Luke Niu, Product Manager
Joined in 2020, from 🇨🇳 🇦🇺
What led you to become a product manager
Growing up, I’ve always been curious in a million different things at the same time. I would try 10+ different sports, play around with different photography and design tools, and take radically different courses in college.
The downside to my generalist nature is that I have never been a true “expert” in one topic, but I have learned to learn efficiently and adapt quickly in new environments.
I knew that the product manager role would be a dream job for me when I discovered that the role would work at the intersection of business, technology and design. The additional bonus on top is that I also get to work with other awesome teams (design, data, eng, marketing, etc.) to translate customer needs into real product features!
Plus, I would like to eventually start my own business one day (most likely in fitness/wellness) and I believe being a PM paves a great path towards entrepreneurship.
What does a typical day look like
1 — Wake up before 7am ⏰
2 — Destroy weak and sleepy self with a workout 💪🏻
3 — Knock out some life admin tasks ☑️
4 — Listen to podcast or read on my long commute 🎧
5 — Work — Prioritize and execute 📈
- chug lots of tea in between 🍵 -
6 — Call friends / family on commute back 📞
7 — Work on my “life sprint” (2 week bursts to deep dive and learn something interesting…more on this life-changing practice later) 📚
8 — Read and sleep early 👴🏻
(I swear there is some spontaneous stuff squeezed somewhere in between this regimented schedule)
Name three people or things you feel inspired when creating a product.
Pat Brown (on truly understanding issues before tackling them)
Pat Brown is most famously known as the founder of Impossible Foods. Pat quit his very prestigious university career and spent a year learning about the greatest problems facing humanity. After a whole year of research, he concluded that our meat-eating habit was at the root of many challenges (climate change, deforestation, obesity, water scarcity etc.)
When I start to tackle new problems in my job, Pat Brown inspires me to think a little bit deeper about the root causes of issues first, before diving headfirst into solutions.
Deep work (on creating meaningful work)
I often call multi-tasking “multi-failing” or failing at multiple things at once. For me, creating anything of deep value requires concentrated effort for at least 40 min, and trying to juggle 3 things at the same time would get me nowhere.
For the longest time, I thought I just needed to keep up but Deep Work gave me solace in knowing that great work isn’t created in between Slack messages.
How to win friends and influence people (for effective communication)
This book is a classic. When I read it in college, it fundamentally changed the way I communicated with other people. The biggest takeaway is recognizing how little people (especially my younger self) took the time to actually listen to someone before speaking. People won’t care what you know until they know how much you care!
Mastering the ability to actively listen is still a work-in-progress for me, although I am more mindful of it when I communicate with anyone — from colleagues to friends / family.
What would your self-portrait look like?
I grew up living in a few places, so I’ve always had a bit of an identity crisis. Nowadays, I tie my identity to my values, which is to be strong, kind and fulfilled.
This is what the values mean to me:
- Doing greater things start with building strong mental, spiritual and physical foundations for yourself first.
- It’s not enough to be just strong. That strength needs to be used for kindness, to help others.
- Life would still be meaningless without fulfilment, or doing what you love. Life is too short to be stuck doing something boring!!
Think of these three values like a Venn Diagram. I’m always trying to be in the center, but I never feel like I can do enough of all three in my life, so this is more of a portrait of who I aspire to become.
This isn’t very picturesque, but I don’t think anyone wants to see a real self-portrait of me anyways 🤪
Anything you want to promote or plug?
Boox Air
If you:
- love to handwrite stuff
- love to read and
- hate eyestrain from blue light
Then you need to get Boox Air. It’s an ink tablet that runs on Android. It’s amazing.
Life sprints (I made up this term so don’t look it up)
There are a lot of good practices we can take from the business world into our personal lives. In product, we work in “sprints” to develop features in approx 2 weeks. I tried to apply the same principle for “life sprints”, where I deep dive into an area of focus (many times, it’s a weakness I’d like to address) to hack away on.
This is a screenshot of some things I’ve worked on.
Some of the things I’ve worked on have radically changed my life. Give it a go and see how pans out!
