realized within the first couple of months that there should be a student association dedicated solely to CSB. We sometimes felt in the middle between two programs—we weren't fully BHP, and we weren't fully CS.
As president in my sophomore year, CSB tried to do a couple of things. One was social bonding—bringing everyone together through socials and having fun. The other part was sourcing career networking opportunities with companies that exclusively wanted to tap into the CSB talent pool. These companies were probably looking for business-minded and tech-minded folks, not just one or the other. That's what attracted many of the early companies.
When I was there, a few companies, like HEB—one of my first employers before Salesforce—got involved. We also had a few people from Apple come in and talk to us.
Now, I'm sure the landscape is very different, with more company sponsors. But at the beginning, it was challenging, because we were trying to get the word out of this new program. That experience taught me the importance of planning in an organization. To lead anything—whether that's an organization or a project—it's important to have clear organizational skills. I learned a lot about planning and execution, which is really important.
Also, being able to facilitate a good culture was important because I can take that to any job or team in the future— figuring out how we foster a good culture that's supportive, collaborative, and fun.
What are some challenges that you faced in college or your career, and how did you overcome those challenges?
Coming into CSB, without a computer science background was challenging because I felt that I had to hit the ground running. It was definitely a challenge my first year, especially those first couple months in data structures, and even in the computer science courses that quickly followed, I stayed up late nights, trying to learn and execute. There are areas where I didn't get the scores or the results that I wanted.
It's tough coming out of high school, where this group of students were all very high achieving in the sense that we all kind of push ourselves to do the very best. But, when we're hit with that learning phase again, it is challenging to say the least. For me, I took that as an opportunity to get better, learn, and change my mindset from getting an A+ or going for the best possible score to trying to improve each and every week. It helped me a lot, especially when some people might say, ‘Oh, you're with peers who are so talented and smart.’ That's definitely true but, at the end of the day, it's your mindset and how you see things.
You can either choose to try to compete with others and then think, ‘I'm competing against this person and I gotta do better than them,’ or think, ‘I'm going to try to get better and evaluate myself on my own personal growth and my own personal timelines.’ The hardest skill that I am learning and still learning today is, as I mentioned earlier, tailoring your communication styles to different audiences. You have to work with all different kinds of people such as leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders, and they all prefer to receive information in different ways.
Are there any lessons or experiences from college that still guide you today?
From both sides—business and CS—the amount of group projects that you get involved in does help after college, where you have to work with a team. It's important how UT and just the two programs heavily emphasize on group dynamics and group projects because that is what has still stayed constant even after college. I'm working with a team, trying to learn how to best work with different kinds of people. You're going to work with all kinds of people. That has been something that is really valuable with how the curriculum is built and what it focuses on.
What advice would you give current CSB students or students interested in a similar path to product management?
First and foremost, have a healthy mindset. It’s easier said than done, but I would grade yourself on how you can get better each and every day or each and every month. If you keep framing it like that, you will find yourself more relieved from focusing on other people and focusing on trying to get A+ and getting disappointed if you don’t. Try to evaluate yourself based on your own performance and set your own milestones and goals based on that.
Two, take advantage of everything that UT and CSB have to offer. I mentioned the career fairs, the alumni networks, and the CSBA coffee chats. All of these are opportunities that you won't get outside of college and only have four years to leverage. The whole point of them is to help you. I know a lot of folks try to stay in their own bubble. They do work, grind, and apply for jobs, but, taking advantage of everything here would be helpful. If you want to learn something new, go to a coffee chat that is talking about that subject. Or if you want to go and try to work for a certain company, go to the Q&A events. UT has so many events to offer. Continue to look for those on campus and try to be involved where you can.
Lastly, especially for CSB students, you know, it can be hard to figure out which path you want to go down. ‘Do you want to go down software? Do you want to go down business? Do you want to go down both?’ The best way to find out is to try them through your internships and see which one you like the most.
For me, I was fortunate enough to get an internship during my freshman and sophomore years doing software engineering at HEB. It was through that experience that I learned I want to do more beyond coding and solving technical problems. I did another software engineering internship at Salesforce, and then I made the transition to product management. But I wouldn't have known that and I would have had regrets about not trying software engineering. The best way to know whether or not you are going to enjoy that job is to try it early on in college. If you can't get it through internship experience, try to get it through an org, shadowing someone, or an unpaid volunteer experience.