Product Management Internship at Tencent Cloud

My internship at Tencent was probably the most fulfilling internship experience I've ever had. Every week, I felt like I had a sense of purpose in the team to make our Serverless product better.

I learnt how to switch between several hats, from product manager to full-stack developer to backend engineer.

As a product manager, I attended weekly Tencent + Serverless product meetings where I tracked progress of our team members, updated our product roadmap, and made a list of priorities for the week. I also interviewed some of Tencent's international customers to discuss about user problems, solutions and improvements. Moreover, I did a competitive framework analysis with Vercel, Netlify and Heroku platforms, after which I started designing and wireframing Tencent's new SSR (Server Side Rendering) product with Sketch.

As a software engineer, I worked on several templates built on our Serverless product. Those included chatbots, full-stack websites, cron jobs in the form of email reminders, an image-resizing app which uses Cloud Object Storage buckets, a Nodejs websocket built with API gateway and Serverless Cloud Functions. I collaborated with other engineers on some backend services that modify our Redis database and is part of our Serverless SDK. I also built a Slack bot which analyses our daily user data and failure rates, and provides useful daily statistics that hinted at which parts of our product needed improvements. Like Austen Collins (CEO of Serverless) said in one of our product meetings, "working without data is being blind". Definitely agreed!

One thing I learnt as a product manager at Tencent is that you need to have a thorough understanding of all aspects of a product, from the technicalities to its positioning. You need to be technical enough to understand what problems users are experiencing. Above all, you need to be user-obsessed, whether it comes to coding or design. The user leads, the product follows.