Gem Nwannem

University of Washington, Foster School of Business

“Product marketer for global shipping. Founder of an indie magazine distribution company. Same problems, different scale.”

Age: 31

Hometown: Brooklyn, New York

Fun fact about yourself:

I host a vinyl radio show called Afternoon Jump on KFFP 90.3 FM in Portland, where I dig into highlife, Afrobeat, and West African diaspora records. Most of the music I play has never been digitized.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Seton Hall University, B.S. in Economics

Where are you currently working? Senior Product Marketing Manager at Amazon Shipping, leading go-to-market launches and product messaging for the EU regions. I am also the founder of Neesh, a wholesale distribution platform for independent magazines.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? The thing I am most proud of is not a specific project. It is that I have learned to adapt to a kind of career I did not think was for me. I spent the first part of my career in startups and small tech, and I assumed that was the lane I would stay in. The opportunity to join Amazon and work with teams worldwide was a real stretch. The scale and pace were different, and the work required navigating politics and structures I had not operated within before. I had to learn to do all of that very quickly while still delivering at the level the role required.

What I am proud of is that I have handled it better than I expected to. I came in with the right instincts and a strong product marketing foundation, and Foster gave me the frameworks I needed to step up to the plate when things got harder than I anticipated. The version of me who started this program would not have been ready for this role. The version of me who is finishing it is doing it well.

Why did you choose this school’s online MBA program? I chose the University of Washington Foster Hybrid MBA for two reasons. The first was the program structure. I needed a program that would not pause my career, because the most interesting business problems I had to solve were already in front of me. The hybrid format meant I could take a marketing analytics class while running real campaigns, take a negotiation class while negotiating a real contract, and take a strategy class while building Neesh’s go-to-market plan. That tight loop between classroom and operating reality is, in my opinion, the only way to internalize an MBA.

The second was the people. Foster’s hybrid cohort is not a place where students hide. It is a small, ambitious group of working professionals from across industries, and the program is structured so that you know each other. I came in wanting to be challenged by people who were navigating real complexity in their own work, and that is what I got.

What was your favorite part of being in an online MBA program? The compression. In a hybrid format, you are not separating school from work. You are running both at full speed, which forces a kind of clarity about what is worth your time. I learned to triage faster, to listen more sharply in meetings because I had less time to process them later, and to take what was working in class and present it to stakeholders the next morning.

The other thing I loved was the cohort. We met in person on campus at the start of each quarter, and those [four weekends a year] became some of the most generative times I have had professionally. People came in with real problems from their own companies, and you could feel the room working on them together. [Note: Close to 95% of the Foster Hybrid MBA coursework is online.]

How did your online MBA experience compare with your in-the-classroom experience as an undergraduate student? It was a completely different relationship to learning. In undergrad, I was learning concepts in the abstract. At Foster, I was applying what I learned in real time, often the same week, sometimes the same day. The frameworks landed differently because they had to work in a real job, with real stakes, on real people.

The other shift was the people around me. My Foster classmates were operators with expertise I did not have, and being in a cohort of people that sharp made me sharper and smarter. My undergrad classmates and I were all figuring out who we wanted to be. My Foster classmates already knew, and they showed up to class ready to teach the rest of us what they had learned doing it.

How has your online MBA education helped you in your current job? Two specific ways. The first is that I now have a vocabulary for things I was already doing on instinct. Negotiation, in particular, used to feel like something I was good at without quite knowing why. Working through Foster’s structured negotiation class gave me language for the moves I was making, which means I can now teach them and build a team that does them too.

The second is that the MBA forced me to spend real time on areas I had been avoiding. Managerial accounting and corporate finance are not where my natural strengths sit, and I would not have prioritized them on my own. Being graded on them was the only way I was ever going to get serious about them, and now those frameworks are part of how I read a business.

Did you earn a promotion while in the program or immediately after graduation? I started the program as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at a small tech startup and, during the program, moved into the same role at Amazon, a global big tech company. The title is the same. The scope, the stakes, and the platform are completely different. That move would not have happened without the credibility, frameworks, and network that Foster gave me, and I credit the program directly for the opportunity.

Why did you pursue an online MBA program instead of a full-time residential or executive MBA program? A full-time program would have meant pausing the most interesting parts of my career, which would have defeated the point. I founded Neesh during the Foster Hybrid MBA. I also moved from a small tech startup to big tech during the program. I built and shipped real product marketing work that paid for tuition and informed every class I took. Stepping away from all of that for two years to sit in a classroom would have made me a worse student, not a better one.

I also did not want an Executive MBA. I am too early in my career to make the case that I belong in a room of senior executives, and I wanted classmates who were still building, still figuring out their next move, still hungry. Foster’s hybrid format gave me the cohort experience without the pause.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? The professors who shaped my thinking on this most were my managerial accounting professor and my marketing analytics professor. Both encouraged us to actively engage with AI in our coursework, and both spent real class time teaching us how to think about a task before reaching for a tool. The principle was simple. If you understand what the analysis requires, you can use AI to handle the data cleaning, the formatting, and the less interesting parts of the work. This frees you to spend your time on the part that matters, which is the insight. Marketing analytics in particular reframed AI for me as a way to pressure-test my own thinking rather than replace it.

The bigger insight has been outside the classroom. With Neesh, my work in product marketing, and a full course load running in parallel, AI has become essential to how I organize my thinking. I use it to draft and pressure-test arguments, to find through-lines across work that lives in different contexts, do first-pass research on industries I am still learning, and study more efficiently when my window is small. The skill I have built is not “using AI.” It is knowing what to ask, what to throw away, and when to trust my own judgment over the output.

Number of Hours Per Week Spent on an Online MBA: 15 to 20 on average, more during finals and intensive weekends. I was also Student Council Chair and took an accelerated load, so my hours sit at the higher end of what is required.

What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? I want to keep building things. In the near term, that means growing Neesh into the kind of distribution and retail infrastructure that makes independent print viable at scale. It also means a career building product, positioning, pricing, and placement for brands across supply chain, where I think the most interesting unsolved problems still live.

Longer term, I am drawn to research. I have spent the majority of my career working in supply chain, and the questions I keep returning to sit at the intersection of physical supply chain, digital and physical infrastructure, and the people and systems that control how both get built. I am interested in how those forces shape a place’s cultural memory. What survives, what proliferates, what disappears, and why. Most people writing about cultural memory do not know how a warehouse works. Most people building warehouses do not think about cultural memory. I want to do work that takes both seriously, because the through-line is real and almost nobody is looking at it from the inside.

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