About
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X/Twitter: @itsmeterrylin
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GitHub: itsmeterrylin
Background
My career started at UBS Investment Bank in Taiwan, but finance life at a massive corporation quickly showed me it wasn't my path. After traveling and meeting a product designer, I discovered product marketing, which led me into project management and eventually product management.
What I'm Working On
I've been at CB Insights since 2019, working extensively with backend-heavy tools like Elasticsearch. This work involves the intricate details of data relevance—tuning search algorithms, weighting results, and balancing the eternal product challenge of recall versus precision.
My technical evolution really accelerated when GPT-4 came out. I started with a personal problem: managing digital camera files was tedious—importing from SD cards, organizing folders, backing up, naming everything properly. So I built a Python script to handle it all with one click. That small automation sparked something bigger: if I can solve this, what else is possible?
From there, I layered on more complexity—Google Sheets automation, database integration, increasingly sophisticated workflows. I've been pushing both the limits of what LLMs can do and my own technical boundaries ever since. With AI evolving so rapidly, I believe you need to upskill as fast as the models improve, or you'll fall behind.
Approach to Product Management
As a product manager, talking to customers is your oxygen. It's easy to get lost in data and forget there's a human struggling to accomplish something with your product. I'm more user-focused than purely data-driven—user research gives you rich context but limited scale, while data gives you scale but loses nuance. The magic happens when both tell the same story.