First post. Definitely not my magnum opus. Here goes nothing.

🌱 In The Beginning

I first fell in love with Product and the role of Product Manager (PM) when as a third-year student in the National University of Singapore Overseas Colleges (NOC) programme, I gathered one year’s worth of belongings and flew 15,323 kilometres on a 22-hour flight to the city that never sleeps, New York City, not knowing how the next year would transpire.

As part of the programme, I interned as a PM Intern for a tech fitness startup called Aaptiv. It was really a baptism of fire for me, being introduced to the different product artifacts and having to pick up the nomenclature pretty quickly. But I loved it from the get go. I never knew that there exists a job that could be a mesh of data analysis, product development, design and business strategy - perfect for a jack of all trades kinda guy. I had never really developed a strong interest in any particular subject in school, preferring instead to widen my breadth of understanding, thus enrolling in a multi-disciplinary major.

At Aaptiv, I really understood the rigour and discipline needed to be a good PM, but also the importance of having a good product culture in the company, thanks to my PM supervisor, Zach. Observing the close collaboration at Aaptiv between PMs, Product Designers, Engineers and Data Analysts, made me realise that the PM is not a CEO of the product but in fact a servant-leader of the product. Being able to do some front-end development work on the Web Team helped me also to better appreciate the work of a PM and how important they were in driving the progress of the product.

When I came back to Singapore a year later, I knew that my product career was far from over. So I decided to intern at local telco company, Circles.Life, where PMs had to be the voice of the customer and the customer mattered the most. It was no wonder that our CSAT scores were constantly hitting above 95%, which was practically unheard of in the Singapore telco industry. And I kept that mantra with me as I regularly dug deep into our Zendesk tickets to identify product gaps.

By the time I ended my internship with Circles.Life, I soon found myself out of school and being thrown into the abyss of unemployment. Once stark difference I noticed was in the dearth of junior PM roles available in Singapore, as compared to the Big Apple. I was unsuccessful in all my PM job applications but decided that my best bet would be to sharpen my data analysis skills, which is how I ended up in ZALORA as a CRM data analyst. On the side, I had built a tool that organised mobile screenshots of some of the pretty interesting apps that I had come across, annotating features and user flows, helping me to observe and learn best practices from mutiple app products.

✍🏽 So Why Am I Writing a Product Blog?

I realised this only after a while, but I don’t have a portfolio of products that I shipped as a PM. That possibly puts me at a disadvantage when applying for PM roles. The only way I can currently show my aptitude as a PM is through my writing. Good, clear writing is a necessary trait for a PM. At the same time, I wish to write posts that express my ideas on product features.

This is my portfolio.

Which is why every week, I write a blogpost on a killer feature/product (Y) I believe an established company (X) should build. I hope you enjoy following me on this journey.

Cheers.