Designing my path to success as a Splunk Community intern
Starting an internship that I didn’t sign up for was intimidating. But with ambition and creativity, I designed a successful “soup to nut” experience. And no, I didn’t make nut soup.
When I was hired as a Community intern at Splunk, I was scared.
I didn’t know what a community professional does, nor did I know that community teams existed in tech companies. Before my first day, I did a lot of research on community management and looked up community specialists on LinkedIn to get an idea of their day-to-day activities.
However, what I found confused me even more. I realized that not all community professionals have the same job description, and community teams operate differently depending on the company. I was left in the fog about my new job, and with the uncertainty, a stampede of questions rushed through my mind.
What do I have to do? Where do I fit in? How will I grow from this internship?
Despite not knowing the specifics of the role, I felt reassured that I would fit in with the team’s values and culture. Based on the two interviews I had with the PMs, I was excited to know that the team advocated for a human-centered approach in their community programs. “Human-centered,” which also happens to be the name of my upcoming master’s degree, deeply aligns with my career aspirations of working in user experience (UX).
However, as much as I was optimistic about my internship, I faced a number of challenges along the way. First, since this was my first time working in a marketing org at a tech company, I had to learn marketing concepts I’d never heard of before. Second, since this internship was purposefully open-ended, I had to navigate ambiguity as I designed a UX-style internship from “soup to nut.”
Designing my own experience
Up until this point, I had been on the path towards becoming a product or content designer. I wanted to make technology easier to use and help people find belonging in their digital experiences. On LinkedIn, I’d been following professionals in the product field for years, so I knew exactly the skills and experiences needed to pursue my dream career. Even though my job title didn’t contain “product” or “content” this time around, it didn’t stop me from creating an experience as if it did.
In my first week, I created a “vision” document that detailed my goals and desired outcomes. I included keywords like “human-centered,” “storytelling,” and “data-driven” to help my manager understand the skills I wanted to learn. I even explicitly told him that I aspired to work in product, and the outcomes of my internship would take me a step closer to my goal.
With this document, my manager and I then worked together to identify the problem spaces that my vision could address. We eventually agreed that I would investigate the UX of the Splunk Community, which involved conducting behavioral interviews, analyzing customers’ digital footprints, and using these insights to improve the community experience.
When my pitch was accepted by the Community director (my manager’s manager), I had butterflies in my stomach. It’s really happening! After five years in school, three years dabbling in UX, I finally got my first corporate design project.
The lessons I learned were simple: to build a successful internship, come prepared, advocate for what you want, and document everything. To prepare for the next step of your career, start working for it today, even if it’s not what you signed up for.
Embracing ambiguity
Many times, I was scared that my project would fail. What if the process doesn’t work? What if I don’t bring in results? Or maybe, what if I’m just really bad at what I do?
As the only UX person in a non-design team (and a junior one too), I felt insecure about managing my own UX project. I wasn’t surrounded by product people who could mentor me through the design thinking process. And when my colleagues asked me how my project was doing, I felt pressured to be right all the time — being right in how I apply my UX knowledge, how I report data, and how I bring insights for the team.
On top of that, I was learning the ins and outs of a marketing org: how different teams — customer success, community, sales, content marketing — work together to achieve their goals. I lurked into slide decks, opened tabs of articles, watched LinkedIn Learning tutorials… I was cramming everything as if I was studying the night before an exam.
It was all too much.
One of the challenges that tested my anxiety was when I had to re-scope the design objective. A few weeks after the project began, I realized that I was stirring in the wrong direction and had to rethink my strategy — a very hard decision to make. Changing the objective soon led to changing every bit of the process: the interview questions that I asked customers and the categories I labeled to group qualitative data.
Initially, my plan was to research a feature of the Community’s website. But when I interviewed customers about the feature, I learned that it was only a small touchpoint in the overall community experience. By broadening the scope, which included both the online and offline experiences, I opened up more conversations about how customers look for information and why certain activities are valuable to them.
This redirection turned out to be the saving grace of the final outcome. With more customer stories, I had more data to work with. With more data, I had more material to produce an insightful, actionable report.
Unexpected changes can happen in a project, and letting go of a plan you’ve worked on for so long can feel like you’re taking a risky mistake. But don’t be afraid —UX is ambiguous by design (pun totally intended). Pivoting is a sign that there’s a new and much better opportunity to explore. If something doesn’t seem right, ask why the problem showed up and make the best decision to resolve it, even if it’s the most intuitive.
Leaving with a story to tell
When I started Splunk, I promised myself that I would leave with two goals: one, create a UX project that combines human-centered and data-driven skills; two, solve a business challenge that has a positive impact on the customers. I’m happy to say that I checked off both goals, but what I never expected was leaving with a third: a story to tell.
Stories have helped me connect with the world better than I do living in it. As a sheltered teenager, the stories I read in literature classes helped me understand our complex relationships with society. Feminism, the relationship between genders and equality. Intersectionality, the overlapping relationships between our multiple identities — race, class, gender — in systems of oppression. Empathy, the capacity to form relationships with others through a shared emotional understanding.
As I went through college, storytelling had helped me reach new heights in my career: the time I got into my study abroad program, my first internship, my second internship, and most recently, a master’s program I’ve always wanted to be in.
I’m grateful to the Splunk Community team for giving me new chapters to write my story. Like many stories, this one has a hero (clearly an overstatement), a challenge, and a resolution, and the theme is about finding success in the face of ambiguity.
As I enter the next step of my career, which will take place in the Human Centered Design & Engineering master’s program at the University of Washington, I will be looking for opportunities with stories to tell — stories that immerse me in uncertain challenges, open my mind to new perspectives, and leave me hungry to learn more, even after the story ends.
