Edward Zhang, Product Manager
Joined in 2021 and 2022, from 🇨🇳
What led you to become a product manager?
During the year I was taking my Master’s Degree at HKUST, I started to realise how fancy the Internet industry is in Mainland China and there are lots of potential and opportunities in Hong Kong; that’s why I chose the Internet industry and LLM after I graduated.
In my previous role as Business Intelligence Engineer, I worked with the Product team quite often to help them manipulate the data and understand the performance of our company. The more I worked with the Product team and knew the job duties of PM, the more interested I got in this role. I feel it would be exciting and cool to design/ iterate a product by myself.
As I am interested in the role of PM, and my skills in data analysis and knowledge of technical/ data structure would be very helpful, when I saw the job vacancies in the Product team, I decided to try to explore the possibilities for my career development.
What does a typical day look like?
- Start my day from 7:30 AM
- Reading something on the MTR
- Work
- Lunch
- Work more
- Relaxing time (dinner, games, books, music, movies, dramas, exercises)
- Sleep before 12 a.m.
Name three people or things you feel inspired when creating a product.
- Yu Jun and his book 《产品方法论》
Yu Jun is one of the most famous Product Managers in the Chinese Internet industry and was the creator of many products on Baidu. I think many theories in his book are very inspiring; for example the value of the product = new user experience — old user experience — replacement cost. It is not complex, but very pivotal and useful when trying to design a product.
- Start from “customer needs”. The product manager is a role that is trying to identify the needs of your customers and fulfil their needs. So when designing the products, always keep the “customer needs” in mind, and stand in the boots of customers → what customers need instead of what you think.
- Do not be afraid to make mistakes, but do not make the same mistakes. Everyone knows this, but I have to say it is not that easy to do. One of the job duties of a PM is exploring while mistakes are always accompanied. Most of the time, creativity is valued more than safety.
What would your self-portrait look like?
📖🎵⛰️🏃👨🍳
Time with friends and families is the best time, like outdoor activities and board games with friends. I also like reading, cooking, and music when I am alone.
Anything you want to promote or plug?
I like two kinds of books:
- Detective story. I like books written by Keigo Higashino and Agatha Christie. While reading detective stories, I like to collect pieces of information and try to find the truth (although it is impossible because the writer will not tell you until the end 😢). But I feel like it can practice my logical thinking, which is important for PM.
- Science fiction. Imagination is so valuable, especially for adults. Please read the book The Three Bodies Problem by Liu Cixin 🙏, you may awe the shinning starts in the sky after reading the book.
