Finding Empathy in Unique Places
Cecelia Myers (mpd2 ‘17) shares how her undergraduate degree in literature inspires how she leads product management for one of the world’s leading industrial supply companies.
Cecelia Myers (mpd2 ‘17) never saw her career journey following a narrow path with a preset destination. Instead, she continuously immersed herself in experiences that sparked her interest.
That’s how Myers finds herself as vice president and group product manager at industrial supply distributor Grainger after earning her undergraduate degree in English Literature. She studied a topic she loved and was open to using that knowledge in creative ways, starting her career in venture capital and eventually ending up in tech. A key part of the journey was her time in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Product Design and Development Management (mpd2) program.
“I’ve tried to consistently pick roles working with and for interesting people on initiatives I was excited about,” said Myers, who joined Grainger in 2023. “I was less interested in a set career path. In pursuing a less traditional route, I was able to get a wide breadth of experiences that were easily applied in different roles.”
This spirit brought her to Grainger, a distributor of maintenance, repair, and operating products and services across millions of customers in North America, each with their own unique needs.
Myers remains an avid reader today and sees how her current work builds on her time studying Byron and Shakespeare.
“A cornerstone of great product management is deep empathy for and understanding of your user," she said. "Studying literature requires the reader to immerse themselves in the words, form a perspective, and bring others along with their thinking. Product teams require a similar approach to deliver value to users.”
Today, she leads product teams responsible for developing software that enables Grainger to operate efficiently while helping customers quickly find what they need from among the millions of products the company sells.
“Our customers are often completing a task and need to quickly identify the right technical products so they can get on with it,” Myers said. “Showing them high-quality solutions that unlock the value of the excellent product information and product expertise we have at Grainger is a really fun and differentiating problem to solve.”
It’s a problem Myers says she is better able to tackle because of her time in the mpd2 program.
Myers said she chose mpd2 because of its focus on building physical and digital products. How digital experiences interact with customers in the real world is of particular interest to her, and mpd2 offers that experience. The program’s emphasis on creating products gave her a strong foundation to build the second stage of her career.
In the first stage, Myers — at age 26 — co-founded an online service for women called CakeStyle, which acted as a virtual styling partner that curated clothes based on the user’s preferences and sizes. She also worked as director of global product and design for Groupon’s global operations function before joining mpd2.
“In mpd2, I was fortunate to be paired with some extremely smart teammates who were good at things I wasn’t,” she said. “When we had to build and pitch a product at the end of the program, our collective strengths created momentum in building a product that I was really proud to be a part of.”
After graduation, Myers spent four years at information technology solutions company CDW, where she led their digital business, including product design and product management. Now at Grainger, she leads teams that explore how the company creates, organizes, and exposes information about the company's products to their customers.
Myers continues to be inspired by Grainger's commitment to technology and new ideas. She is a leader with the company’s tech team – called Grainger Technology Group (GTG) – that experiments with new technology across artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and large-language models (LLMs). The work examines clear, tangible problems to solve on behalf of users.
“We explore new tech in every single product team at GTG, but never just because it’s cool," she said. "We start with the customer and use AL or ML to tackle problems the technology is truly useful at solving. We don’t do things because they look good. We want to build products that are good.”
Sometimes, new technology connects to her writing roots, too.
“I find LLMs are outstanding editors," she said. "While I nearly always rewrite their output, I find they act as great sounding boards when writing drafts.”
Myers also introduced a new outlet for innovative ideas when she connected Grainger with Northwestern Engineering. In 2024, the company sponsored a capstone project for students in the school's Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) program and Northwestern's MBAi program, a joint-degree program offered between the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering.
Myers previously worked with MSAI and MBAi students in the capstone program when she worked at CDW.
She has strong feelings about how job seekers can stand out in the technology space. A key element for her is a candidate’s ability to work and function within their team. It's a realization she had while in mpd2 and one she continues to focus on today.
"Investing in my team is the most important thing that I do each day," Myers said. "That was true in grad school and remains true as a leader today. My job is to act as a sounding board, ensure they have clarity, and hear what they need from me. Their strengths and tenacity are what have built Grainger’s impressive technology advantage."