Summer of SaaS

Hello world! My name is Ishita Ahuja, and this summer I moved across the country to take a chance: I became a Growth intern at a B2B API SaaS company. 

What I found on the other side was nothing short of spectacular. With a great team, challenging problems, and real projects and experience, I learned first hand what it takes to maintain one of the most critical aspects of any company: the customer experience.

If you’re curious about one intern’s journey at a startup: from receiving a first offer to saying final goodbyes, then read on!

Why Me? Why Merge? 

I study both Management Information Systems and Design, and knew from the start of my internship search that I wanted a role that exposed me to both the product and operations side of a startup. 

From my first week as an intern on the Growth team, I quickly realized my summer would be spent solving problems that were not just cross-functional, but totally unique. Products are meant to solve a customer’s need and one of the closest teams to our customers is our Growth team.

What does Growth mean at Merge? 

You’re probably wondering “What does a Growth team even do?” 

Let’s start with Merge. Merge sells a highly technical product to other companies. The Growth team at Merge is responsible for managing all aspects of customer success. 

The companies we work with all have different stakeholders, from engineers, to product managers, to CTOs and CEOs. For all those individuals, Growth is responsible for being at their side whether they need help with an integration or if they simply need help working through complex technical problems.

I came to realize Growth is the perfect team for someone with a versatile skill set that varies across different expertise: you have to be technical to understand the product and answer questions, creative in coming up with solutions, and personable: at the end of the day, we’re talking with other human beings who want to be heard. 

What an intern is able to get done at Merge

Okay okay, but what did the full scope of my summer look like? As I mentioned earlier, the Growth team is in charge of customer success. 

From a day to day perspective, that looked like:

• Troubleshooting customer questions via chat, email, and meetings
• Resolving technical customer issues by looping in relevant internal resources
• Streamlining internal processes 
• Improving customer resources for ease of use 
• Shadowing customer kick off and onboarding calls
• Spearheading my own projects to enhance customer experience

Ultimately, the tasks and projects I took on this summer had a common theme of improving our processes to use more proactive customer success approaches.

In terms of personal goals, these projects helped me understand how to work with different teams, technologies, and strategies to create solutions to pressing problems within a company.

Take that Leap of Faith – Join Merge! 

If you want an internship that is challenging yet rewarding where your coworkers turn into friends, or if any of my goals align with yours in some way, then this is the place for you. 

I found Merge to be a great place for me to grow, and I’m excited to see where my experience here will take me in the future. 

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