In July and August 2009, I did my first corporate internship at Procter & Gamble, in the Customer Business Development department at the Casablanca headquarters. It was my first real exposure to the corporate world, and it shaped how I think about feedback, technology, and customers in ways that stayed with me long after the internship ended.
A year called “Pitbull”
That year, the CBD department had given itself a name: Pitbull. The idea behind it was simple and direct: if you catch an opportunity, never let it go.
It sounds like a slogan, but it functioned as a filter for how the team operated. Opportunities weren’t treated as things that would wait for a better moment. They were treated as things you had to seize the instant they appeared, and hold onto with the same persistence the name implied. That mentality shaped how I approached the rest of the internship, and how I’ve approached opportunities since.
We don’t have weaknesses, only opportunities to be better
The internal assessment I received that summer introduced me to a philosophy I still carry: we don’t have weaknesses, only opportunities to be better.
It’s a small reframing, but it changes what feedback feels like. A weakness is something you carry, fixed and a little shameful. An opportunity to be better is something you act on. That single shift in language, at twenty-two, in my first real corporate evaluation, taught me how to receive feedback without flinching from it, and that lesson has outlasted everything else from that internship.
Technology is the enabler, not the solution
As an IT student, I came in assuming technology was the answer to most problems. P&G taught me otherwise.
Through numerous field visits, I saw firsthand that technology doesn’t solve anything on its own. It enables solutions, but only once you’ve actually listened to the customer or user first. Without that listening, the most sophisticated technology is solving the wrong problem, efficiently. That distinction, between technology as the solution and technology as the enabler, has stayed with me through every system I’ve built since.
Access, at the headquarters
Being based at the HQ in Casablanca meant I wasn’t isolated in one function. I had the chance to meet leaders across different departments, people whose work I would otherwise never have been exposed to as a student. It gave me an early, broad view of how a large organization actually operates, department by department, rather than the narrow slice most internships offer.
In closing
Looking back, P&G gave me three things that mattered far more than the internship title: a philosophy for handling feedback that removed the shame from it, a corrected understanding of where technology actually belongs in solving problems, and a first real glimpse of how decision-makers across an organization think and operate.
From Intention to Impact, this internship is where I first learned that the tools you’re trained on, in my case, technology, are never the point. The point is what they enable once you’ve actually listened.
