Noel Chiu, Product Manager

Joined in 2020, from 🇭🇰

What led you to become a product manager?

Before becoming a product manager, I started my career in the customer support team in my previous company and then moved to an operations role. I was hoping to focus more on strategy and planning in the new role, instead of spending time on manual work like I previously did.

But shortly after I started the new role, I found myself doing repeated manual work again to sustain operations. The only way out was to wait for the development of new internal tools or enhancement of existing products to resolve our business problems at scale. That’s how I realized the importance and impact of products.

I wanted to take part in the designing and developing a product after being an end user for so long. So I started looking for product roles and now I’m a PM :)

What does a typical day look like?

• Get up and have breakfast
• Listen to podcast on my way to work
• Work, work, work
• Netflix after dinner (Netflix is my family activity)
• Workout (skipping it most of the time)
• Read & sleep

Name three people or things you feel inspired when creating a product.

I would always ask myself these questions when creating a product:

Is that really a problem that requires product development?

As a product manager, I always hear a lot about the problems faced by different teams and also their product requirements. Sometimes the “problems” and “requirements” are the results of not understanding how to use a tool or how the workflow is supposed to be. Always ask questions to validate the problem and find out if it’s really a problem.

Are these issues stemming from the same problem?

Issues reported by different users are seemingly different, but they may just be reflecting the same problem. Again, ask more questions to have a deeper understanding of the problem before jumping to the solution.

How would the overall user experience be?

When I am working on a feature, I may pay less attention to the big picture, which is the whole customer experience. The feature alone may work fine but the whole flow may not be a good experience to the user. Always remind yourself of the big picture and the users when creating a product.

Anything you want to promote or plug?

I usually listen to Planet Money/ The Indicator from Planet Money on my way to work. Economic concepts and recent economic news would be explained in the show in a way that’s very easy to understand.

If you’re into history, I’d recommend Throughline, another NPR podcast which can tell you how history affects the world we’re living in.