As you might have guessed after reading the title, this will be my internship at an international medical device company, Stryker. While it might sound intimidating, I was pleasantly surprised by the warm atmosphere and the friendliness of the people. My first weeks were supervised in such a way that I would like to stay at my own pace. Stryker is a mildly well, a complex organization. On a product and superficial level, it is separated into 8 divisions. As part of the partnership development team, we have the pleasure of working cross-divisionally, meaning that we offer value propositions and develop internal tools that make communication between divisions easier and more productive. We also try to make the overall company portfolio more internally accessible as well as customer accessible in order to benefit from opportunities that we might miss otherwise. That went off on a tangent, I know, but I thought it was important to explain what exactly we do for context purposes, so there!
It was definitely an eye-opening experience, I am part of such a grand mission: “Together with our customers, we are driven to make healthcare better”. There are a lot of products to learn about, but more importantly, we have to understand their potential and make it visible to other people. Working cross-divisionally means that you always have to be mindful of multiple perspectives when proposing something, ergo there always needs to be an open line of communication between you and the other division members.
Most of my work is a feedback loop process. Make a value proposition, check to see if it makes sense for other people, repeat. It is quite a humbling experience to find out your take on things always needs a fix. I had the chance to do a lot of individual work that was afterwards examined by my internship host, and there were also many different things to do. features, advantages and benefits in order to present value. And there is more to come! Only one month in and I can be proudly say that my schedule is always booked.
So far so good! Looking forward to the future and I hope I’ll have interesting stories to tell you on my next blog update. Peace out, kobe!
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