Member Spotlight: Product Manager Edward Ho

Tell us about yourself and your background with Blueprint!

I’m a 4th year Management Engineering student and a product management intern at Blackberry.

I’ve been working with Blueprint for three terms so far, starting in spring 2023. I originally started as a VP Scoping where I scoped out and communicated with prospective clients, eventually switching into the product manager role for the very project I scoped out.

I originally joined Blueprint as a way to leverage my engineering background to help the local community while also filling in gaps for my product management background. However, I had also heard about Blueprint’s community and the amazing people who work there. Having been part of Blueprint for three terms I cannot understate the number of amazing people I’ve met and become close friends with thanks to the team.

Could you tell us about your role with Blueprint?

I’ve been working as a Product Manager for A Better Tent City for the past two terms.

Where Project Leads may be the brains of a team, and designers and developers being the hands and feet. I’d like to say Product Managers are the heart, being integral to building a community within their project team, motivating their team, planning socials, and empathizing with both teammates and clients.

My role as a PM can be categorized into product strategy, product execution, and team building. Product strategy involves determining the needs and pain points of our client and their users, and identifying how our product can solve their issues. This discovery stage is accomplished via client meetings and conducting user research. The execution stage is where the actual building begins. I begin by identifying KPIs and project goals, followed by creating a product roadmap, formulating user stories, planning sprints, and prioritizing features all while working closely with the project leads, designers, and engineers.

What can we catch you doing outside of school/work?

I’m heavily involved in athletics clubs like UW Muay Thai, UW Dragonboating, and weight lifting, I plan on competing in a Muay Thai competition sometime before graduation. I’m also absolutely obsessed with food, traveling an hour within KW or several hours to Toronto to try out anything from aesthetic cafes to hole-in-the-walls or something in between.

Tell us about your favourite memory with Blueprint!

One of our team socials was at an AYCE hot pot restaurant. Somehow one of our team members had sat on a chair so hard that the entire back portion of the chair broke off.

What has Blueprint taught you?

When you’re working as a Product Management intern, you might find yourself working with a massive and complex product with several other product managers. At Blueprint, you’re able to build a product from ideation to execution and delivery, meaning that as a PM, I learned to lead a project through every stage of the SDLC. Additionally, building a smaller product means every feature and strategic decision I make has that much more impact and influence on the end result than a more mature or complex project, meaning I can see the correlation between my decisions and how the project is affected.

What is your favourite part of Blueprint?

My favourite aspect of Blueprint are the people, be it the people I work with in my team or the clients who are passionate about having a possible influence on their local community. There tends to be a mentality that learning skills, having fun, and expanding your network need to be done separately, but Blueprint has given me the opportunity to do all three at the same time.

Moving forward, what are your plans and goals for the future?

I’m currently pretty dead set on pursuing Product Management, but I plan to keep things interesting and switch between different industries and products to keep things fresh and interesting until I find a niche I really enjoy working with. So far, I’ve really enjoyed working with small and medium sized companies where I can feel the impact of my decisions and have extensive flexibility on how I approach a problem. Ideally, I’d love to work with a product heavily related to data analytics or storage or a product focusing on environmental sustainability.