Hello, I’m Erica, a Project Manager in the MING Labs Shanghai office.
If I were to explain my work, I’d say, “I coordinate and manage the development of a digital product from its conception to completion.”
I’m currently working with a team to digitalize the product quality tracking and troubleshooting process for one of our clients. This project is particularly complex, and I’m in charge of coordinating the work of designers and developers across the Suzhou and Shanghai offices to make this happen.
9:30 am: Good Morning! 早上好！☀️
I arrive in the office and get myself organized for the day. For breakfast today, I’m having a banana with my morning cup of tea. (Claire, our Office Manager, keeps us well fed, but the bananas disappear FAST.)
10:30 am: Daily Standup 团队开会 🖥️
We have quite a large team across MING’s Shanghai and Suzhou offices working on this, so we keep in touch online. Today, I’m catching up with the team on Slack.
As a Project Manager, I am partly a Scrum Master, so I manage the progress of the project. I’m responsible for high-level aspects such as planning the overall timeline and delegating sections to my team. I also look out for granular details, checking if specific features are as they should be.
Our standup meetings are to track our progress. I keep an eye on the schedule and set priorities on tasks if we are tight on time.
After the standup, I work through some of the issues the team raised during the meeting. For today, I’m working with the QA engineer and the frontend engineer to tackle a module which needs some looking at.
Generally speaking, my job is to make sure each person in the team is working on the right things, at the right time, to create a product with the right features.
11:30 am: Client Meeting 与客户开会 👨💼
We have arranged for the client and our team to meet today. We’re about two thirds through this project, and a lot of hard work has been put in by the team. This kind of client meetings are held regularly for requirement analysis and project status review.
1:00 pm: Lunch 午餐 🥗
Here in China, food delivery services, 外卖, are wide-spread and I am spoiled for lunch options! Today, a hearty salad is on the menu.
2:00 pm: User Testing 用户测试 🖍️
The team is doing a round of user testing today. They sketch a draft design of one of the modules we are testing.
Then we bring in users to try out the prototype. Throughout the testing, the UI designer sketches out each new page, filling it with results that our backend engineer “finds” from pre-written Post-it notes. The UX designer observes how the user interacts with the prototype, ready to use these insights for the next iteration.
4:00 pm: Project Planning 项目计划 👩💻
Back at my desk, I pull up Jira, a software we use to track projects. I check on our upcoming sprints and key in new requirements and changes that the client brought up during our meeting.
Aside from being the contact point for clients, I am also a Product Owner, in charge of the product’s requirements and features.
At the start of this project, I broke down all the features to their details. Then I planned the sequence of development.
Some might find this tedious. But my work helps the designers and developers here work smoothly together. Keeping close to design specifications also means our products meet the QA standards as previously defined.
4:45 pm: Checking Features 验收功能 ☑️
After updating Jira, I check on some new features that were built over the past week. I compare them with the requirements of our client. One or two of them need tweaking, so I drop a message to the team to tell them about it.
5:30 pm: Heading Home 回家去 👋
Today, I’m leaving the office a little earlier to attend my daughter’s school event. Thanks to the flexible work arrangements at MING Labs, I can spend my evening with my family!
Erica Li is Project Manager at MING Labs.
MING Labs is a leading digital business builder located in Berlin, Munich, New York City, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Singapore. We guide clients in designing their businesses for the future, ensuring they are leaders in the field of innovation.
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