Not long after graduating from Cal Poly Pomona, Courtney Yu has found a career she loves in mobile gaming, an innovative and ever-evolving industry.

“If you’ve heard of Pokémon GO, you’ve heard of Niantic,” says Yu (’20, marketing management), an associate product marketing manager at San Francisco-based Niantic.

Since she joined the company in 2022, Yu has helped launched two mobile games — NBA All-World and Monster Hunter Now, which released in September 2023. As a product marketer, part of her job is helping to ensure that Niantic’s games, new features and updates get broad visibility among current and new players. Yu is currently working to promote Pokémon GO.

“For example, I worked with mobile app stores like Apple and Google to gather all of our assets like our key art, video assets, etc. to make sure that we’re featured on the app stores,” she says. “I also helped our live events team to plan what we want to do at events, like South by Southwest and PAX West, and fill in the gaps.

“My role in product marketing is very much like a Swiss army knife,” she says. “It’s super broad but also very fun and very rewarding, especially when you’re working in such a cool industry like gaming.”

Throughout her academic and career journey, Yu says she had great faculty, staff and peer mentors who guided her along the way, from inspiring her in class to prepping for job interviews to supporting her as a student club leader.

At Niantic, she met a fellow Bronco and mentor in Andrew Macintosh (’13, marketing management), who was on her hiring panel. Yu says she had heard of Macintosh, who helped organize the first Bronco Startup Challenge in 2012 when he was an undergraduate at Cal Poly Pomona.

“Andrew was a great mentor. We always made time to talk about my career growth, what I wanted to do, what I wanted to accomplish and what were my next steps,” Yu says. “He really taught me the foundations of product marketing, and at Niantic we were able to launch a game together.”

“My role in product marketing is very much like a Swiss army knife,” she says. “It’s super broad but also very fun and very rewarding, especially when you’re working in such a cool industry like gaming.”

Yu is enjoying all aspects of her role, including attending premiere tech and creative events like SXSW to working with team members across the globe to receiving user feedback.

“Honestly, I love hearing the community feedback. I love it when people say they love our game. It gives like a really great sense of validation that all the hard work that we put into is paying off,” Yu says. “I also really like it when people have valid criticisms of our game. That means people care enough about our game to actually put in critical feedback for our team to take in.

“It’s rewarding to have launched a game. Not many people can say that, because it takes so many years to develop a game. I just got very lucky with the timing that I was able to join Niantic and joined the different teams that I was on.”