Designing Impact Through Empathy: A User-First Journey into Product Management
Manjari Gupta portrait. Courtesy photo.
Manjari Gupta, MS ’26, engineering management, is currently on co-op at McKinsey & Company. With a technical background and a passion for user-centered products, Gupta is entering the job market with a sharper focus on the artificial intelligence side of product management.
Manjari Gupta is completing a master’s degree in engineering management at Northeastern. She earned her Bachelor of Technology in instrumentation and control engineering from JSS Academy of Technical Education in India, then spent several years in industry as a project engineer at Wipro Limited, where she supported software tools including Siemens Teamcenter—a product lifecycle management platform—and Microsoft Azure. The work built a strong technical foundation, but it also revealed a growing interest in management and strategy. She decided to return to school to pursue that interest more deliberately.
Northeastern appealed to her for several reasons. Chief among them was the university’s commitment to experiential learning. “I wanted a place where I could learn not only through classes, but also through projects, competitions, student organizations, and real work experience,” she says. The Co-op Program reinforced that appeal, and the engineering management program itself—with its concentration in product management and relevant elective offerings—aligned precisely with what she wanted to pursue. She valued her technical background and appreciated that the degree didn’t set it aside, but instead served as a “bridge” into leadership and management roles “while still staying rooted in technical understanding.”
Classroom Influences
One of the most impactful courses Gupta took was Digital Product Design and Management, a project-based class that developed her product-focused thinking through hands-on work. She learned customer-first problem solving, early-stage product prototyping, and how to weigh user needs against business constraints. Her team’s concept app, GearLend, was selected as one of the top three projects of the semester—her biggest achievement in the course. She also found Applied Generative AI valuable for keeping her current with emerging technology and learning how to integrate AI tools into a product environment. Across the program as a whole, she developed stronger skills in “product thinking, project planning, communication, AI applications, and decision-making”—all while learning to balance coursework with an ambitious slate of extracurricular commitments.
Extracurricular Involvement
Gupta at a conference for APMC. Courtesy photo.
Gupta approached extracurricular involvement with intention, choosing activities that would build both professional skills and personal growth. She joined the Aspiring Product Managers Club (APMC) at Northeastern, serving as a product marketing manager. One highlight was her role in organizing NorthStar, a month-long bootcamp featuring guest speakers covering product management and industry practice. She also attended a leadership workshop through LEAD360, where she took the Gallup Strengths assessment—ranking developer, empathy, arranger, strategic, and achiever as her top traits. The experience gave her a clearer picture of her own leadership style and the role that empathy and self-awareness play in leading others effectively.
During her first semester, Gupta participated in a hackathon with APMC, where her team worked on making Google Maps more accessible for visually impaired users. They spoke directly with potential users at the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind—an experience that deepened her commitment to user empathy and customer-first thinking. The team placed third.
More recently, she served as team lead at the Inter-University Product Hackathon 2026, organized by the Johns Hopkins Product Management Club, competing against teams from universities across the country. Within a 20–24-hour window, her team built GrocerySplit—a fully functional web application designed to eliminate the friction of splitting shared expenses among roommates. The product allowed groups to track itemized orders, split costs proportionally including tax and delivery fees, scan receipts using AI to auto-populate items, and set automated reminders for payments and due dates. The team placed third. For Gupta, the competition was the ideal intersection of product thinking, technical curiosity, and execution under pressure.
She also serves as a Global Student Mentor for the Office of Global Services (OGS), supporting around 40 international students each semester as they navigate college life in the United States. She received the Fall 2025 Rising Mentor Award for her efforts. In a parallel role as marketing and communications lead for OGS, she has taken on content creation, graphic design, and coordinating tasks across a team of mentors. The combination of responsibilities has reinforced a lesson she carries into every role: “leadership is not only about taking initiative, but also about responsibility, empathy, communication, and consistency.” Managing so many commitments simultaneously has also sharpened her ability to prioritize thoughtfully and make intentional decisions under pressure.
Co-op Experience
Gupta at her co-op. Courtesy photo.
Gupta is currently on co-op at McKinsey & Company as a product analyst on the Platform McKinsey Team, which runs the firm’s main service support platform. Her responsibilities include translating stakeholder needs into clear action items, managing the team’s task backlog, tracking product performance, and maintaining communication across teams. The part of the role she has found most exciting is helping integrate artificial intelligence into the platform—including a chatbot designed to enhance the customer experience—putting her coursework in AI to direct, tangible use. Landing this position, she says, has been one of her proudest accomplishments, reflecting “all the effort, learning, and resilience that had gone into this journey.” The professional network and experience she is building at McKinsey, she knows, will be an asset throughout her career.
Both her co-op course and her advisor played an important role in getting her there. The course pushed her outside her comfort zone—particularly through exercises like delivering her elevator pitch in front of the full class—while her advisor provided steady, practical support, from resume refinement to mock interview preparation.
Advice and Future Plans
Gupta graduates this summer, and her advice to younger students reflects the challenges she navigated along the way: “It’s okay if the journey feels overwhelming at times—it’s okay to not have everything figured out from day one.” She faced rejection and self-doubt during her internship search, and what carried her through was the discipline she had built through her extracurricular commitments. Consistency, she found, made “luck look predictable.” She also encourages students to stay open to unexpected opportunities and to trust the process even when results are slow to arrive.
After graduation, Gupta plans to move into a product management role where she can build meaningful, user-centered products and continue growing as a product thinker. She is deliberately keeping her options open across domains—from consumer products to emerging technology—in order to identify where she can create the most impact. She is particularly drawn to the potential of AI to shape the next generation of products, and is eager to work on solutions that integrate it in thoughtful, practical ways. Her longer-term ambition is to lead products from start to finish and drive progress at scale—building things that are not just innovative, but genuinely useful.