Every time I go home, I openly talk to my grandmother about not wanting to have children, which may not be a wise thing to say for a female born in Asian culture. She never shows a strong disapproval nor a sign that she is fond of the idea. In her hussy voice, she reminds me that the society will see me as an outcast if choose to do so. She always gives the same response, but I keep telling her anyways. It’s much less about seeking her approval and more about simply sharing things with her like a little kid confiding in her best friend, even when sometimes some of my decisions are considered ‘controversial’.

The truth is, I don’t know if I will ever possess the kind of patience and selflessness as a mother like my grandmother and maybe that’s what scares me. While I recognize that being a mom is the most precious thing in the world, I can’t help but feel a sense of bewilderment when I think about her; for she has always put her children first and sacrificing herself so much in the process that it feels like she left behind who she was. I never know if my grandmother has ever got the chance to live for herself up until this day.

My grandmother is not unique, and that you may see your grandmother in mine. In her 20s, she worked extra hours then came home to feed her three children while my grandfather was not able to stay at home often due to the nature of his job. She took different gigs to pay for her children’s college tuition like cooking meals for a small group of workers and collecting tea leaves on the mountains. Her angsty children were a handful, and she was always busy.

When my mom gave birth to me and my sister at the young age of 21, we moved to live with my grandmother so that my parents could figure their life out. My grandmother has been through a lot, which makes her a grumpy woman, but she never questioned nor objected when it came to caring for her kids and grandchildren. And sometimes we just take that for granted.

When my grandfather passed away from an accident and my parents god divorced, my grandma was only around 40 years old. She never remarried, or more like she never had the time to date. She was too busy filling in the roles of a dad to both me and her children.

Just like that, she never truly has a break.

When was the last time we bought a nice meal for our grandmothers?

I would never forget how she always bought chicken thighs for me and my sister, cooked them deliciously and put them into our bowls while eating her rice with fish sauce — a Vietnamese dressing used to season our food. Sometimes she would pick up the leftover bones from our meals and cherished those very last pieces of meat sticking out. We happily ate our meat, us young naive little kids.

When we got a little bit better off, and by that I meant we managed to buy a house and could now buy expensive organic food that was once out of reach, my grandmother’s responsibility of feeding the kids turned into a different type of duty. She now stepped in to take care of my aunt’s son (or my cousin) in his daily routine when my aunt is away from home, which is relatively frequent due to her job as a businesswoman. My grandmother also helped my mom with her real estate business when my mom did not want to hire more staff. There were times when my grandmother, with her joints now becoming weaker every day, went from one apartment to another to greet guests, wash their clothes, makes their beds, and cleans up the house. My heart always grew heavier when I got home and saw her floating from one place to another.

I wonder if she’s happier now. I reminisced about those days when me and my grandmother lived in a rented apartment. Each afternoon she would hang out with some neighbors and they would play volleyball together. I wonder if she was happier then. I wonder if she will forever live with her responsibilities until the day she dies. That is her choice, of course, to devote herself to her motherly duties. I can’t argue with her about her choice, just as much as how I can’t blame her children for being selfish.

“It is hard to live under their roof and just do nothing” — she said.

Grandmas are the toughest. They are so independent and strong that it is impossible for me to imagine if I can ever be like that. They are just there, silently devoting their own lives without asking for anything. I hope we wake up every day and feel grateful for the badass grandmas that we have, and that sometimes a call back home can make her day a little less lonely

Can We Talk About Our Grandmas was originally published in An Idea (by Ingenious Piece) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I should mark today as one of my best days. I never thought my personal happiness would depend on a product requirement document (PRD). After revising a PRD for god-know-how-many times under a tight deadline and constant stress to move to a new house, coupled with some nights working until 4 am and periodic dreams of failing to transfer the requirements to our developers, I finally made it. No more revisions, my friends.

I have been working as a product manager intern for Shopee Ltd. Shopee is an e-commerce giant under Seagroup, operating in eight Asian countries and Brazil. I have been here for five weeks. I joined the user/account team, and I have been initially focusing on SOUP, which is Shopee’s access control system for 24,000 users.

What is an access control system? That’s exactly what I was thinking initially. Imagine Shopee has hundreds of different teams and sub-teams in each region. An access control system is a one-stop place for teams to streamline the process of managing access of employees, ensure security and increase business efficiency by allowing company employees to quickly apply for roles across different regions and teams.

When I was three weeks into the company, Patrick, my manager, trusted me enough to let me take over a big project, which is to build an audit system under SOUP. Usually, after a PM gets business requirements from stakeholders, they will draft a PRD to include all the requirements and product design before transferring it to developers for deployment.

An audit system is a big part in access control. In Shopee, auditors have to go through a biannual review to guarantee the right user has the right role, and the right role has the right permission. This may sound simple, but imagine when you have around 24,000 users; it isn’t much fun. The audit system is, therefore, requested to save the day, in the hope it will automate this whole manual process while ensuring utmost accuracy.

When I joined the call with our auditors, who requested this feature, we made sure to capture their expectations and clarified feature requirements, as well as feature scope. I was sure I understood their expectations, and they thought so, too. We were both wrong.

When I look back, my first PRD was very bad, but we didn’t get many comments from the requester side. They would drop some comments here and there, but nothing too dramatic. Not until we went to the first PRD transfer with developers did I realize there were so many missing back-end details, and there was a clash between the PRD and the requesters’ expectation. Only when requesters went through the actual flow of the system did they acknowledge this is not really how they had imagined it would be. They started changing their preferences. My original PRD consisted of five main modules, which were thought to be very well-defined for the sake of auditors’ use, but we cut two modules and, eventually, arrived at two modules only.

Overall, the clients share the same big idea about what and how the audit system should work, but they have minor differences when it comes to some smaller details (or what we think are small details, until they drastically changed the whole thing). I felt kind of bad after the first review, because our developers were confused, due to a lot of inconsistency and missing logic. The product scope was too big for less than two months left. Our resources are meager, with only one front-end developer and two back-end developers in SOUP.

After the first review, I revised the PRD. This time, I tried to communicate with our stakeholders as much as possible. Patrick scheduled another call with them after my second PRD, as we were more careful now before transferring to our developers. What started off as around 20 pages of mock-ups now turned into a whole lot more, as you can see from my messy Figma:

My very big lesson is you should never trust the business stakeholders, really. Even if they send you a very detailed business requirements document (BRD), and schedule the first and second meetings with you to clarify their expectations, never stop there. It will be better to not hastily assume you have understood their expectations and jump right off into writing the PRD. In the future, I would definitely approach it by doing the mock-up first, with no documents, and make requesters go through the actual flow, note their concerns and their changes in preferences, and revise the mock-up until it’s perfect before diving into the PRD.

Most of my time working until 3 am was because, for each change, big or small, it would have an effect on the entire system design, so I had to modify not only the mock-up, but also the messy PRD and the logic behind it.

What differentiates an excellent PM from an OK PM?

I asked this question to many PMs, including those from Microsoft, GoJek and KMS Tech. They always told me quite similar things. It varies from company to company, yet the ability to communicate with both business stakeholders and developers surely plays the winning card. This is true, but I never quite understood it, because it sounds quite general. I know I need business skills and some understanding about tech, but I never realized what exactly this was, until I dove myself into this project.

What to understand about tech

“Think from the perspective of a developer. If they look into your PRD requirement, would they know right away how to code it?” Wise words from Patrick.

Even for the most seemingly obvious thing, we need to be able to know where this data coming from. For example, a user ID is not just a user ID. How is it created from the back end? At what point does it appear in the front end? I probably could have written a much more detailed and clear PRD at the beginning, had I acquired more knowledge about how the back end works, and how data is stored and generated. This would not only help to better understand how your product is being built at its core, but also how to estimate the effort of development when talking to business stakeholders, specifically. This is super-helpful when requesters have fancy product requirements, while your team only has limited resources.

What to understand when talking to business stakeholders

The best product will be those allowing users to use without having to read or figure out too much on their own. The product should be user friendly and instinctive, and it should minimize any complexity involved while in use. It is also crucial to keep looking for alternative use cases and brainstorm how the product can maximize the user experience.

While user experience is crucial, I find it very easy to fall into the trap of siding with users and forgetting you are also representing people on the development team. In my case, we were debating between the two ways to let reviewers update a user: whether to update a user on the spot using inline edit, or make them update batch users by uploading a CSV file. The former is, apparently, more user friendly and convenient, but in a business case when reviewers have to check thousands of users at a time, inline edit is not ideal. It would be best if we could do both features to optimize user experience, but again, the limited resources come into play, so we have to decide which option comes first.

While user experience is crucial, remember you are not only representing your users, but there are other stakeholders you should keep in mind, as well.

Do research on edge cases

Another trap I fell into is I imagined the perfect route for the product without taking edge cases into much consideration. Edge cases here can include how your product handles empty state, errors or overload state. In each scenario, the logic behind the scene definitely changes and can be tricky. A great product manager (such as Patrick) is someone who can think of thousands of edge cases while communicating with business stakeholders and understand how the workflow will alter in between.

No one has time for your detailed PRD

It’s a sad fact, but developers won’t have time to read a detailed PRD, regardless of how much effort you put into it. As a PM, it is important to do a detailed PRD, because developers will need to refer to small details during the development process. But how can we make developers have a grasp of what we are building, thereby allowing them to be able to estimate the effort as soon as possible?

I tried to put an overall mock-up flow at the beginning of my PRD, so developers can have an overview of how the whole thing works before writing detailed descriptions for each feature functionality. Visuals definitely do a better job than words.

For a product with more than one type of user (in this case, both reviewers and auditors are our clients), a PM needs to thoroughly understand how a change in the system can affect the other party. Developers will spend much of the time in the PRD review asking questions in order to save some time reading 10 pages, so a PM must make sure she/he understands all the logic behind the scene, any hidden problems that might arise, all use cases, and why (most important) the current product design is the most optimal — considering other factors, such as available resources, business requirements, user experience, etc.

The ability to synthesize information

This is such an important skill that I can’t stress it enough; I’m still trying to improve it day by day. In some discussions, when a lot of information from different stakeholders is being thrown at you, you must make sure you have an idea of what they are talking about. Even if you don’t quite understand everything (such as in some technical discussions), it is important to, at least, have a sense of what they are trying to convey, then confirm with them by saying something such as: “Here is what I understand from what you are saying. Is this correct?”

I was so happy when I got the message that said: “The PRD looks great! We are good to go!”

I felt like a stone on top of my chest was lifted up. It can get frustrating and discouraging when you fail to transfer the product at first try, but I think what is important is the experience taken away from it. Being a great product manager is no easy task, but once you are able to take up the challenge, you’ll feel this rewarding feeling, and a great sense of responsibility toward your client and your team. Once the product comes out of the paper, you might even feel extreme happiness, when you have been able to work with an awesome team to bring something to life.

The past two weeks were by no means easy, but what I got from it was so valuable. Also, if you are someone’s manager out there, please be like Patrick. He trusted me, and that motivated me a lot to deliver this project as best as I could.

The Lessons I Learned During My First Big PRD Transfer was originally published in Agile Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Prioritizing features has always been a challenge to me during my journey into product management. One can waste tremendous human and financial resources, if either one of these scenarios happen:

• Building a feature customers don’t want and not building a feature that matters.
• Focusing on a feature that needs more resources than what is available at a time.
• Building a feature without realizing a better alternative already exists.

There’s no strict framework for product managers to follow, of course. I have seen product managers using different prioritizing schemes in their roadmaps. Some base their estimation on competitors, while others choose to focus on available resources of the company. The tricky part is that product managers receive user complaints, feedback or suggestions on a regular basis, if not too often. They are requested to make changes here and there, add more of this and less of that. So how can product managers quickly decide if a solution is worth pursuing?

My first task during onboarding week with Shopee, an e-commerce giant in Southeast Asia, was to research and recommend features to be built. As part of the User & Account team, I was in charge of improving and building SOUP — an access control system for the companies that basically (and hopefully) makes it easier for cross-regional teams to manage, control and integrate their accounts into a shared service.

After some research, I told my manager about a feature that will automatically grant access to contractor employees for an effective period of time based on their contract. The managers, therefore, won’t have to go back to the system and manually remove access permission one by one, after the employees leave the firm. Would this feature be needed, and should we prioritize it in our next release?

My manager asked me five questions in 10 minutes that helped me find the answer myself. I found these questions extremely helpful, if one needs to make the decision on the spot about which feature is of utmost priority and which one can wait:

1. How severe is the problem this feature is solving?

Severe, as in how many people are being affected, and what is its urgency estimation? In short, why are we solving this problem?

In my case, I estimate the company might have at least 1,000 part-time employees or interns across the region per month, all of whom have varying contract durations. Since access permission is approved by their managers, it is also their responsibility to remove access for people no longer on the team. This feature will, therefore, save a huge amount of time and effort, as they don’t have to go back to the system and manually tick off the box every time a part-time employee off-boards.

2. What will be displaying on the front end?

• Name of the employee
• Types of access permission
• Contract duration, including start date and end date
• Options for managers to automatically revoke their access

3. What is the logic behind the back end?

If the current date passes the employee’s end date, then the access is automatically revoked.

4. Are there any alternatives out there yet?

It’s in this step that I figure out we already have an alternative out there, so much more simple and obvious, that I was surprised at why it didn’t cross my mind at all at the beginning.

5. Do we have enough resources to proceed at the time?

This question uses the input broken down from points 2 and 3. I didn’t come to this step at the time, but this is definitely a very important thing to bear in mind, because sometimes, constraints in resources are the culprit for a delay in product delivery. You definitely want to direct resources into what is of utmost priority first.

Product managers have to maintain incredible patience and clarity in order to absorb a massive flow of user feedback and suggestions from other stakeholders. It’s always good to develop a quick “framework” that helps break down the features quickly to determine their priority level in the queue.

Five Quick Questions to Ask Before Deciding to Build Features was originally published in Agile Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My first religious practice by no mean started off with a serious intention. I visited Nepal in 2019, only to find myself staying in a monastery for 10 days learning the basic foundation of buddhism philosophy because it was one of the recommended activities for tourists. Basic tourist I am, yes. Many interesting and respectful conversations with atheists take place, and I think that sometimes people are blaming religion as a scapegoat for human’s misdeeds.

Now it’s not like I’m trying to change someone’s religious practice, but it is crucial to examine the question seriously, especially nowadays when mainstream media hugely impacts people’s perspectives without them realizing its bias.

The Cause Of Misery?

I’ve heard people claim that they chose to be an atheist because religion itself is a cause for misery. Religion has been extensively used as a political weapon to benefit a certain group of people — a cause of wars and terrorism. I agree that religion has been and continuously being exploited. In the book Betrayal: the crisis in the catholic churches, which later inspired Oscar-winning film Spotlight, I felt sick reading about how people, under the disguise of catholicism, molested and traumatized thousands of kids, yet always successfully getting away from their degenerate acts’ consequences just because they were publicly viewed as the missionaries of god. they took advantage of trusts from parents to benefit their sexual desire while still being able to act high and mighty when accepting a ton of donations from practitioners. Religion has also been the culprit of wars in many countries and groups of people. Blood and tears are shed between Shia and Sunni groups, for example, (the two major denominations of Muslim), among countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and the list goes on. As i think very well-put by my friend, “some of the most diabolical acts have been committed by those whose faith towards their god is strongest”.

Human As The Real Culprit

What I think we should be aware of is that religion itself is twisted and misused by humans. Humans, in the name of religion, create their own evil agenda and once turmoils happen to take place, they turn to religion treating it like a scapegoat. There are surly many surreptitious practitioners who commit frightful acts as a result of their blindly following the wrong teachings without further examination or reflection. However if there’s anything they should be blamed for it’s their own ignorance. they also deserve a certain level of sympathy, for they simply play as the pawns in someone else’s political agenda. Religion itself doesn’t have any fault.

To me, Prophet Muhammed, known as the last messenger of God in Islam, is probably the most progressive human being at the time. Over 1500 years ago he received his first revelation from God and successfully built an Islamic empire that took off in Saudi and expanded later to the surrounding neighbours. It’s true that now when someone mentions Islam, thanks to mainstream media, our brain automatically translates it to extremism, zero women’s rights, and terrorism. Barely does anyone know that Muhammed spent over 60 years of his life preaching a religion that originally promotes and protects women’s rights; a religion that aims to blur the line between the rich and the poor; a religion that discourages social hierarchy. In his days, Shira (Islamic law that forms tradition in Islam) recognized that women should be treated fairly in the society: a women had the power to own properties; a man couldn’t marry more than 4 wives at the time. this is not because man’s status is assumably superior to woman, which give them the right to marry more than one wife. Rather, the law takes women with their husbands sacrificing in wars into consideration and hopefully made it easier for them to remarry. Women were allowed to take the initiative to propose to a man she loved, to work freely and independently.

1500 years later, ironically, women in Saudi are not allowed to go on the street without a male guardian and discouraged to work on her free will. Not to even mention how the status of Islamic women are decreased to the point of causing severe domestic violence, social abuse and tremendous injustice in education and professional career advancement.

1500 years later in Saudi, women are not allowed to drive a car on their own without a male accompany. as if it doesn’t sound like a joke just yet, the male guardian has to be a family member so as to avoid potential adultery. Not all males in the family have enough time to escort their sisters or moms every single time they need to head out, of course, so a law was published in 2010 to allow women driving a car with a male who’s not her family member as long as she feeds him with her breast milk. To put it in the fucking plain words, as long as she lets him suck her breast. In Islam, breastfeed kinship is as important as blood relationship. turning foreigners into a family member by breast feeding him is, therefore, a solution to women demanding to drive a car on their own (???)

Was it specifically written in Quran that women are not allowed to commute without a male accompany, or that they better let a stranger suck their breast if they want to drive? No. The society, the people, the government, whoever has more political authority to impose such absurd are the culprits.

Culture As The Exploiter

Now i cite a lot of examples in Islam because it’s the most misunderstood religion in my point of view. Extreme religious interpretation, if not used for political purposes, is abused in the name of culture. in some countries ruled by a patriarchal society such as Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, for example, women are by culture set up to be marginalized by men. What happens when women are not obedient and start questioning the abuse forced on them? that’s when religion is cited as a source of authority to allow injustice to operate without obstruction. If one wants to maintain certain social constructs, it is then reasonable that one only chooses the methodologies that he think will support the reign. the teaching is therefore interpreted in a way to guarantee it will serve whatever considered appropriate to the “culture”.

In either pakistan or Afghanistan, a woman might get beaten up hard if she’s raped. If a woman reports a harras to the police, it’s most likely that the man stays intact while the woman suffer more humiliation and beatings from her husband. The circumstances that the man will get arrested is when there are 4 (or 6) witnesses of her rape. Absurd. In Quran, it is recounted that the youngest wife of Muhammed was stranded during a travel through the desert. she was helped and rescued by a man. As she was being criticized due to her staying overnight with an unknown man, she was convicted of adultery. Muhammed, in an effort to save her, established a law that says a woman is found guilty of adultery only when there are at least 4 witnesses. In the modern day, some Muslim countries counter argue that if 4 witnesses are needed to verify a woman’s adultery, then the same number of witness is also required whenever a man is accused of rape. Culture is very objective. It is defined by humans to make sure a certain group of individuals will be able to live in harmony with each other. Sometimes it is no less than a way to make sure people obey. There are some muslim countries that lift the heavy shades against women by interpreting the Quran in a different ways that’s beneficial for women, therefore changing part of the culture that marginalizes women. However there are so many interpretation tailored for the sake of one social system, regardless of how unfair it is.

Stay Alert

So, maybe we should all be wise to blame those morons who exploit the meaning of religion to create misery for others, and rewards true religious practitioners who use religion to promote peace and love. religion has never been the problem. It is no better than a pawn. People are the problems.

I think religion is sexy. No one can ever capture a “scientific” proof of its existence nor be justified to actually have felt it, but it still has the power to give people sort of mental support and hope, something to hold onto during tough times. It is true religion is misused and taken advantage of, but we should not neglect the fact that it is absurd to attack one’s religion for the evil acts committed by another individuals. I’d rather look at how one interprets the religious teachings and then execute it, since will realistically tell me more about that person than just believing that religion itself is the culprit for all the bad things.

Don’t Blame Religions, Blame The People was originally published in Interfaith Now on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Honestly, anyone from any background can enter product management, as long as you understand how to cultivate a product mindset.

I have a background in business analytics and technology management. The summer of my junior year at Babson College, I spent 3 months working at Fidelity Investments in Boston, where I was so fortunate to work on different projects, from business analytics to more technical things, such as building an automation tool.

As much as I like telling stories out of provided data, I soon realized I enjoyed working on the strategic side, while the pre-processing seriously gave me a headache. I also realized I want to do something closer to end users, something that would give me the chance to interact as much as possible with different stakeholders in a business.

Right now, I’m working as an associate product manager intern for GroveHR, an HRIS product developed by KMS Technology, a U.S.-based outsourcing company with a development and testing center in Vietnam. I have learned so much over here about product management and really recommend that my folks in Vietnam who are interested in becoming a PM consider joining the team. (Disclaimer: This is not a recruitment post.)

I’m by no means an expert in PM and have so many things to learn, but I figure there are other people looking into product management out there who don’t know where to start. This post is a quick recap of some of the very basic concepts and resources I used to get started.

BIG NOTE 1: Talk to product managers in different companies. Their responsibilities might be different, but sometimes, you’ll find them facing the same problems at work, and it’s interesting to see how each tackles those in a different way.

A classic but nerve-wracking question: What do PMs do, and who are they?

The responsibilities of a PM vary, depending on what kind of product you are building or what stage your product is in within its life cycle. Product development is often practiced with agile methodology, which is a practice that focuses on building a product through multiple iterations based on user feedback.

There are two types of PMs: ones who build internal products and ones who build external products. Simply put, internal products are those used by teams in your company or the entire organization, while external products are for users not within your organization. This can be a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumers (B2C) product.

Since the product I’ve been working with falls into the latter category, I’m going to talk about the second type of PM.

What do they do every day?

From a high level, a PM works/coordinates with different stakeholders (designers, engineers, sales, marketing, etc.) to ensure the product is delivered in the right state, with the right requirements, solving the right needs of our users.

Let’s talk about the very basic workflow of a PM. For example, when I build a feature for our product, this is what the flow looks like:

1. I start with researching. This is where a combination of your own common sense, user experience (UX) design and competitive research kicks in. Market research, competitive research and UX research all serve the same purpose, which is helping you define the requirements for the feature you’re building.
2. After I define the requirements for that feature, I start building a user flow, which helps me break down how many activities the users are going to be able to perform with my feature.
3. Now that I am able to get the concept of how my feature works, I’m going to construct a wireframe, which is a UI mock up that transfers your product concept into something visually nicer. Normally, I use Balsamiq or Sketch to do the wireframes.
4. It’s time to get roasted by designers. After I have my wireframes that kind of show how I want this baby to look in reality, I’ll discuss with designers, and they will give me feedback. It’s not like they will judge how pretty my UI looks, because apparently, they know more about design than I do. Rather, they’ll give me feedback in the area of user experience — for example, if this button should be put here and not there, if a scroll bar is needed, etc. So make sure you know what you are talking about, and do your research before you transfer your wireframes to designers.
5. If everything’s good with the mockup, designers will take your mockup and start doing some magic so it looks better. It’s time to write a user story!

Think about it like this: Now that you know how you want your feature to look, who is going to help you build it? That’s right, our high and mighty engineers.

With that being said, a user story is a user case in which you carefully craft a scenario from your user’s perspective.

A common “template” to follow is: As a [user], I want to [their need], so that [the result]. For example, if I built a feature that helps our users view a new announcement of the company, I’d write something such as: As an employee of the company, I want to view the list of news when I log in to the app, so I will be aware whenever a new change or announcement is made.

In a user story, you need to define the acceptance criteria with 100% clarification, so engineers and quality assurance (QA) folks can build and test if it works as wanted.

So that is a very basic flow!

Of course, you also have to work with marketing, sales and other people within your company to ensure anything related to bringing the product to your end users is properly executed.

As a product manager, you also take responsibility for your product’s vision. You’ll need to build a roadmap for your product that satisfies the business goals in different stages, and establish a way to measure your product success.

The list goes on, but that’s basically the main concept.

BIG NOTE 2: A product manager does not manage ANYONE, but rather, manages the product itself.

So what’s the most important skill?

When asking people with work experience in the product management field, a very common answer I got from them is that anyone from any background can break into this field. However, I believe an excellent product manager possesses a combined knowledge of these fields:

• Business (the most important thing, from my point of view)
• User experience (UX) design, because PMs need to understand the users
• Technology, because PMs need to coordinate with engineers, communicate with them and understand what is technologically feasible — and what’s not.

As for soft skills, the three most important ones for me are:

• Empathy for your users: Always ask why, how and what, because that’s the core of building any product. One can easily get lost in details, and forget the whole big picture of why we are building this product and how it’s going to benefit our users.
• Prioritization and critical thinking: Understand what features or functionalities are of greater importance and, therefore, should be included in our MVP, instead of investing time, money and human resources all at once to build a product that might not really solve the pain points of users.
• Research: Understand the landscape and our competitors in order to know where to position our product.
• OK, there are four: The ability to construct user mapping stories and user journeys to develop an understanding for your product, and most importantly, help other team members to get the big picture.

Resources

• Books: I find User Story Mapping and The Lean Startup are two useful books to cultivate a product mindset.
• Courses: I really recommend “Become a Product Manager” in Udemy. This is a great overview course that covers every basic thing you need to know about product management.
• Blogs: I subscribe to “Product Management Insider” on Medium to discover good articles about PM, and then just follow authors who have high-quality posts or sharing. Some links are below:

https://medium.com/@AngshumanGupta

• Jack Moore - Medium
• Matt LeMay - Medium
• Lucas Didier - Medium

https://uxdesign.cc/@will.lawrence

For UX design, I follow https://uxplanet.org/ and https://uxdesign.cc/

This is a very short recap for those new to product management, as I was five months ago. There are so many different lessons and insights along the way that I, hopefully, can share in another post. If you are also passionate about product management, I’d love to learn from you, as well!

Breaking Into Product Management was originally published in Agile Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Disclaimer: Mọi ý kiến là của cá nhân và mang tính chất reflect, chia sẻ

Với sự sinh sôi nảy nở như vi rút của mạng lưới startup tại Việt Nam, Product managers là những X factor đang được săn đón. Sở dĩ mình gọi họ là X factor vì rất khó để định nghĩa được trách nhiệm của họ, nhưng họ là người đại diện cho tiếng nói của khách hàng — là người mang sản phẩm, mang đứa con tinh thần của cả đội đến với end users.

Bài recap này là bài viết reflection của mình sau kì thực tập vị trí Associate Product Manager tại GroveHR — một sản phẩm Human resource infomation system (HRIS) được chống lưng bởi @KMS Technology . Một bài recap khác hơi technical hơn 1 chút đi kèm với các resources mình dùng để bắt đầu: https://hackernoon.com/breaking-into-product-management-1xr3baw

“Hiện tại thì bên anh không cần thực tập sinh nhưng mà nếu em có năng lực thì có thể xem xét. Bây giờ thì anh không nói chuyện được vì chỉ có 10' nữa là meeting rồi".

“Anh cho em 10' đi em trao đổi nhanh với anh ạ".

Tim đập hơi nhanh sau khi nói chuyện với anh Bình — Product Manager của team vì không biết có được nhận được vị thực tập Associate Product Manager không nữa. Cả cuối tuần hôm đó cứ thấy nick anh Bình sáng lên là lại nhắn tin remind anh là anh cân nhắc xong chưa để em còn liên hệ với HR. May quá đến sáng thứ 2 thì cũng được vác mặt đến công ty.

Mình chưa làm sản phẩm trực tiếp bao giờ. Tất cả những gì mình biết mơ hồ về quản lí sản phẩm đều chỉ là từ đọc online, học một vài concept trên trường và nói chuyện với người đi trước. Dưới đây là những công việc cụ thể mà mình hoàn thành trong kì thực tập:

1.Research

Như một cách để mình “nhập môn" hiệu quả nhất, anh Bình đưa cho task đầu tiên là đi tìm hiểu các đối thủ trong và ngoài nước. Sản phẩm mình làm, GroveHR, là một phần mềm quản trị doanh nghiệp có các modules như quản lí thời gian timeoff, recruitment, news, directory, v…v để giúp doanh nghiệp có thể quản lí nhân viên và resources hiệu quả hơn, và nhân viên thì có thể dành thời gian làm việc có ích hơn là đi qua các paperwork hay các process rườm rà khác.

Khi làm quản lí sản phẩm, research là một kĩ năng vô cùng quan trọng và hầu như lúc nào, thời điểm nào, làm gì cũng cần research. Research thì không phải là cứ ngồi đọc rồi đưa một đống thông tin vào một chỗ mà quan trọng hơn là cần biết nên research CÁI GÌ, ĐỂ LÀM GÌ, TẠI SAO, và INSIGHTS thu được từ research đó là gì, nó sẽ phục vụ như thế nào đến BUSINESS GOALS của mình.

Một số research mà mình làm là tìm hiểu về đối thủ xem sản phẩm của nó hơn kém mình như thế nào, sự khác biệt trong hướng đi của chúng nó là gì, research cách làm một feature cụ thể nào đó, research về business models của đối thủ.

2. Xây feature

Nói là xây feature cho ngắn gọn nhưng đầy đủ sẽ là “làm việc cùng với các chế designers, engineers và QA để đưa một tính năng từ concept lên hiện thực".

Có lẽ đây là phần mình yêu thích trong quản lí sản phẩm. Người quản lí sản phẩm phải làm việc với tất cả mọi người, tất cả các stakeholders trong công ty từ team Dev đến Sales, marketing, design, QA để đảm bảo mình đang xây dựng một tính năng, sản phẩm đem lại giá trị cho người dùng.

Workflow sẽ như sau:

• Lên requirements: sau khi nhận được feature mà mình phải xây dựng, mình sẽ đặt ra các câu hỏi như ai là người dùng tính năng này, người dùng có thể thực hiện các tính năng gì với activities này, tại sao mình lại phải làm cái này.
• Research: khi đã hiểu là tại sao mình phải tốn tâm tư tình cảm để xây dựng cái này, mình sẽ research đối thủ hoặc những business với feature tương tự xem họ thiết kế và dùng tính năng này như thế nào, mục đích là để tham khảo cách thiết kế trải nghiệm người dùng.
• Userflow: một feature hay một product thì sẽ có thể thực hiện được rất nhiều hoạt động hay chức năng. Để có thể tưởng tượng được hành vi của người dùng, ví dụ như khi họ ấn nút Y thì X sẽ xuất hiện và Z sẽ được thực hiện, thì mình phải làm một cái userflow cơ bản. Userflow thì mình hay làm ở các trang mind map như là XMind, Diagram, hoặc Lucid chart.
• Wireframes/mockup: sau khi có thể tưởng tượng kha khá là đứa con mình nó sẽ làm được những gì thì đây là lúc xây dựng hình hài cho nó. Mình sẽ dựa theo từng stage/activity của feature mà mình xây dựng từ userflow để xây lên một bản mockup. Mockup là bản vẽ phác thảo để bạn có thể hình dung rõ hơn feature đó nhìn sẽ ra sao, và khi user sử dụng feature đó thì từng hành động sẽ nhìn như thế nào. Để làm mockup, mình từng sử dụng Balsamiq và Sketch.
• Lấy feedback từ designers: mình sẽ đưa bản mockup cho designers xin góp ý về UX/UI. Nếu không có gì cần chỉnh sửa, designers sẽ nhận mockup và vẩy cây đũa thần biến tranh mầm non thành tranh Picaso.
• Viết user story: Nếu PM là người làm concept cho sản phẩm thì engineers là người đưa concept đó thành hiện thực. Để giúp engineers có thể định hình được rõ xem mình phải xây dựng những cái gì, mình phải viết user story cho họ bao gồm user case, acceptance criteria, validation và các link về wireframes hay những thông tin khác. Xem ví dụ chi tiết về user story tại bài viết cụ thể hơn:
• Recheck với QA: sau khi team Dev đã nhận requirements, mình sẽ làm việc cùng QA để xác nhận lại xem có gì không ổn hay chưa rõ ràng để họ làm test case

Viết dài quá, nhưng đó là một cái flow cơ bản khi xây dựng feature trong 1 sản phẩm.

3. Tìm hiểu trải nghiệm người dùng

Việc hiểu được người dùng sản phẩm của mình là vô cùng vô cùng quan trọng. Nói ngắn gọn, để hiểu được người dùng của mình thì mình phải đặt bản thân vào vị trí của họ. Cái này nghe thì dễ mà không hề đơn giản nha các chế.

Việc hiểu người dùng không chỉ đảm bảo là mình sẽ có cái nhìn tổng quan về sản phẩm dưới góc độ khách hàng mà quan trọng hơn là mình sẽ nhìn ra được những lỗ hổng, những rủi ro trong sản phẩm của mình ở các tình huống khác nhau.

Về trải nghiệm người dùng cho một tính năng, mình làm Empathy map và User journey mapping để hiểu rõ hơn về hành trình sử dụng sản phẩm của họ, nhìn lại các rủi ro trong từng trường hợp có thể xảy ra, đưa ra các backup solution cho từng rủi ro. Bạn có thể google rõ hơn về Empathy map và UJM nhưng đây chỉ là 2 phần rất rất nhỏ trong việc tìm hiểu trải nghiệm người dùng.

4. Các kĩ năng khác:

Ngoài những công việc cụ thể hơn, mình quan sát và học xung quanh từ anh các thành viên trong team APM nữa.

Để đưa được sản phẩm đến với end users, một PM sẽ còn phải làm việc với marketing và sales để đưa ra chiến lược launch sản phẩm, xây dựng roadmaps để phát triển sản phẩm, lấy feedback từ khách hàng, communicate với đội ngũ business và tech làm sao để cả hai bên hiểu nhau.

Từ góc nhìn bản thân, mình tin là bất cứ ai từ background nào cũng có thể dấn thân vào Quản lí sản phẩm chỉ cần người đó có một product mindset và tập trung chau dồi kiến thức về UX, Tech, và Business. Tuy nhiên đối với một người mới bắt đầu, khả năng tự học và chủ động có lẽ là cái quan trọng nhất. Chủ động đi săn task, chủ động thử cái chưa làm bao giờ, chủ động hỏi và không giấu dốt.

Ai đã đọc đến đây thì cũng siêu quá… Mặc dù còn quá nhiều thứ khác nhưng mình hi vọng recap ngắn gọn này sẽ giúp người đọc có cái nhìn tổng quan hơn về Product Management và đặc biệt là nếu bạn mới trong lĩnh vực này.

Mình tổng hợp một vài resources mình dùng để bắt đầu tại cuối bài post này. Bài post này hơi technical hơn 1 chút nhưng nội dung 70% giống nhau. Ngại type lại phần resources quá hic

Breaking Into Product Management

Much as Babson has provided me with excellent resources, I personally feel that there’s a serious lack of technology and computer science classes at my business school. I came directly to higher education from Vietnam and unfortunately, coding is not offered as part of the official academic program in public schools there. I took/enrolled in my first coding class in my sophomore year at Wellesley College, which offers some cross-registration courses with Babson. Before then, I thought CSS is a name of an online video game.

Photo by Ahmed zayanon Unsplash

By the end of my third year, with not much tech background but a determination to pursue my tech career, apparently I felt like a clueless goldfish, swimming and swirling inside my own glass tank that I did not know how to break out of.

I was, however,rather fortunate

By May, I’d spent the last 2 months scattering out my resume to over lord-know-how-many companies in the US Right when I was about to return to Southeast Asia, someone from Fidelity Investment called me, and asked if I would like to interview for their technology internship position. I ended up going through their 2-round interview, and after 10 weeks , I can’t say how much I’m grateful for this amazing/stellar/inspiring/motivating opportunity.As a goldfish in a tiny aquarium, someone threw in a hook and set me free to swim through the ocean tides.

I was, admittedly, insanely nervous and intimidated, being the only intern in the NLP (Natural Language Processing) chapter not from a tech school or major.This organization’s space is alive and pulsating with constant energy.. The people are brilliant and process information and codes with lighting speed. I was working in a team of three and especially involved with the Virtual Assistant landscape.

Photo by Talia Cohenon Unsplash

Very recently, I have completed my internship. I’d like to share some of its most valuable takeaways for me, that I think could be valuable and applicable to anyone’s future internship endeavor.

1. Self-learning

I can’t stress how important self-learning is. School will never teach you enough. At my third year, I decided it’s time to pick up Python again. I was interested in data analytics so I went on Coursera to find data course. I enrolled in two courses, one was a basic Python course The other was onPandas & Numpy, the very two basic and essential Python libraries for data science.. My schedule at Babson drove me insane, quite honestly. I was taking 18 credits and working part-time for a start-up remotely,so the only time I had was a two hour break in between my morning and afternoon classes, and the weekend. On the weekend, I would cram as much as possible, trying to finish a 1-month course in 2 weeks (to save time and money, of course! Saving money is essential as a business student.. I certainly was not an expert by the end of the course, but I did learn enough to use it at my internship. I used Pandas and Python for a project, which was building a notification system for when the model for a chatbot needs retraining. Seeing my Pandas course come in so handy was so motivating/inspirational/exciting

2. Always ask “Why”

It sounds cliche and simple but people, at least me, never really think about it. When working in a technical team, aka not being on the front lines like business people, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of jumping into the details and think about HOW to make something work but forget to think about WHY we need to make this work. What is the purpose of what we are building? Why are we doing this work? Who is directly benefiting from it and what return are we bringing to the stakeholders ? My client wants to achieve X, but is he considering the current state of Y?

A problem statement can be written in a 3 sentences but when you start to put the question mark Why Why Why, you realize there are more than one layer in it. “Why” is easily neglected, but it’s the core of building a solid business mindset, as well as tracking down a technical problem.

3. Always remember what gets you excited

In my last day, one of my mentors asked me “with no consideration to factors like the number of figures in your salary, location, etc, what kind of work would make you the most excited?”. When I’m 21 and try to learn everything and maybe fail a couple of times, no one will give me a second look for it. But I imagine as I grow older, and still question myself every single day,whether ‘“I’m satisfied working on this’, doesn’t seem as ideal. My mentor gave me motivation and a reminder of how important it is to be open-minded to being hungry for learning everything I can handle. But at the same time, Carefully observe how my interests form and evolve as I learn more of myself and my career.

4. “There are three types of people others will remember: people who are smart, people who work hard, and people who help them”.

When you are an intern in a field that you’re trying to learn more about, accept whatever tasks others don’t want . Jump in. Help with the seemingly mundane work that may bring a new opportunity you never knew because that little small thing can pop up in a conversation with someone who can connect you to a new opportunity.

5. You will never know enough…

I was a novice to NLP. I took some quantitative and Machine Learning classes at college, but had much to learn. It took me more than a week to get myself familiar with the different systems that various teams would use. My two teammates were so talented and they had a background related to NLP, in one way or another. Working with people with such a strong base of knowledge in this field, I tried to research and asked many questions. I have never used the database system that the company uses either, but was able to pick it up from some introductory courses online, and just exploring through practical tasks. Organizations use diverse means to construct their organization, store data, choose which tools to employ. The more important things is that how willing you are to spend some extra miles doing research and trying to pick up the new concept as fast as possible.

Takeaways from a goldfish in the ocean was originally published in EdSurge Independent on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chỉ còn gần 2 tuần trước khi SheCodes, mọi thứ cũng đã hòm hòm nên mình viết vài dòng để tế sự dũng cảm của cộng đồng phái nữ cả codders lẫn non-codders đã quyết định tham gia SheCodes Hackathon năm nay. Đây là những người mà đối với mình, vô cùng gan dạ để thử một cái gì đó mới — những người mà mình nghĩ vô cùng thông minh, ham học hỏi, nhưng chưa có đủ đất để dụng võ

SheCodes Hackathon là hackathon đầu tiên dành riêng cho cộng đồng phái nữ dù họ có kinh nghiệm lập trình hay không. Ở Việt Nam thì cũng không phải là nhiều hackathon nhưng mà cũng không ít và quy mô lớn nhỏ thì đều đầy đủ. Tuy nhiên thì khi tìm hiểu về format của những hackathon này cũng như đối tượng của họ thì mình quyết định là đây không phải hướng mà mình muốn xây dựng hackathon của mình. Mình muốn tạo ra một sân chơi nhấn mạnh vào văn hóa học bên lề và networking, song song với việc xây dựng sản phẩm. Còn mục đích của mình là đem đến sự hứng thú về Công nghệ cho phái nữ và khơi dậy sự ham học hỏi của họ.

Có rất nhiều lý do tại sao mình muốn có một cái hackathon dành riêng cho phái nữ. Nhưng thôi, mình sẽ không thể viết hết ra đây, vì nó dài lắm.

Khi mình pitch ý tưởng này trong quá trình tìm đồng đội, hay là khi mời diễn giả về cho sự kiện, thì mình nhìn ra chung 1 vấn đề: họ đều “cảm giác” là cộng đồng phái nữ lập trình hoặc hứng thú về CNTT rất là ít. Có chắc là mình có đủ demand để mà tổ chức cái này không? Cái tham vọng tạo ra một movement để thay đổi mindset của mọi người liệu có đang bị thừa?

Thì có mỗi một cách là làm mới biết được chứ còn sao nữa.

Đến hôm nay, với gần 200 người đăng ký cho cả sự kiện chính lẫn các sự kiện bên lề trong một thời gian ngắn, mình có thể khẳng định là có một cộng đồng phái nữ ở đó — luôn muốn học hỏi thêm về CNTT nhưng còn thiếu tự tin do không có kĩ năng bài bản, hoặc chưa cảm thấy có một sân chơi để họ mạnh dạn được sai, được học hỏi từ người khác, và được thử.

Trong số những người chơi của SheCodes Hackathon, mình nhớ nhất là những bạn:

• Bay từ thành phố khác như Hồ Chí Minh ra để tham dự
• Những bạn cảm thấy lo lắng, inbox hàng vạn câu hỏi vì sao cho page về chuyện tìm đội — đơn giản là họ cảm thấy “rén” vì chỉ sợ mình là người duy nhất không am hiểu về lập trình, chỉ sợ mình là tờ giấy trắng duy nhất ở đó. Mình thấy họ đáng yêu vô cùng
• Những bạn/chị chia sẻ về kĩ năng làm trà sữa, nấu cơm, sản xuất, may vá thêu thùa rất là pờ rô đi cùng với một tinh thần máu lửa muốn học hỏi thêm về Công nghệ thông tin.
• Và cuối cùng là những bạn có kinh nghiệm chắc tay với một độ hưng phấn tột đỉnh muốn tham gia chương trình để kéo các chị em khác on board

Đây là lí do tại sao mà nếu được hỏi câu “có demand không?” một lần nữa thì chắc chắn mình sẽ trả lời lại luôn là Có, có một phái nữ ở đó nhưng chẳng qua là họ chưa có đất để mà dụng võ thôi.

Được sánh vai với những người đồng đội khác trong 3 tháng xây dựng SheCodes chắc chắn là một trong những điều mà mình không thể quên được. Mình rút ra được 2 điều quan trọng nhất là luôn thử mới biết, và luôn có một niche market bị bỏ ngỏ tưởng như không tồn tại.

Trong tương lai mình có một dự định lớn hơn cùng SheCodes, và vẫn luôn tìm kiếm những con người có chung một interest về women empowerment và tech giống như mình. Nếu bạn đang đọc và có hứng thú tham gia, liên lạc mình nhá :)

“Can you check on her to see if she is mentally okay? Can you advise her on her future career for us?”

Yes, that’s basically what my mom and grandmother ask me at the end of 80% of our Skype conversations. For your information, “her” here refers to my twin sister, who is taking a gap year to volunteer in Nepal and studying Mandarin in China after her graduation from an IB school in Norway. I never rush her to get into college, of course.

While my family, like many other typical parents in Vietnam (and probably yours too), think of a gap year as an unfamiliar approach for personal development, I believe taking a gap year is a type of self-directed education that should be encouraged. I was told many times how I should “get into college as soon as possible and secure a major for future career.” But no, ages 17 or 18 or even 19 are not the time for us to rush.

It is the age of self discovery.

Going back to the idea of self-directed education, I simply define it as when you choose to “design” your own education experience in a certain period of time. To give you a more specific and comprehensive definition, self-directed education refers to self-chosen activities and life experiences of the person becoming educated, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education. It can be organized classes that you take outside your school, online courses, or through any experience that you gain from participating in organizations and outside schools.

Of all the reasons, I believe self-directed education should be more welcomed, especially among kids at the age from 6–11.Curiosity, as the force behind self-directed education, excites and makes children become more active learners. Human’s curiosity has always been seen as an inborn trait. The desire to ask questions and to socialize with other kids, to be attracted by an unknown object, and to discover things out of the norm have always been demonstrated when we were kids. However, I believe the traditional, structured, and standardized pathway of the current education system is killing this curiosity inside students. At our young age, we used to be encouraged to come up with new ideas, to talk about whatever we think, to interact with other kids, and to let imagination prevail. As we approach primary school, then secondary and high school, we find our curiosity gradually fades away as we are unconsciously forced to adapt to a structured and GPA-focused education system.

At young ages, kids go to school and see many of their peers, from whom they learn a lot. Yet they are restrained from learning about their peers because most of the time they have to sit in class, expected to behave in a certain way that “fits” some norm that comes from I don’t even know where.. Kids come to school with an open mind, eager to express themselves, yet the coercive school system itself teaches them how to bottle up their creativity and follow the one-size fits all system. In other words, the strictly structured education builds up a major block for students to satisfy their creativity. As a result, students lose their interest in discovering new perspectives, and their eagerness to learn simply mellows down. Kids were born unique, but schools teach them how to be uniform.

In Vietnam, for example, from my own experience with the primary and secondary education system in three public schools (those already regarded as top public schools in the city), questioning teachers or demonstrating a learning style that is different from others will normally get students into trouble. When kids are assigned to analyze, let’s say a piece of literature, instead of giving them opportunities to express different perspectives, teachers normally set a final version that they should adhere to if they want to do well on the exam. I still remember how much I hated learning by heart these pages of literature analysis (and history, geography, and the list goes on). I hated it when I got overstressed with a huge workload when I was only in primary school, looking wistfully at the kids playing outside while studying for these crazy exams.

In self-directed education, in contrast, curiosity is the cornerstone. It disrupts the one-size fits all education structure and motivates people to actively seek knowledge. There are many ways to approach self-directed education: a gap year, home-school, alternative education programs, etc. Speaking from my own personal experience and observation, I think taking a gap year has been more commonly chosen among teenagers in Vietnam, even though there are still a variety of stigmas in the mindset of some people. Choosing to take a gap year sometimes can turn out to be an intimidating option as the question of “what am I going to do during an entire year?” arises. Students are also more unsure about this option because of the popular belief that high school graduates should determine their majors in college and secure their future career. However, students should be thinking that the transition from high school to college is one of the most important moments in their entire lives. Logically, it makes sense to take time.

In 2016, many prestigious universities in Vietnam reported to have hundreds of current college students dropping out of school after they decided to have enrolled in the wrong major. The failure of schools to sufficiently guide students, along with the fact that students have to declare their major during their first year of college, results in thousands of Vietnamese students unemployed after graduation. There are many benefits of taking a gap year, but I will only bring up the most obvious (and probably cliche) one: to know exactly who you are. There are a variety of options you can do during your gap year: getting an internship, doing volunteer jobs, studying languages that you like, travelling to different places and seeing how people are living there. Most importantly, you need to think about yourself: what your goals are, what you think you are good at, what you want to do for yourself and future and not for someone else’s, what makes you you, and what you want to contribute.

The questions are always hard for students to answer, as the educational experience that they have received hardly gives them enough time to fully discover the unknown aspects and capabilities inside them. With that being said, the only way for students to give answers to these questions is to experience the unfamiliarity, learning from outside class and getting to know themselves in a deeper extent.

I don’t deny that there are other factors that can affect your decision of taking gap year, and one of which (also probably the most important one) is financial support. Again, as long as you have a specific plan for your gap year and don’t end up playing video games in the basement, who says you have to go to an exotic or far-away place? The idea of taking a gap year is to throw yourself in an unfamiliar environment, in which you learn and grow both personally and intellectually. From the government side, I remember Lisa — one of the EdSurge Independent Fall 2017 cohort members shared that she got into a program funded entirely by the United States government to spend a gap year in China. Although there are many options for what students can do during the gap year, I really have this hope that its benefits for personal development will be more recognized in my country, and that there will be more government-funded programs for students.

All in all, I believe self-directed education deserves more attention (at least in my country). In every sense, it will give students the freedom to unlock the potential and other capabilities that they have not yet discovered. That’s why after every Skype conversation with my parents, all I do is to text my sister: “Don’t rush to college. Go out the world and learn!”.

Works Cited

The Alliance. “What is self-directed education”. The Alliance, 28 Oct. 2017. Web. https://www.self-directed.org/sde/

Tuoi Tre Online. “Students Dropped Out Due To Wrong Major Decision”. Tuoi Tre Online, 4 May. 2016. Web. 28 Oct, 2017. http://tuoitre.vn/sinh-vien-bo-hoc-do-chon-sai-nganh-1094884.htm

VOV. “200.000 Bachelor Candidates Face Unemployment In 2017”. Vietnam.net, 13 Feb. 2017. Web. 28 Oct, 2017. http://vietnamnet.vn/vn/kinh-doanh/thi-truong/them-200-000-cu-nhan-that-nghiep-trong-nam-2017-356094.html

Self-Directed Education In The Age of Self Discovery was originally published in EdSurge Independent on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I was still home in Vietnam, whenever people talked to me about doing something in the future related to either computer science or technology, I would visualize a person sitting all day in front of a computer, sorting out complicated and mundane “technical stuff”, though I barely had an idea of what this “technical stuff” was. The same image popped up if I got asked whether I was interested in technology or not, and I would typically respond: “No, I hate it”.

Things changed though.

By the end of my high school senior year, I was able to pack my stuff and carry a sense of excitement in my heart to leave Vietnam and study abroad in the States. I came to Babson College — a Boston-based business school in Massachusetts. One of the things that might seem so common and usual to people but was so new for me is how technology is strongly integrated and promoted to students here. My peers would use all these technical terms to talk about a trend in technology that I couldn’t actually understand. I first heard about some languages like HTML, Java, and CSS while I was in my freshman year at Babson and I thought, “What the heck is that? Is it edible?” What is important most, though, is the fact that people talk about it — technology — with an excitement and a rising glow clearly registered in their face. That is so opposed to the typical cluelessness and bewilderment that I normally see from my peers back home whenever we have any conversation related to (a career in) tech.

Later on, during the second semester of my freshman year, I found myself getting involved in tech little by little: hackathon events, a tech conference, and a tech club on campus. All of the sudden I felt like I was exposed to a completely different side of tech. These coding languages appeared to be so intriguely beautiful in a sense that there is a meaning, an order, and logic behind them. These languages are no longer boring to me but instead I view them as materials, and the idea of people using these given materials together with their creativity to build something from scratch is mesmerizing to me. Coding appears to me now as a way to train your critical thinking and problem solving skills, which is super essential for students, especially when they are at a young age.

I was even more mesmerized by the power of technology when I accidentally participated in a hackathon about IoT (Internet of Things) last year. The basic concept of IoT is that all the physical devices are connected with each other and can be controlled from a single smart device like your phone. Having no technical background, I was intimidated, of course. Yet, when my peers actually spent time teaching me some basic concept behind it, I was so fascinated as I saw everything falling into place. We ended up creating a prototype of a security device that could help prevent sexual assault for kids. Just as a catalyst, that event enlightened me about the power of tech and how we students can use it to build, to create, and to make a social impact. Now tech comes to me as a spectrum full of possibilities for innovations and changes.

In short, my curiosity was triggered.

I started to read some more on how technology is disrupting the old and outdated education system and, to be more specific, how IoT has gradually proven its role in making improvements for both students and teachers inside and outside classes. The most basic thing we can see now is that students and professors use more computers, laptops, and tablets in the classroom. In fact, as of 2015, 73% of all U.S. teenagers had access to a smartphone, according to Capterra. With accessibility to the internet, they are able to control and connect different devices. For example, according to Business Insider, the foremost example of a tech company that has invaded schools is SMART, which pioneered the world’s first interactive whiteboard in 1991. They used IoT to create a wireless interactive whiteboard, which could be controlled by the professor through their mobile phone or laptop connected to the internet. Apart from SMART, New Richmond schools in Tipp City, Ohio are saving approximately $128,000 each year by using a web-based system that controls all mechanical equipment inside the buildings. With some examples and figures, it is clear that IoT is changing the way schools operate and the way students learn in class.

I started to rethink why I and many peers and students around me back home were so indifferent to the power of tech and its presence in this day and age.

So, let’s get back to my education in Vietnam. I went to a traditional public high school from primary to secondary school (K-8 in American terms). We did have a “computer science” class, but all we learned about was how to use Paint, which, as its name already points out, is a drawing application for students. We would spend time learning how to draw traffic signs with Paint and how to draw our school. During my secondary and high school, we made some progress, though. We learned how to use Word and basic Excel. Although, we barely got exposed to the concept of coding or any other aspect of technology and how it could help foster the critical thinking and problem solving among youngsters. In other words, the computer science curriculum from the majority of the public schools in my country did not provide students with the practical tools and experiences that they were supposed to. Only students who were seriously oriented to a career in computer science (typically male students) would try to pursue it in college. But for us, high school students unsure what a career in tech was all about, we didn’t see any interest in computer science or tech in general, because we were simply not exposed enough to it.

As I am excited to learn more about how IoT is being applied to improve the education system around the world, I have thought about how IoT is being viewed in my home country, Vietnam. Last week, I got the chance to talk to Tri Nguyen, who is the CEO of Mimosa Technology — a company based in Vietnam that uses IoT to provide data, decision support, and remote control capabilities through sensors in agriculture. I was lucky to gain some insights from him on the topic and trend of the development of IoT in Vietnam, and what it means to students. Here is a quick recap of some insights that I think do not only exist in my country but in many other developing countries as well:

Q: “What do you think about the trend of IoT in Vietnam right now?”

A: “I think right now, IoT is a new trend that has been pretty well recognized in the ecosystem of tech startups in Vietnam. However, it has been only applied and understood in tech business. It needs to be incorporated more in our daily and practical application so that the society can grow more interest and awareness around it.”

Q: “How do you think we can use IoT to improve our education system?”

A: “IoT can be used as a tool to improve your critical thinking and problem solving skills, which are the most two important skills needed to be trained especially when you are at a young age. Teachers can teach students basic coding and programming skill behind IoT via practical projects, in which students actually use IoT to design a solution for a real issue. The second way to incorporate IoT in our schools is in building different applications from IoT that facilitate the process of learning. For example, a smart card that helps track students’ footprints for safety purposes on campus, or an application that helps navigate books in the library.”

Q: “How can we make people be more aware of the presence of IoT?”

A: “Actually we shouldn’t think of IoT as something so advanced because once we do so people will feel scared to approach it. Instead, we should focus on the benefit that IoT can bring about through practical applications. Similar to STEM, IoT will need more time in Vietnam to be more widely recognized and applied in our education system. We need to use it to create applications that can change the way students study in class. Once people realize the benefit that IoT can bring about, they will start to pay more attention to its presence.”

From the interview itself, I believe the biggest challenge right now is to grow students’ interest and awareness around IoT and technology, in general, through the implementation of practical projects. The main purpose is that by gaining hands-on experience, students will actually get to know what IoT and technology in general are capable of. In order to grow early interest in tech for students in Vietnam, schools should encourage a more creative and innovative learning environment. They can organize different small-scale talks about careers in tech for students and how they should not be afraid of tech. They can also encourage students to found or join any tech clubs. At the same time, the schools should incorporate a more practical computer science program so that students from a young age can develop their critical thinking and problem solving skill through coding.

If I could go back in time to answer the question of whether I am interested in technology, I would answer that at that time, it is not that I hate it, I just don’t know about it. It’s all about exposure.

Works cited:

Meola, Andrew. “How IoT in education is changing the way we learn”. Business Insider, 26 Dec. 2016. Web. 6 Oct. 2017.

<http://www.businessinsider.com/internet-of-things-education-2016-9>

It’s Not That I Hate, I Just Don’t Know was originally published in EdSurge Independent on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.