Heemeng (Chris) Foo

Project update! My application tracking extension is now doing fuzzier matching and injecting new information into LinkedIn (and other sites) to keep me from doubling up on applications. Next up: local storage and bulk import/export operations...

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A successful systems design and delivery strategy begins by assuming that change is likely the only constant. Be adaptable, or fail.

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I am excited to share the latest blog, co-authored by myself, Junhwi Kim and Vyas Sekar, detailing how we managed to successfully localized and improved LLM by combining Fine-Tuning and RAG. https://lnkd.in/gKDkgGPq

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In my experience of interviewing and working with many product leaders, a common trait among the great ones is treating their craft more as a science than an art. Delighting users, creating magical experiences, and ultimately developing software that users love to use is a science. An immediate red flag during interviews is when product leaders can't express details beyond "talking to customers" on how they build lovable products. While talking to customers is paramount, I listen for the structure and tools they use to become customer-centric and experts in the users they serve. Here’s what I look for: Methods to Listen For When Evaluating How Product Leaders Create Lovable Products: 🗺️ Journey Mapping: Understand what users do before and after they interact with your product or attempt to accomplish their job. 🔑 Key Moments Identification: Reveal the key moments that matter in the user journey. 😌 Emotional State Awareness: Understand the emotional states of users and how they change as they progress through the journey. 📊 Data Collection and Analysis: Collect and analyze data to understand funnels, drop-off rates, attrition, etc. I’m also on the lookout for specific techniques on how the product leader builds high-performing product teams. Here are some of the practices to listen for: 🏆 Recognition and Rewards: Establish clear KPIs that define success, create accountability, and drive alignment. Implement a system for recognizing and rewarding team achievements and individual contributions. 🤝 Consistent 1-on-1s: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to mentor and guide the career and development of the product management team. 👥 Team Collaboration: Allow teams to craft their process and evolve it over time. My favorite team performance ceremony is the retrospective, where the team can gather in a safe place and collectively define how they will improve. 🔄 Cross-Functional Alignment: Create alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership. This involves regular cross-functional meetings, transparent communication of goals and progress, and a unified vision that ties the efforts of all departments together. Ensuring that all teams are moving in the same direction is crucial for driving consistent and sustainable growth. Overall, there are many important items across both themes that define effective product leadership. By listening for a product leader who employs these structured methods, companies can make a better hire to turn insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that the user experience is not left to chance but meticulously crafted and continuously improved, while building and managing high-performing teams that drive success.

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Your ability to adapt to changing conditions will be your super power. Being overly adapted to existing conditions makes survival questionable.

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The best use case for overseas development I've heard: We have customers in the eastern hemisphere. To support those customers better, we're standing up product, dev, and support teams to help serve those customers needs. Two key ingredients in making that successful: commensurate pay and the same level of performance and accountability as US peers. #software #international #teammanagement #overseasdevelopment #startup #leadership #coaching

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We've all heard the buzz about "10X engineers" or "Top talent PMs." It's tempting to believe that finding that one exceptional individual can magically transform your product and catapult it to success. But in reality, this approach can often lead to disappointment. Just like in product development, where focusing solely on flashy features can overshadow the core user experience, fixating on hiring individual superstars can neglect the crucial element of team dynamics. The truth is, the true "superstar" is always the team, not the individual. I've seen firsthand how teams filled with talented individuals can struggle to deliver results because they lack a shared culture, complementary skills, or the ability to elevate each other. So, what's the alternative? When building my team, I focus on these three key factors: 1. Extending the team's strategic advantage: I identify our strengths and weaknesses, then hire people who fill the gaps. Do we need a data whiz, a UX guru, or a master storyteller? 2. Sharing a common culture: Strong communication and collaboration are essential. I look for individuals who fit our company's values and work style. After all, a team that vibes well together, thrives together. 3. Making others better: Technical skills are important, but I also value those who inspire, motivate, and uplift their colleagues. A team player who fosters growth can be more valuable than a lone superstar. Remember, a 10x team isn't just a collection of talented individuals; it's a cohesive unit that works together seamlessly to achieve extraordinary results. So, let's shift our focus from hiring rockstars to building rock-solid teams. Because in the end, it's the collective effort that truly makes the difference. #productmanagement #teamwork #hiring #leadership #culture #collaboration #innovation

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We're looking for a senior-staff PM now at Honeycomb, who will drive and own a multi-year vision for a net-new, permanent and significant expansion of Honeycomb's product surface area: https://lnkd.in/g2sM_TfC I’ve sat in this role for 3.5 years now, on and off, so you’ll be inheriting a lot of my regretful decisions. But I’m here to help you navigate that! It involves big data (for real), deep OSS involvement, lots of customers who love the product, and a great team to boot. If you like the idea of thinking through how you’ll turn 10M events per second into 100k, without breaking the bank, and making it as semi-automatic as possible, without losing signal on that data, and building a compelling UI that lets people build and monitor this stuff, this might be up your alley! Wanna talk with tons of customers and spicy sales engineers who have to sometimes commit code crimes to make stuff work, and then tell you about it? Wanna make painful prioritization decisions? Wanna find a way to execute on a multi-year vision and not get lost along the way? Click the link above. Wanna eat shit in front of a customer whose exact set of constraints violates every tradeoff decision you made? And then go back to them 4 months later with the good news that you’ve fixed it all? Come say hi! Wanna try to wrap your head around someone's perceived notions of how observability works, and find creative ways to reorient their worldview? Hi hello please apply. Wanna get deeply involved in the #opentelemetry community, become a core contributor, attend lots of community events, and be continuously infused with customer problems and feedback and also overall industry directions? You know what to do. Wanna work with a very product-minded engineering team who will push you to get stuff done? Wanna be a part of a group that is usually fast, usually right on the first go of things, and isn't afraid to try things and maybe pull them back if they're not working? Wanna have fun too? Clicky clicky.

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Here's something counterintuitive; taking on more investment risk reduces long-term returns: https://lnkd.in/gHwkjHmP This is only my second investment video, so I'm still learning. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it. Based on the feedback from the first video, I tried to make the audio more balanced on this video. I also shortened the length, to make the content more digestible.

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I have been curious for some time now about how the advances in AI would manifest itself in the QA space. I just learned about the upcoming launch of Momentic. If the product works as expected, Momentic will scale the expertise of QA professionals by empowering them to build powerful, self-healing tests using plain English. What do you think? Are you feeling excited or skeptical? #AI #TechInnovation #QA #ProductDevelopment #Momentic #verticalAI

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The session unfortunately wasn't recorded, but here are the slides from my talk at LFMS on quantifying the ROI of contributing to OSS https://lnkd.in/gwdQa3UZ

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Hot off the press, this latest Silicon Valley Product Group article is a good reminder that there are multiple paths to success, and we have to tailor our strategies to fit our unique circumstances. There’s rarely a single answer or approach when it comes to topics like organizational design— after all, people and companies are complicated and are never the same! To quote Marty: “I believe strongly that with the right people with the right skills, a strong product team can succeed no matter the org design. […] I will never again doubt what a motivated group of empowered and skilled cross-functional professionals can accomplish.” Definitely worth a read if you have ~4 minutes and lead or are part of a product team.

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The Missing Readme is a great book to share with your development teams and their mentors. Surprisingly concise and readable, it's a great guide for developing professionalism, craftsmanship and a sense of engineering culture in your teams. https://lnkd.in/ghH8UMHv

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AI is blowing up everywhere, and everyone's trying to figure out what to do with it. Countries are scrambling to make the rules, invest in the tech, and find the energy to power it all. Some are way ahead, while others are still playing catch-up. Key differentiators to keep an eye on. #Compute resources - countries of the global South are still considered "GPU poor" meaning we don't have enough GPUs, which is the engine that powers AI #GreenEnergy - AI ecosystem is compute- heavy and this linearly translates into massive strain on the national grid. Is your country investing strategically in green energy? #Skilled manpower -AI research has been very niche for the better part of the last 2 decades or so. That means expertise is mostly only with the hyperscalers or serious research institutions. Most governments are currently thinking of a massive "retraining and reskilling" of their workforce. Case in point is Singapore setting aside some budget to re-educate its citizens on AI Remember, AI revolution is like electricity all over again. Over a hundred years ago, We (humanity) figured out how to light up the world, but some places are still in the dark. The same goes for AI. Where you’ll be in ten years depends on what you do today. No magic, just smart, strategic and very intentional prioritisation. So, where does your country fit in? I found this post very resourceful. It curates key resources on the US governments' approach to AI. Check it out! #Inequality #AIGovernance #GreenAI #CarbonFootprint #AIStrategy

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After watching the GPT-4o demos and reflecting on "The Great Flattening", it's clear that we are in an amazing time to be building new products. What was once infeasible is now viable, which opens the door to more useful products for more people. However, this new opportunity comes with change and new risks. Product managers can't simply slap an LLM on their product and call it a day. Nearly every product manager I talk to are being asked to hook a bot into their product, whether it's valuable to users or not. Adding shallow functionality to an LLM and hoping to survive is not the answer either. As Sam Altman puts it, you're going to get steamrolled. To succeed, we need to research and empathize with people and how they will adapt with ubiquitous compute. #itstimetobuild #productmanagement

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I've been interviewing a lot of people, so I get some variant of this question a lot. What does Remi actually do? I explain our unique business model & opportunity in my latest post. https://lnkd.in/gswR5anB

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