You are looking at a pro_

_duct requirement document of myself (:D)

1. Problem statement

Today’s technology is developing at an incredible speed that a lot of people find it challenging to catch up with, or are even unaware of what’s possible.

As a result, many people and organizations are still operating manually, consuming an enormous amount of mental, physical, and financial resources.

2. Goals

Help improve the productivity of humans as individuals and organizations by leveraging the power of technology.

3. Solution concept

I am a Product person that strongly specializes in all forms of communications, which helps me effectively gain customer insights and collaborate with data specialists, engineers, and designers to deliver a solution that delightfully solves the customer’s JTBD.

4. Target audiences

Any entity that serves customers having such a problem, regardless of its size (Individuals, Start-ups, SMEs, or Conglomerates)

5. Product Inspirations

📚 Books

• Google Work Rules by Laszlo Bock
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• The Lean Startups by Eric Ries
• Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz
• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
• Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar
• Upstream: The quest to solve problems before they happen
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (review)
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win (review)

🎧 Podcasts

• Inside Intercom Podcast
• Intercom on Product Management
• Acquired
• This is Product Management
• Have a Sip
• How I built this with Guy Raz (highly recommended!)
• Recode daily

📰 Blogs/Newsletters

• Inside Intercom
• First Round Review
• Reforge
• Buy/Sell/Hold – A newsletter by Marker
• Marker by Medium
• First Round Review
• Commoncog by Cedric
• Growth.design
• Lenny’s Newsletter
• Not Boring
• Bring the donut (by Ken Norton)
• Benn Stancil’s newsletter
• TechCrunch – This week in apps

💻 Courses

• The SQL Tutorial for Data Analysis
• UX Design Fundamentals
• Designing infographics and data visualization
• Design better features by solving better problems
• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python (MIT)
• Python with projects (Likelion)
• 100 days of code (Udemy)

6. Product principles

There are three principles that need to be prioritized during the process of… me building myself:

• Commitment: I believe in the beauty and power of specialization.
• Collaborative: Take a look at Notion opening their API, Zapier flourishing by standing on the shoulders of the giants, dbt spreading like wildfire by connecting with your favorite BI tools. The future of integration is inevitable.
• Truthfulness: duh!

7. Measure of success

A successful product is one that delivers value to its customers and is profitable.

For me, it, first and foremost, is the improvement in the productivity of any individual or organization (or clients of those organizations) I have a chance to serve. Second, it’s the financial status with which I can sustain my own life and my family’s.

Also, as a spiritual being, my measure of success has a lot to do with my level of happiness in life, measured by the median of my subjective feeling at any given point in time.

8. Go to market

Products that I contributed to

📌 Habitify.me + Summerian.net

• Implement growth strategies to increase total downloads from 500,000 to 900,000 within a year
• Launch #2 place on Product Hunt twice
• Defined and promoted a consistent brand via in-app microcopy, landing page, and app store content
• Improved customer engagement and retention via targeted ad campaigns and email sequences

📌 dbdocs.io + dbdiagram.io

• Validated Product-market fit
• Re-built product landing page
• Defined customer profiles
• Launched: Password-protection, feedback collection slide-out

📌 Holistics.io

• Launched The Analytics Setup Guidebook on Product Hunt
• Improved the self-service experience of non-technical users: Metric Sheets, Geo Map (Heatmap, Filled Map, Custom Map), Cross-filtering, Drill-through…
• Improved Product team’s operation:
  • Usability testing using prototypes
  • Squad retrospectives
  • Customer engagement ops

Published articles

For more articles, visit my Tech Talk page.

• Talking to machines and self-service in data analytics – published on Geek Culture
• How the Curator Economy shapes today’s products – published on Start It Up
• The conceptual design of Todoist – published on Prototypr

Products that I built for myself

📌 This blog

I consider this blog my own product and each visitor is a customer. I managed and developed this blog with clear north star and proxy metrics. I will write about my journey with this blog soon (thinking of a title like “Blogging is Product management”).

📌 Billboard 100 to Spotify Playlist

📌 Finding homestays on Booking.com

My company often organizes field trips and I love being the one to find homestays for everyone. The pain point starts to emerge when I have to consolidate all the homestays that match our requirements in a Google Sheet for everyone to vote. It’s really time-consuming to copy and paste each location’s name, price, link… back and forth. Really cannot do that all day can I?