Gabi Stein ’15 Drives Innovation through Data Analysis and Computer Science

What is a typical day for a product manager and what professional skills do you use most often? 

There is no typical day for a product manager. My job is to manage the research, design, analysis, and launch of new features. Typically, I manage a handful of features at different stages of creation, experimentation, and implementation. On any given day, I’ll meet with engineers about what is currently being built, review how an experiment performed, and have some one-on-one meetings with my managers or team members. In order to see these features from idea to completion, I use critical thinking, verbal and written communication, and data analysis skills daily. 

What do you enjoy about working with data? What made you decide to pursue a master’s degree in analytics?

Data helps tell the story. It’s not a gray area; there will always be data and you can craft it into a story to communicate it to others. Finding insights in the data is fun! I didn’t take a lot of data modeling in my undergraduate classes, and I wanted to learn more techniques and methods for understanding and communicating data. 

As a woman in the tech industry, is it common for you to be the only woman on a team or one of a handful? Did attending an all-girls school prepare you for this?

There have been various times in my college years and career where I have been the only woman in the room. I do what I can to encourage women and other underrepresented communities to pursue computer science, data science, engineering, and other tech fields. Going into college, I was not sure I could pursue this path of computer science. I thought you had to have been a coder since birth. Finding a community of my peers who were learning from scratch with me was empowering, and I try to empower others to enter the field as well. Attending an all-girls school has continually helped me have the confidence to speak up, regardless of the population in any given room. I am very grateful for that.

Gabi Stein ’15 is a product manager at Reddit in Seattle, Washington. She received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 2019 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She is working to obtain her master’s degree in Analytics from Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Reddit, she was a product manager for Microsoft for two years.