Product Management Lab

Benefits of becoming a host organization

PM-Lab offers an invaluable opportunity for students to work on a real time PM project over four weeks from January to early February, while also providing companies an opportunity to build connections with MIT Sloan students.

Some benefits of hosting a PM-Lab team include:

  • Support on company product strategy (e.g. understanding the market landscape and analyzing competitive products for an enterprise e-commerce company, then developing a prioritized product feature roadmap)
  • Support in implementation and execution (e.g. validating product-market fit, funnel and conversion impact analysis, creating epics/user stories for an MVP)
  • Streamlining recruiting process for summer internships and beyond
  • Improved presence and reputation on-campus at MIT

Roles and responsibilities

Host companies must be able to:

  • Identify and scope PM projects for at least 3 students
  • Support a 4-week experience
  • Submit description of host company and project to be included in a company book
  • Attend in-person or virtual Networking Night
  • Delegate a mentor (preferably a PM) for the student through the duration of PM Lab
  • Engage in mid-review and final-review sessions in which students can receive feedback
  • Complete a post-program survey

Interested in becoming a host?

If you are interested in hosting a PM-Lab team, please contact pm-cert@mit.edu with the number of student spots available.

Host testimonial

  • Eilon Shalev, MBA '19, co-founder and CEO of Elphi

    Elphi has been an avid partner of PM-Lab from its inception in IAP 2019. We have been blessed to have worked with two, three, and six PMs during IAP 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. Elphi has had four surges of product breakthroughs thus far, three of them were during and because of MIT PM-Lab MBAs. In only 3/4 weeks, students were able to hit the ground running, assume responsibilities on core product requirements, conduct user research with actual Elphi clients and users, craft a product roadmap, prioritize tasks, create JIRA tickets for engineers, manage engineers daily, deliver actual code into our cloud-native testing environments, and delineate next steps for the product enhancements. Can it even get any better than this? Join us next IAP to figure it out for yourselves!

Host timeline

  • Late October

    Company presentation and Pitch Night with MIT Sloan.

  • Late November

    Student matches are confirmed with host companies.

  • January

    Four-week PM-Lab experience. 

Application/matching process

  • Participating students will receive an application after Project Pitch Night
  • Each student submits an application, and will then rank projects they would be happy working on using a scale 1 to 8 (one being the top preference)
  • Sloan teaching team review applications and match students with projects based on interest
  • Students can accept or reject their project match. Students may have the ability to be rematched with an open project