Meet Zihao Xia, a product manager here at Affinity. We asked Zihao a few question about what its like to work as a part of the Affinity product team:
—
Let’s start with something easy… what is something someone may not know about you?
I ran my first marathon during Covid.
—
Tell us a little bit about your role and what you take care of day to day.
I lead our product development team focused on enabling workflow and data integrations with 3rd party systems. This includes our native CRM integrations, Affinity Analytics, and our external developer API. My day to day varies depending on what is the highest priority. This could be user testing designs or discussing the feasibility with engineers, working with customer success on supporting a new feature, or looking at product usage data and customer feedback to develop new product ideas.
—
What do you like most about your role?
We have an enthusiastic set of customers that are always eager to talk to us and share feedback. That makes my job more fun and humanizes the problems we’re trying to solve. One of my favorite memories at Affinity was when a designer and I jammed out a prototype over late night pizza in the office. The next morning, I hopped into an Uber to Oakland with our CEO and ran through the prototype for customer feedback. That quick feedback loop is invaluable and I have never regretted making the time to talk to a customer.
—
Any tips for someone considering a career in product?
The longer I work in product, the more I realize anything and everything can be approached from a product mindset. Take for example an email you send to your team summarizing the results of an internal discussion. That email can be framed as a product. Your team (the user) needs to have a quick reference for revisiting the agenda discussed as well as next steps (user need). How you choose to format your email, the subject and body content, and even when you send the email (design) can influence your team’s ability to use this email for reference later. It’s a trivial example, but viewing the world with this perspective is a useful mental muscle to develop.
—
Why do you love working at Affinity? Any team events or activities you look back to that were your favorite?
We have an inspiring vision, a great team, and clear company values embodied by everyone at the company. Every hackathon I’m impressed by what our engineers create.
