Bridging Healthcare and Product Strategy: Amdia Saccoh’s Summer Internship at Medtronic

Image

Internship Company: Medtronic

Internship Department: Marketing (Downstream) Finance, U.S. Marketing

Internship Location: Minneapolis, MN 

Position Before MBA: Product Manager at Grow Progress

How did you secure your internship?

I secured my internship through pre-MBA recruiting at the Consortium conference in June 2025. That began a long journey that ended with the final interview and offer at the end of November 2025.

What were your responsibilities during the internship?

My role was to assess the software launch process for a specific division in Medtronic's portfolio, one that needed to scale, stay competitive and build the agility to handle future growth. That meant running interviews with over 40 cross-functional stakeholders to understand where the process needed to change, synthesizing what I heard into a set of prioritized themes, and benchmarking our approach against competitors and a best-in-class tech company. From there, I was responsible for building the actual solution: a launch framework for continuous learning, a playbook with clear ownership, scorecards to track launches and a retro process so lessons carried forward from one launch to the next. I also built the business case behind it and presented the recommendation to leadership.

How did your MBA coursework prepare you for this internship?

Operations Management, Business Communications and Competitive Industry Analysis helped the most. Organizational Behavior, Marketing and the rest of the core curriculum helped me understand how to communicate value to stakeholders across different functional areas, think strategically and spot where a process could improve. I actually went back to my class notes more than once during the internship, which I'm grateful for. More than anything, coursework gave me frameworks for problem-solving that I could apply directly.

How did the internship align with your career goals?

Before business school, I worked in healthcare operations and revenue cycle for about seven years, then moved into product management in tech for about three. This internship let me bring both of those together. My healthcare background gave me context for how the clinical side of the business actually works, and my product management background gave me a way to structure and pitch a recommendation that could actually be used.

It also stretched me. I was managing and gaining buy-in from over 40 stakeholders across functions, aligning on milestones and keeping the work moving. And it clarified something for me, pointing to areas of work I want to explore further — closer to internal consulting or process improvement than to a single product role.

Image

What was your favorite part of your internship experience?

The people, and how much the company centers everything around patients. There's a real culture of continuous learning and service: Symposiums, volunteer opportunities, networking events and patient/physician panels run through the whole summer. Sitting in on those made it clear that decisions get made with the patient and the people they affect in mind first, and that staying innovative and differentiated comes down to high quality work and empathy, not just the product itself. I got to build relationships across the business naturally, just by being present for all of it, and that was the best part of the summer.

What advice do you have for prospective students?

Stay open to the direction your internship can take you. I was assigned to a downstream marketing role, but a lot of what I actually did was process improvement and implementation — closer to internal consulting than traditional marketing. That wasn't what I expected going in, but it opened up an interest I didn't know was there, and I was glad to have the room to follow it.

Amdia Saccoh is a Full-Time MBA student in the Class of 2027.