How One Zillow Intern Turned a Career Pivot Into Product Leadership

Gonzalo De Cardenas' career journey has taken him from an e-commerce startup in Peru to business school in the U.S., a Zillow internship, and, eventually, his current role as Director of Product Management. Along the way, he discovered that the parts of his work he enjoyed most, such as solving problems, coordinating across teams, and navigating ambiguity, were pointing him toward product management.

His first experience at Zillow came during his MBA, when he joined the company's Rentals team as a product management intern in 2019. The experience confirmed that product management was the career he wanted, while the mentorship and collaborative culture he encountered gave him another reason to consider Zillow long-term.

After returning to Zillow full-time, De Cardenas steadily expanded his scope. Today, he leads the Rentals Ad Product Team, working with property management companies, landlords, sales teams, and engineers to develop advertising solutions that help fill vacancies.

"Two constants have kept me motivated over these six years, even as the job itself has changed significantly," he tells The Muse. "First, the people, and specifically the culture we've built in Rentals. It's genuinely entrepreneurial. People are empowered to take bold chances and are held accountable for delivering results that move the business forward, while also having real room to explore new ideas and collaborate across different skill sets."

For De Cardenas, that has been an exciting environment in which to grow, especially because the business has been a success.

“Being part of a growing, successful business creates real momentum and possibilities,” he added. “There's pressure to keep delivering, of course, but I like operating in an environment where we're making real progress against our goals.”

We spoke with De Cardenas about turning an internship into a long-term career, why Zillow's culture brought him back, what has changed as his responsibilities have grown, and why early-career professionals should stay curious, raise their hands, and take ownership of their path. Here’s what he had to say.

I am from Lima, Peru, where I completed my undergraduate studies. My career actually started at Linio, an e-commerce startup trying to become the first e-commerce-only "everything store" in Peru, shipping nationwide. By the time I joined, it was already running that same playbook across Colombia and Mexico as well. During my three years there, I first realized the parts of the job I liked most were the exact skills that make a good product manager.

To make that shift official, I went back to school for an MBA and moved to the U.S., spending two years at the Kellogg School of Management. During the program, I landed a PM internship on Zillow's Rentals team, in the Seattle office, back in 2019. That's how I first landed at Zillow.

I lead the Rentals Ad Product Team. We build advertising solutions that help landlords and property management companies use Zillow to fill vacancies in their buildings. It's a huge area of growth for Zillow, and we work closely with our property management partners, our sales team, and engineering to develop and launch those solutions.

Day to day, that means a lot of stakeholder meetings, planning for what's next, checking in with engineers on active projects, and having one-on-ones with my team to support them however I can.

During my internship, I worked on the long-term adoption strategy for Zillow Rental Manager, our landlord platform that lets landlords post listings, receive applications, message prospective renters, create and sign leases, and collect payments. That work confirmed product management was the career for me, and I received real mentorship from people who did not have to give it. This was exactly the kind of environment I wanted to keep learning in. So, when Zillow offered me a senior product manager role after my MBA, it was an easy yes.

Three things stood out to me about Zillow's culture. First, it was highly collaborative. Even as an intern, people were willing to lend their time to teach me, and I received real advice from senior team members that enriched the experience and set a high bar for the caliber of people I worked with.

Second, individual contributors are given real autonomy and ownership over their space, even as an intern. I've always operated best when I can chart my own path and find my own way to deliver results, so when I came back and took ownership of my own product area, I knew it was somewhere I could succeed.

Third, Zillow, especially in Rentals, rewards people who step up and take on more responsibility to help grow the business. That's proven true throughout my career here. I've been able to expand my scope, learn new parts of the Rentals business, and develop new skills. That's been invaluable as I've moved into leading larger teams, since I now have context across a lot of the marketplace and a more holistic view of the business.

The most surprising shift was that Zillow had gone from a company that operated almost entirely in-person, with deep roots in Seattle and limited employees outside that office, to what we now call CloudHQ. Our shift to a distributed workforce has enabled permanent location flexibility for many Zillow employees.

I felt that shift firsthand in my first week. During my internship, I'd learned by walking the hallways, sitting near more experienced PMs, and picking things up just by being around them in meetings. As a full-time employee, I was sitting at home by myself, so I had to be much more proactive, actively seeking out guidance and asking questions of my manager, my engineering partners, and people I'd met during my internship who were generous enough to help me figure out how to succeed in this new reality.

It is a completely different experience. As an intern, managers put real effort into scoping out a project you could deliver in three months, so you are given a lot of freedom and focus to move fast against one clear goal, largely without distractions.

As Director of Product Management now, my scope is much larger and tied directly to the overall success of the Rentals advertising business. There's constant context-switching; my team is working multiple projects at once, stakeholders are far more numerous, and there's always a long list of work to prioritize. Creating focused effort is much harder; it takes strong prioritization and alignment with Rentals’ leadership to actually invest in a big swing that needs sustained, cross-functional focus over a few months.

Knowing I was headed back to Zillow as a senior product manager in Rentals gave me clarity on what I needed to be ready for, and the freedom to use my second year to build toward it. I focused on developing user research skills, getting more comfortable with data, and building enough technical knowledge to work closely with engineering teams.

I also did an internship at 1871, a startup accelerator in Chicago, where I got to work closely with founders and learn how they'd arrived at their ideas, what they were building, and what customer pain points they were solving for. That was great preparation for coming back to build.

That said, it was still great theory, and those first few months on the team were genuinely tough. I owe a lot to my peers and my manager at the time for getting me through it.

That experience taught me that more senior members of a team have a real responsibility to look out for the people coming up behind them. So now I make a point of spending time with new hires and giving people who are new to Rentals the context they need to be successful. It is my way of paying forward what I received when I was the one just arriving.

We actually say this a lot internally: Right now is the best time to be in Rentals, and I think that's true more broadly, too. The business has matured significantly, and our bets across Rentals, Zillow Home Loans, and agent software are all progressing well, thanks to strong execution across the company.

But specifically for product people, this is an especially exciting moment because of how AI is changing the role itself. Zillow is investing heavily in AI tools for product development, and that's opening up a whole new set of possibilities, letting us work more closely and quickly with engineering, move faster from idea to shipped feature, and dig into data and research in ways we couldn't before. It's a real opportunity to develop new skills and work much more closely with this evolving technology. Most people who become product managers are drawn to exactly that kind of possibility, and Zillow is a great place to build those skills right now.

Early on, especially while you're still figuring out your path, it's really important to seek out learning opportunities and try different things. You probably won't know at the start of your career what you'll actually enjoy or be good at, so explore different projects, even within the same company, and raise your hand. That's how you get exposure to new types of work, develop new skills, meet people who might become mentors or friends, and build the visibility that lets you grow and scale your impact over time. Be proactive about managing your own path, and seek advice from more tenured people you respect.

When I first joined Zillow full-time, one of my first projects was building a new machine learning algorithm for rentals sort order, the first time I'd ever worked on an ML project. It was a steep learning curve, but I leaned on guidance from more tenured leaders and focused on playing to my strengths. I didn't need to be a machine learning engineer; we had great ones on the team. My job was making sure the project was moving and that we were building the right thing for our marketplace. Understanding that role and collaborating tightly with engineering and our cross-functional stakeholders is how we got it delivered.