From Brazilian Marketing to AWS Project Management with Maureen Peterson | Ep 012

Episode Information Show Notes In this episode, host Manuel Martinez sits down with Maureen Peterson, a Customer Solutions Manager at AWS, to explore her fascinating journey from advertising in Brazil to tech project management in the US. Maureen’s story is a testament to the power of continuous learning, adaptability, and perseverance. She shares her experiences transitioning from marketing to technology, working in various industries including casinos, and ultimately landing a role at one of the world’s leading tech companies. Key takeaways from this episode: How to successfully pivot from marketing to tech project management Strategies for navigating major career changes across industries and countries Tips for overcoming imposter syndrome in the tech world Insights on preparing for and acing interviews at top tech companies The importance of continuous skill development and stepping out of your comfort zone Whether you’re in tech, marketing, or considering a career pivot, Maureen’s journey offers valuable insights and practical advice for anyone looking to advance their career. Listen in as Maureen shares her experiences implementing digital analytics, managing large-scale projects, and adapting to new challenges as a non-native English speaker in the tech industry. Her story is not just about career progression, but also about personal growth and the courage to pursue new opportunities. Don’t miss this inspiring conversation that proves with determination and the right mindset, you can successfully navigate significant career transitions and thrive in the ever-evolving tech landscape. Subscribe to Career Downloads for more episodes featuring industry professionals sharing their career wisdom and practical advice for professional growth. Episode Length: 1:39:08 Release Date: October 1, 2024 Follow us on social media: X/Twitter https://twitter.com/@careerdownloads TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@careerdownloads LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/career-downloads Instagram https://www.instagram.com/careerdownloads FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/people/Career-Downloads/61561144531249 We’d love to hear from you! If you have any questions or topics you’d like us to cover in future episodes, please reach out to us. Transcription Manuel: Welcome everybody. So my name is Manuel Martinez and this is Career Downloads, where basically each episode I hit the refresh button and bring on a different guest to learn more about their background and their experiences and really help pull out any techniques that they’ve used to manage their career that could be helpful to anybody watching or listening. So for this episode I have with me Maureen Peterson and she is a project manager. So she has a lot of experience in that realm and I think it’s very interesting because she has some certifications, some knowledge in areas that have really been of interest to me. So hopefully you enjoy the conversation and with that welcome Maureen. Maureen: Thank you for having me today. Manuel: Of course. Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to come in and talk to me and tell a little bit more about your career. So I want to know now, so I know I’m going to skip ahead a little bit, but just in your current role, what is your current role now and what are you doing there? Maureen: So right now I work for AWS, I’m a Customer Solutions Manager. So we are business and technical program managers. We are in charge of helping very large customers to navigate their migration from data center to the cloud using cloud technologies. And then there are some customers ahead of the cloud and the others. They are using database systems, they are using analytics systems, they might be using storage systems. So what we do in my team, we help our customers to make sure that they are getting the best out of their cloud journey by anywhere from helping them to start a project from scratch, writing project plans or working with their software developers and the customer to understand what are they doing and how can we help. So one of the things I do right now is to connect specialists inside AWS to help our customers and bring them trainings and bring them to the events that we have to make sure that they are learning and taking the best to resolve their business outcomes. Manuel: What I’ve been doing with every guest is if you can just kind of start off, just give me a little bit of background and you know, again, as much as you want, just kind of where you grew up and what eventually got you interested in technology and kind of how you got started. Maureen: So I’m Brazilian. I was born and raised in Sao Paulo, which is a very large city in Brazil. And then I’m now living in Las Vegas, I immigrated here first as a student. I came to study when I was like, in 2008, I came to get my third degree. And that’s how I got here. There’s a long story about that. Now. So I started at my career in advertising and marketing. I decided that I wanted to be in advertising and marketing when I was about five years old, when I watch a commercial. And I told my mother or my father, I said, I want to be the person that create those stories and put it in there. I remember it was a cartoon to sell some blankets and it really touched me. But I said, it’s not because I want to buy that blanket, I just wanted to be the person that create the little stories and touch other people. And I was so young, but I still remember that. So when I was 17 years old, I always like study a lot. I went to get a test. It’s kind of like SAT in Brazil for you to pass the school. And I studied in a school that is considered like the best advertising and marketing school in probably Latin America. It’s called Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing. So in the first year, I just studied and then I think second year, I started an internship in advertising. So the first role that I had, I got actually like learned how to network because it was one of my colleagues at school in college that told me, oh, there’s this position open where I’m working in this advertising agency, super small, but I think you’d be a good colleague. So he told me to apply and then I went there, did an interview and I got hired. And it was like part-time internship, but I learned a lot about doing editing with Photoshop. So we used to do those advertising that you send on the mail, you know, like for offers. Manuel: Yes Maureen: And I used to be the person like cutting the background of the product. Right now you just use Gen AI and you get that done in one second, but you used to take a lot of time to do that. And I was really into doing that. I did advertising for furniture, for anything. It was a really fun career because you get to understand about businesses that are very different from each other. Manuel: And is it the, was it the storytelling that you enjoyed? Was it the creating something that kind of similar to you when you were younger that, you know, it really caught your attention? Was it the, what was it exactly that really kind of got you interested in marketing? Maureen: I think when I started, so I had the idea when I was five years old. But when I was 12 years old, I think in school they had career fairs. And then I went to research about all of those different careers. And that’s when I learned there was actually something, a word for that, which is then it was when I learned about advertising. I didn’t know about marketing at that time. But then I started learning about marketing at college. And then we studied things that most people say, I go to college and I don’t even remember what I did so many years after. But one of the things that are really nice about the college event, they go right through the primitives, you know, like the building blocks of how you do things. And there I learned there was different ways for you to get communication through one person to the other. So you learned in school about you need to learn who you need to talk to. So you need to learn their type of communication. You need to learn what kind of conditions and why are you doing that kind of communication. You’re trying to basically solve a problem. And that was something that really interested me at that time. Manuel: So they did prepare you quite a bit then with a lot of those skills, it sounds like, right? Understanding and really preparing you for getting your first kind of job or role. So when you graduated and that colleague got you that internship, did you feel prepared with what you had learned so far in college to that point? Maureen: I did, but on top, I think also like when you get into a real job, you see that there’s way more than you, because you don’t have time to learn about everything. And then I think also I learned when I started learning more about marketing, I got more interested in marketing than in actually so in the beginning I wanted to be an art director and do like work with Photoshop and Illustrator. So I got trained for that. Then I get really interested in the part of doing marketing research and learning about people and learning about their needs and how you get to fulfill those needs. And sometimes in advertising or marketing, you’re trying to sell things that people don’t really need [Laughter] and that’s kind of like a, it’s like a very fun game. It’s like people like to play video games, I like to understand people and what makes them happy, what makes them sad, what are their needs, that’s something that is really interesting to me. So I think a year or two after I got that first internship, I got into, there’s this company in Brazil, I think it was like very beginnings of people opening for you to look for apartments or houses online. So it was one of ...