“There is no set route” Jay Fong, Product Manager at ByteDance / TikTok
Good grades and a successful academic career will make life a little easier, but Jay Fong encourages us to keep our eyes and minds open.
by Sunny Liu
Back in June, Jay Fong, product manager at TikTok/ByteDance sat down with us for a chat. We expected him to tell us how he leapt out of university and into his dream job, but, like his current company, his story is less conventional and more colourful than one might expect. As Jay himself said, “there is no set route for you to have to do something, don’t force yourself.”
Forging your own path
Jay Fong’s career began at 17 when he joined an internship with A*STAR in his first year of JC at the Institute of High-Performance Computing. There, he picked up coding and created a computational model to optimise polymerase chain reactions in natural convective media. He decided not to stay in programming, however, and earned a Bachelor’s in Business Management in SMU. Even without the most desirable A level grades, Jay managed to forge a career path through “luck” and skill.
Jay has worked at several different companies throughout his career, including Accenture and honestbee. During an internship at SeaTown Holdings International, a subsidiary of Temasek, he enjoyed the analytical nature of the work involving global equities for global markets but he didn’t get much fulfilment from it. He couldn’t see himself spending his career just making numbers go up in a spreadsheet. He went on to work as a technology consultant at Accenture, covering many different projects including a clinic management system. The work was demanding and the management less than ideal, so with his newfound skills, he moved to honestbee, where he took on the role of product management, helping with planning and strategy, investor relations, and many other projects, and learned about business from the team. He also worked at another start-up, Traveloka, as a technical product manager for a year.
Out of all his past roles, Jay seemed to consider his time at honestbee the best years of his life, where he made plenty of lifelong friends. This is what he highlighted: the relationships, memories, and emotions you experience are something you will remember long after you’ve forgotten the role.
That is how Jay viewed his past occupations: not just as jobs, but as experiences — unique and special, helping him become who and what he is today. He learned how to manage, by observing how his managers treated their employees, noting how toxic leadership can make employees feel. He learned the importance of empathy, not just towards users and consumers, but also his colleagues. Understanding users, their experiences, pains, and problems, and eradicating all of the preconceived biases he had when he first began his career. Realising that everyone is an expert in their field, no matter who or what they worked on. To Jay, it was important to understand that people have different perspectives so you should never be dismissive of their ideas, even if you disagreed with them.
Working at ByteDance/TikTok
At ByteDance, Jay’s role is to build analytical tools for mobile developers, to create a safe environment for users, and to use machine learning to determine what are good/bad advertisements on TikTok. As a product manager, Jay is a jack of all trades. He figures out what the problems are, who is affected by those issues, and who are the stakeholders. He then collaborates with other data scientists, engineers, user experience designers, managers and so on, to find a solution and measure its success. This is where the need for collaboration and communication comes in, “a product manager is nothing without his team”. Knowing the technical details of a product and how it can be made and how to work with experts from different fields, are both imperative to creating a good product. Because you may know how to do something, but there are specialists who know the best practices to make it as good as it can be.
Jay’s day to day involves talking with stakeholders, collecting information, discussing with his engineers, and having lots and lots of meetings. To Jay, this is a plus. He enjoys working with people, seeing them mature and overcome faults, both technical and social, and feeling that he was a part of that process.
Beyond collaboration, a product manager’s job is to understand a user’s pain points, and work with their team to create ways to resolve these pain points in ways that are profitable to the business. To Jay, the hardest part about being a product manager is finding the right problems to solve.
Jay enjoys his work at TikTok not only because there is a large focus on tech, but also because throughout all his previous occupations, he always looked for ways to help solve problems at larger and larger scales. TikTok happens to have a massive user base with over 800 million monthly active users. There he is free to dream about the future and solve problems. He is able to choose his projects, work with intelligent people, to dream up solutions and see the people who benefited. Even if he wasn’t a product manager, he would still want a career in a product firm.
A dreamer that wants to change the world
No matter how meaningful Jay considers his current work, he continues to dream of becoming an entrepreneur. He is, however, wary of the unspoken failures, the 99% of people who don’t make it compared to the 1% of successes who do. But not everyone needs to be the next Jeff Bezos, just having a good idea like making a cheaper single-use cup will do. So he hasn’t given up his dream. According to him, “it’s never easy, and there are always high risks, but it will be fulfilling.”
Jay told us not to put a school, a role, or a person on a pedestal, to find self-worth outside of others’ validation. To think about what we wanted to get out of our schooling, have realistic expectations and know what to do after university. It is important not only to excel but also to make connections. You need a good network to help you find an occupation you like in the future.
Sunny is a rising 11th-grade student at United World College Southeast Asia (Singapore).
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