2024–nowUpstate New York
- Left big tech and stopped being a cog: I want to build products that truly matter, and be a user of my own products
- AI product consultant; on the side I advise startups on product
- I hope to design products for plants and ecology. Design for nature.
- Moved to a small town in New York, August 2024
- Volunteer with Wild Ones Capital Region, promoting native plants
- Cornell Master Gardener Trainee
- Through the long autumns and winters, volunteering is my link to the world outside
- Finally saw the coast redwoods, and the giant sequoias in Yosemite
- A plot in a community garden, where I share Chinese vegetables
- Always trying a new hobby: crochet, calligraphy, painting, piano, clay, stickers, seal carving
2022–2024Shanghai
- Shopee Shanghai: e-commerce search product
- Trip.com: AI product manager, AI Trip Planner
- Four classes in 2024: calligraphy, watercolor, Chinese painting, flower arranging
- A two-hour round trip every week to flower class, and a junior florist certificate at the end
- Honeymoon in Australia: my favourite was the plants of the Cairns rainforest, and in Tasmania we were lucky enough to see the aurora australis
2020–2022Shenzhen
- Shopee · Senior PM: food delivery in Southeast Asia from scratch; I owned the dispatch product
- From zero to four countries and 1M orders a day
- Back in Shenzhen I finally had a life: a big south-facing balcony, and energy from the plants friends gave me
- Learned yoga and sketching
- Drove from Shenzhen around Hainan island; a typhoon on the way back meant leaving the car in Hainan
2017–2020Beijing
- Intern at Esri’s Beijing R&D center, on ArcGIS Earth
- After graduating, map products at DiDi: building our own map service from scratch until it led the industry
- With my intern pay, showed my grandparents, my mother and two aunts around Beijing
- Finally close to the China Film Archive, and Q&As with directors I love
- Five films in a row at the Beijing film festival
- A road trip in Xinjiang, stunned by the scenery of Kanas
- Most of the time, work filled almost everything
2011–2018Guangzhou
- B.S. and M.S. in GIS, Sun Yat-sen University
- National first prize, Esri China GIS software competition: internet products can solve the needs of people around you, and that is cool
- Planned to stay in research; a week of solo fieldwork in Suzhou
- After an internship at an urban-planning institute I still chose tech. Every big-tech internship turned me down; I applied to 30+ companies, found the courage for an English interview with Esri, and in the end got the product job I wanted most, at DiDi: my second turning point
- University was hard at first: I had given everything to get there, and others seemed to arrive with ease
- A small-town exam kid seeing the wider world for the first time
- First trip abroad: Songkran in Thailand
Until I was 18Henan
- At 18, passed the gaokao into Sun Yat-sen University: my first turning point
- Henan has one of China’s largest and toughest gaokao pools; Sun Yat-sen is a top national university (Project 985), the leading one in South China
- Grew up in a small county town in Henan
- In one class in eighth grade it came to me: if I wanted a bigger world, only I could get myself there
lula
Growing slowly, like a redwood.
Trained in GIS, then six years as a product manager in maps, logistics and AI at DiDi, Shopee and Trip.com. Now I build things myself with AI, and I am learning to look after a forest.
Right now: Building products I care about, and slowly growing toward plants and ecology. Happy to talk about product roles.
Projects
See what I am building →- FloradexPokédex for plants: an iOS app for collecting and organising the plants you have met, like Letterboxd, but for plants.
- WildCardAn iOS app: photograph a plant and get a knowledge card for it.
- Native Plant Care SignsPrinted care signs for 151 native plants, made for the Wild Ones native plant sale. Scan one to see on your phone how to grow the plant and what it feeds.
- Wild Ones native garden guideA guide to planning, planting and maintaining a native plant garden, for members of Wild Ones Capital Region NY (WOCRNY).
