I The Decision#
The journey began with panic over finding a summer job, aware that a blank summer would hurt my graduate employment chances. I chose a half-year placement for less competition. After several interviews, I received an email offering a choice of positions; I picked a business role on the product team for a broader view of the feature development life cycle. The final interview was with a product manager right after my final exam. I was called for an online interview within an hour after the exam, rushed home to prepare, and had an excellent conversation, boosted by my post-exam alertness and strong desire for the role. A week later, I received the offer by email, quickly prepared my gap semester request and graduation study plan, and settled everything within two days.
II Onboarding Journey – My First Job#
On my first day, I learned business concepts, team structure, operations, and met colleagues. The culture impressed me—they encouraged face-to-face coffee chats with collaborators to understand responsibilities, duties, and personalities. This practice accelerated adaptation and idea sharing. Quickly grasping the complex business logic and technical operations was both challenging and rewarding.
III Role and Responsibilities#
As a placement intern assisting the product owner, I supported the end-to-end release lifecycle of two main features: Scameter Phase II and App-to-App. My tasks included market research, e-payment landscape review, competitor analysis, preparing PRDs and PIRs, writing user stories with acceptance criteria, breaking epics into task-level tickets, grooming technical teams, translating business requirements into technical constraints, and assisting health checks in Pilot, UAT, and PRD environments.
IV Tasks and Achievements#
My role extended beyond product owner support through collaboration with diverse teams:
- Learned business and architectural differences between PM4C (Customer-centric) and PM4B (Business-centric) systems.
- Collaborated with Design & Customer Experience teams to build user journeys and intuitive layouts, identify user pain points and set priority settings based on statistics and roadmap.
- Worked with Transformation on scheduling feature release and reporting progress
- Collaborated with Data teams on making dashboards, SQL queries to carry out forecasting
trend analysis, and feature release monitoring. - Supported Technical teams validating backend ledger transactions, aligning app UI interactions, and user journey enhancements.
- Engaged the Risk Team for bank and MA regulations.
I Limit Change Impact#
Performed impact analysis on P2P and P2M payment journeys, identifying API call entries, backend and ledger code changes, error handling adjustments, API and limit check updates, effort estimation, and backend schema review.
II Scameter Phase II#
Followed release aimed at identifying high-risk PayMe and FPS transfers, alerting users with centralized unique identifiers. Created tickets with user stories, acceptance criteria, use cases, and story points estimations. Groomed technical teams, ensured correct backend tagging and logs, supported accessibility features, aligned cross-platform behavior (iOS & aOS), approved tech demos, and updated Scameter webpage copy per police requirements.
III App-to-App & FAQ#
Enhanced user onboarding by enabling PayMe login via HSBC bank app, streamlining without extra verifications. Constructed user stories and acceptance criteria, updated bilingual FAQ copies, approved demos, met tight deadlines, and participated in daily stand-ups.
IV Dashboard for App-to-App Impact Monitoring#
Built a Databricks dashboard using Python and SQL for PIR, tracking onboarding statistics pre/post-release. Focused on HSBC customers not yet onboarded to measure onboarding speed by first valid transactions. Applied advanced SQL and scheduling to provide timely feature effectiveness insights.
V App Speed-Up#
Worked to improve app responsiveness across onboarding, payments, vouchers, promotions, and navigation. Analyzed API call sequences, caching mechanisms, token retrieval, crash reports, clickstream data, and possible API revamps under bank compliance constraints. Prioritized enhancements aligned with team capacity and roadmap, balancing iOS and aOS application differences.
VI NPS Journey Analysis#
Managed NPS score updates, score analysis by user journey, and positive/negative verbatim categorization to pinpoint pain points critical for app experience improvements.
VII Verbatim Categorization Tool#
Developed a keyword-frequency based Excel tool with 85% accuracy for automating verbatim categorization, drastically reducing manual effort by 1 month per semi-annual and enabling regular use across Excel versions.
V Other Contributions#
Participated in sprint planning, backlog management, and weekly reporting covering active users, ticket sizes, churn rates, transactions, engagement stats, vouchers usage, revenue, and related trends. Assisted feature enhancements including pin removal, voucher logic, HKID drop-off studies, referral journey reviews, bug fixes, and new market opportunity investigations.
VI The People I Met#
Worked with talented professionals specializing across diverse fields, passionate about business operations, contributing to PayMe’s reputation as a popular Hong Kong e-payment app.
VII Takeaways#
The placement developed my business mindset, technical skills, time management, organization, presentation, and delivery capabilities. I learned soft skills like outreach, embracing mistakes, continuous learning, and self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses, demonstrating value to the team. These experiences significantly contributed to my career and personal growth.
