From Medicine to Tech Product Management

In my chapter from Explorers Today Winners Tomorrow, I shared how I managed to make a drastic career change from medicine to tech.

“Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.”― Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, USA The tech world and the healthcare world share one major commonality: they’re both predominately male dominated across the leadership board. In fact, I am the single female senior leader in the Singapore office in my organization. This is in spite of the fact that women constitute 50% of the population and it is critical to keep them, especially working mothers, in the workforce. It’s even well established that adult kids of working mothers are high achievers later on in life. Despite these clear benefits, we still see very few women in tech. I am here to share my story as a working mother and my journey to obtaining a leadership position in a tech company.

I am currently the director of medical products at ASUS under a specialised division that focuses on building AI healthcare SaaS solutions for hospitals in the Asia Pacific region. I lead the oncology product line, which works with hospitals based in Taiwan, and mentor junior product managers on how to develop products from 0 to 1. Unlike the rest of my colleagues, I am not a computer science major and I am one of the only women and one of the only mothers in the office.

Life is a Box of Chocolate

How did I wind up in my position? Well, when I was young, product management was not a job that was hot on the market. Growing up in the Bay Area, the dot-com bubble lingered like an ominous shadow. Instead, everyone talked about a stable, high paying job with a biotech company. In high school, I interned two days a week at Gilead Sciences shuffling contracts and paperwork. At Duke University, I studied cellular and molecular biology for my undergraduate degree and dreamt about becoming a scientist. When we are young, we often stick to a career trajectory based on what adults tell us, but I am here to tell you not to do that because life is unpredictable. If I had set my sight on a dream and never let it go, I would not be who I am today.

I still remember what my professor told me when I decided to pursue a career in medicine in my junior year. “You can have impact as an engineer or as an architect, but why medicine?” It was a great question that I could not answer honestly at the age of 20, but now I know what he meant. I have the talent to be a great doctor. Patients liked me and I could chat with patients for hours. I have steady hands suited for surgery from years spent in the zebrafish lab injecting mRNA into clear embryos as an undergrad. And yet, something was missing.

Unfortunately, medicine is hierarchical and almost militaristic in the way doctors is trained, something I learned only after joining the field, Unfortunately, I did not like obeying orders. To me, medicine is interesting because of the amount of thinking you have to do. When you are obeying orders, you are not thinking and that was the part of medicine I missed. So what would you do if you were in my shoes? Most people would have stayed with what was certain: a prized seven year surgical residency many spent years queueing for. Unlike what the general public thinks, the residency application process does not start when you graduate, but much earlier. I started queuing for it when I was a second year medical student. By leaving, I was abandoning years of research and connections that I had built. I thought of the opposite outcome: sticking with a system that I hated for the rest of my life, which was a good enough of a motivator to try new things.

I was fortunate enough that my medical school mentor became the Chairman of the Medical Board at Sengkang Health and I approached her to learn about hospital administration and management. I was not picky about the projects that I was given. Anything was good for me to learn this new field quickly. The fear of appearing foolish would have stopped many from asking questions, but to me, ego is worthless when there is no outcome. I chose to focus on outcomes instead. Despite being the most junior person in the planning team, I was winning the trust of people much more senior than me. I was not there to play politics, but to bring everyone together in a room and discuss the gaps that we faced if we were to open the hospital tomorrow. I did what everyone else did, rolled up my sleeves and got things going.

It is always in the most chaotic and unstructured environment where you learn the most about yourself and what you like to do for a living. Because of the shear amount of planning that we had to do, I had to learn things (such as reading a blueprint of the building) on my own. Google was a tool that helped me understand how electronic medical records were structured and how some of the tech that we were planning worked. I was constantly solving problems and I liked that. I created an infectious disease outbreak surveillance tool that ended being critical for contact tracing efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic and I loved how it gave me an outlet for my creativity. I knew then that I found what I wanted to do. I was learning Python and data analytics in my spare time when I discovered that GovTech’s Open Government Products was recruiting for a product manager.

Gain Practical Experiences in Areas of Interest

Product management fit what I knew I was good at, which was bringing an idea to life. I liked that it was a creative outlet for me and a new opportunity to learn about computer science and working with engineers. The main problems was that I was not a traditional candidate. I don’t have a formal computer science degree, so earning the trust of those working with me would take time and effort.

The first few months of being a product manager was spent learning the ropes from experienced product managers in terms of customer support, feature planning, and day-to-day project management. Besides work, I devoted time learning about each product, their infrastructure, and the various tools engineers used for development. It was hard to earn the trust of engineers because I did not speak the same language as them. Over time, I listened in on the discussions to learn their concerns and considerations when building new features and the technical debts that we were accumulating over time. In learning about the field, I found my colleagues to be the best resources. I was taking Udemy courses on full-stack development so I could catch up and learn the vocabulary required to do my job. Learning on your own had its limitations, so I would ask my colleagues to explain difficult concepts to me. Understanding how the concept was related to my work helped to solidify the knowledge and made learning more interesting. I was motivated knowing I was not spending time learning theoretical concepts, but rather, obtaining skills and knowledge that I needed to understand in order to make decisions about trade-offs.

I was also privileged in my first product management position to have a supportive boss who encouraged us to learn. We had hackathons where we studied problem statements, determined solutions, and launched MVPs within three weeks. Hackathons really push you to think through what you can realistically build in a short span of time with minimal resources and those were the best practice that I had in creating things from 0 to 1.

What it Takes to be a Product Manager

Looking back, the hardest part of being a product manager is prioritising. There are always a million things that you can do, but they are not the things that you should do. Ruthless prioritization is something every good product manager does as new information comes in.

The second hardest part is stakeholder management. It is always the soft skills that distinguish a good product manager from a great product manager. You need to know what your stakeholders want, what you can give them, and what your team can deliver. You can’t please everyone, but you can always come to a consensus. The key is to read the room and do your homework beforehand. In Singapore’s context, most decisions are made before the meeting is even called. It is your job as the product manager to find out these things before you go into a meeting such that the meeting runs smoothly when you show up.

A senior product manager knows how to plan and execute new products from 0 to 1, guide other product managers, and come up with a long-term roadmap for a mature product. I was not there on day 1, but over the years, I picked up the various skills I needed to level up in my product management skills. It is the iterative process that helps you refine your skills in launching and maintaining the product. The best part of the job is that you are constantly solving problems. Furthermore, tech jobs are stable, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, as we can work remotely. It brings me joy and satisfaction when I see my product being loved by my users. It meant that all those hours that we have put in paid off.

Managing People and Mentoring

As I transitioned towards a more senior position, I spend less time on executing features and more time thinking about the big picture, managing difficult customers, and mentoring junior product managers. People management skills becomes more and more important as you level up.  I listen more than I talk because everyone that you manage has a slightly different way of working and it is your job as the director to adapt and meet the needs of your direct reports.

What I’ve learned over the years is that being a good leader is not being the person with the best idea or the smartest person in the room. Instead, by listening to what everyone has to say and encouraging a no-blame and no-fault environment, I was able to gather the best opinions. People can be incredibly thoughtful and you only know that when you listen. Beyond listening, I would say that making the right call consistently is what you can do to earn trust, but that comes with experience. It is ok to make mistakes as a product manager because no one can predict the future accurately. Sometimes a feature is a flop. Don’t be afraid to step up and analyse your own failure. People appreciate your candour and honesty.

“Do what is right even when no one else is looking” was something one of my mentors in medicine told me and I thought that is still very fitting in the tech world. It is easy to take shortcuts and not protect a user’s privacy as putting extra safeguards require more engineering resources. Don’t be the person that build a product on a house of cards. You are not there to push features but to build things that people can really use. Always be respectful of your users’ privacy and build things properly the first time your team pushes the code out. Being fast but pushing out dirty code would come back and bite you at a later point.

The job isn’t full of rainbows and unicorns. There are still serious issues of sexism and racism that plague a largely homogenous, male workplace. I hope that by telling my story, I will be able to inspire more to follow in my footsteps and make the tech ecosystem a more diverse and inclusive place. Product managers are there to build tools for everyday people and you need individuals with a wide range of backgrounds and experiences to build tools that can be used by anyone and everyone.