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Host:Hi, thank you so much for coming. I’m Anders. I am the co-finance and sponsorship director of Millenium STEM’s Executive Team and this is Sophie, the co-chair of Millennium STEM.

Yuan:Great, nice to meet you guys.

Host:Nice to meet you too. I’d just like to ask you a few questions about your journey to STEM. To start off, could you introduce yourself?

Yuan:Sure. My name is Yuan Fang and currently, I am the Senior Director of Product Management at SolarWinds. We create enterprise software to monitor their network deployment for both on-prem and cloud. You know, currently, [with] people working from anywhere, it creates complexity for enterprises in how they manage their user's access, how they manage their security for their infrastructure, for either network, for their database, [or] for applications. What we do is provide them a solution so they always know what’s going on inside and outside of their networks.

Host:Thank you so much for that overview of your company. Could you tell us about your education and how you started off in STEM?

Yuan:Education-wise, I graduated from UBC in computer engineering. I also have an executive MBA degree from a China-European business school, and my entry into STEM was kind of easy. Both of my parents work in academia; my father is a professor in electrical engineering and my mother is a professor in mathematics. So to me, being born into a STEM-based family, I was exposed to a lot of resources – books they gave me that I read, not for learning but just [out of] general interest. One of the interests when I was in elementary school that I still remember was how to communicate with aliens. There’s a book…I would stay up late at night and stare up at the stars and try to talk to the stars. Those were the things that kids would do, but it slowly evolved into interests like “Oh! There are different types of stars, and black holes? And what about them?” That’s how I got more interested into STEM.

Host:You mentioned earlier that you went to UBC and that you also went to China for business school. How do you make that decision to go to another country for another degree?

Yuan:That’s a good question. One of the things that gives me satisfaction working in STEM areas is that you get to create technology that changes people’s lives. When I graduated from UBC, my first job was working for Hughes aircraft. What we [worked on] was an air-traffic control system. Before that, not just in Canada but around the world, the whole air-traffic control system was manual. The pilot talks to the tower and the tower has the charts on paper and they monitor… putting the airplanes onto different trajectories and making sure they can manage that. One is that it's very labor intensive. Two, you can’t really scale, right? You can’t really keep too many airplanes without some kind of a safety mechanism in place so you have to limit the number of planes that can come into and come out of different airports. So the system we built was an automated system – a computerized base that back in the 1990s that changed the whole air-traffic control system. Today, the volume of air-traffic control is probably 10x to what the late 90s was. And I wouldn’t say that everything should be done like that, but that automated control system was definitely a factor in allowing more air-traffic and travel for people. The reason why I went to China was that my second job was working for Motorola, and I think you guys are used to I-phones, [being] born in the wireless access-to-data era. Back in the 90s that wasn’t the case. In the 90s, fixed broadband was just starting. You had broadband when you’re sitting somewhere with a computer plugged into a model, you have one or up to five megabits per second. That was considered to be “broadband”. If you were on the phone, on mobile, it was SNS only. You can text, but you can’t really do data. So at Motorola, what we developed was the first generation of wireless data. It’s called the GPRS, and the first generation was analog, so you can talk to each other. The second generation was digital, you can talk to each other, you can send data. GPRS was supposed to be the 2 and a half generation, where now you can start to send a limited amount of data. So once this technology matures – and obviously, you know, China was a huge market – so Motorola wanted to market their technology to China. They asked, you know, if anyone was interested and of course [people were]. I was born in Beijing and that was an opportunity for me to go back to my home country and bring the product I’d built into that market, so that’s why I went to China as my career gave [me] opportunities. And the business school I went to wasn’t a full-time degree, but it was a career-development that companies, seeing me grow in my career, wanted me to have more business knowledge.

Host:Thank you so much. I’m curious about you mentioning the development of analogs, digital and that quick process of optimization. What do you see for the future of technology?

Yuan:Right. I think things are still going a little bit in circles, like it started – when you look back at history – very much of a human-driven thinking. It started as humans who empower and build systems , based on not data-driven but philosophical and different ruling systems. Then, as those systems moved into a computerized age, we became much more data-driven. When we make a decision nowadays, we look at data, [which eventually] went from small to big. But I think at a certain point we’ve gone back to what people need, [our] emotional need, what society needs. Because too much data is making us unable to consume it all. You look at any data source, whether that be Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, it’s a stream that never ends. You can never say: “I’ve finished reading everything.” You have to be selecting, and in many circumstances, those algorithms are dictating what we can see. And in many cases that’s bad; we’re being influenced without even knowing. So now there’s a lot of questions about how to make sure that technology is indeed helping us and not bombarding or flooding us with a lot of information that in many ways is hijacking us, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I think the next step is deciding how to steer technology into the right trajectory for us, collectively, as a civilization.

Host:Thank you for that answer, that was very insightful! Do you think that AI plays a role in any of this?

Yuan:Definitely. AI, you see, is a fancy term. What it’s really saying is that you have a large amount of data, and if you just digest data the same way that we used to – reading it, trying to process it – it’s not scalable. You cannot deal with that amount of data. So AI or ML is a way of us building algorithms similar to what human thinking is but at a much faster speed, so we can digest that information. So AI again, that artificial part is intelligence but not real intelligence in the sense that it’s still based on human understanding of the algorithm, and is still very much based on what our knowledge is. As our knowledge improves, so does AI. It’s like a machine; if you’re trying to farm by hand, you can only farm maybe half a hectare in a season. But once you have those algorithm machines, you can now farm a much larger area. AI, similarly, is a tool that we have. One thing that is key, in my opinion, is that AI is a tool for us. It’s not an entirely different thing, it’s not unparallel with our thinking. It’s just part of a tool that expands our ability.

Host:I’m just going to reference back to your work. Could you describe what a typical day at work looks like?

Yuan:A typical day would start fairly early, as it’s a Texas based company and they’re 2 hours [ahead] and there’s many different meetings. The role of a product manager is that you make decisions with where the product needs to go in the sense of direction. Because every company and every project has finite resources, so you have to tell the engineering team based on what you hear and your research on the market and what the competition is doing – basically what the overall market is evolving into – in order to build a roadmap on what YOU want the engineering team to develop. So a lot of time is spent on talking to customers, talking to sales, talking to FCs, talking to engineering teams, and really applying that knowledge that you gain into balancing short-term and long-term needs. All the while trying to draw balance between the financial returns of the product versus the long-term competitive means of the product. Much time is spent on these meetings and processing information, and some outcomes of that work would be: providing business models – ie. “my projection is that the product will grow by x percent in the next few quarters” and this is my view on the competitive landscape, and working with the engineering team to bring all our innovative ideas into reality.

Host:Thank you for that. We know that technology is changing a lot; it’s changing rapidly. How would you go about advising younger students interested in starting in tech fields, what branch, and why?

Yuan:One thing, at least when I went to school, is that universities use very antique tech. It’s very hard to keep up with the latest. When you go out of school you discover “Oh! What I learned was really dinosaur-tech.” But that really didn’t matter. Because technology is about knowledge. You weren’t born with technology, but with an ability to learn. So that’s the most important part. It’s not about the technology you work with. In our industry, technology evolves very fast. What you learn as “cutting-edge” today will become table-steak 2 years from now and out-of-date probably 5 years from now. So you’ll never be able to say “I’ve mastered all the latest tech I have nothing else to learn.” The key thing is to keep refreshing yourself and keep current. I also keep an open-mind, always be ready to pick up the latest and quickly understand what that technology is, what its benefits are, and I truly think that ability to learn is the most essential skill – not technology itself.

Host:When you were navigating through your university life, what were your methods for learning?

Yuan:Yeah, I’m probably not the model student that I want other people to mimic (laughs). For me, it was really about getting through university with the least amount of effort. I was definitely not the type that would study 18h a day and try to get the best possible grade. I was more looking at it like “if the course is interesting, then I’ll devote time, but if it isn’t intriguing, I’ll try to spend enough time to pass it”. But one thing if I were to go back to my university life, I wish I would’ve spent more time in learning things that weren’t just on those mandatory credits I had to take to graduate. One thing I learned was that once you get into a professional career – for me that’s the IT/computer industry – every other discipline will be a factor. You’re going to be working with customers that come from a law background, people that come from the consumer industry. So my main encouragement for STEM students would be to not just look at STEM itself but take more electives and have a broader knowledge of disciplines like the arts and other science fields that will all prove to be useful later on in your career. You’re going to have many opportunities to work with different verticals, and having that knowledge in school would give you an advantage compared to others. So if I were to travel back to my university days, I’d probably do less in engineering and more in executive courses to broaden my knowledge.

Host:On that note, talking about STEM is a really broad topic as it connects to many different subjects. Given your field of work, how do you think science or STEM connect to business, and how do those worlds overlap?

Yuan:For STEM, before you could say that selling a computer is a business and that the science aspect of the computer itself is isolated. But now…I was just on call with a colleague who showed me a new website, called DALL-E, that’s a project from OpenAI. [On this website] if you have in the description something like kids playing water on Mars, the AI algorithm will generate a drawing to match. That’s an extremely interesting idea. But what we can see is that this is connecting many different disciplines together. Before we needed to spend many many hours learning how to draw. With tools like this, it’s all about ideas. If I have an idea and know what I want to create, I don’t need to learn how to draw anymore when these types of tools are available. This is truly what STEM is doing for us; it’s allowed us to be able to do a lot of the things that previously required a lot of learning and shifts the focus on generating ideas. What is it that you want to do with technology? How do you make the technology to generate outcomes that people desire? How do you stimulate interest? I think that’s the part that will help us stop viewing STEM and technology as an isolated piece and more as a tool, an engine, and more importantly consider what we want that tool to do for us. And technology itself cannot tell us that. We have to come up with business ideas for technological tools to fuel, like an engine to a car.

Host:I’ve actually seen that website before, the drawing, and I think it’s really fascinating. I just want to ask: how do you go about that innovation or that process of thinking of a new idea? Something totally original?

Yuan:Firstly, I don’t want to burst the bubble but the most original ideas…I’ll just say don’t get too hung up with over-original ideas. The reason for that is if it’s still original, it probably means that there’s a high chance of it not working (laughs). A lot of times, I’ll say, it’s incremental improvements that make a big difference. So start with that, start with incremental. You know, for example, in my line of work – when we talk to the customers, I mean, at the end of the day, the use of those products doesn’t change that drastically. If I’m a network administrator or a web or application developer, the application I’m developing today is probably very different in looks and feels and complexity from 20 years ago. But those applications [from 20 years ago] whether they’re still used for games or HR applications or business data-process application – the contexts in which its used in doesn’t change that much. When you look at innovation, don’t always think this is going to be a groundbreaking idea, but look at it like “How do I help the same people to make their lives a little bit better, a little bit easier.” Then those smaller innovations add up. Because if you make their lives 5% more efficient this year, you do another thing that makes it 10% more innovative – it’s like an investment. Compound interest. If you have a fixed percentage every year, then every 7-8 years you’re going to double. Of course, there are going to be groundbreaking ideas, say like SpaceX with their reusable rockets. Those ideas come once in a while, but not every company will be in the position to do that kind of groundbreaking thing. So don’t limit yourself in thinking that unless I come up with a groundbreaking idea, I’m not really innovating. That’s the part that I want to convey: little innovation matters.

Host:I like that optimization of a program can really make my life more efficient in that way. So what do you think, in your career,what was one of your biggest optimizations of maybe yourself or just something in your work that you optimized?

Yuan:I mean, optimization is…let me play back. I think what you’re really asking here is how to maximize the growth opportunities. For me, one of the big parts was my decision to take this opportunity to go back to China and work for 10 years there. This really opened up my eyes because, in Canada, we’re a Western, large country but with a smaller population. So here, in comparison to 1.4 billion people, it’s a very different market. So for me, being a Chinese native – [I] speak the language, understand the culture – being able to spend time working in China and then also understand Western culture and how the technology is built, market and customer needs, to me that was very beneficial towards my entire career. You have exposure to both the technical front and the go-to-market front. You know how sales are made, how to go to the market and market the technology, that has been very helpful to my career. Everyone’s opportunities will be unique to their own choices and their own growth path, but for me that was a bold move at the time. Even though I grew up in China at a young age, I’d never worked there so from a career-standpoint, that was a bold move. But I think I would definitely do it again. After that, I then moved to Singapore and moved back to Canada. I did a number of different roles, starting from software engineering then pre-sales and marketing, and in the last 10+ years product management. They’re different jobs, but every part of the experience adds up. Because your engineering background helps you market products because if you know the product, you can market it better. Then your marketing experience makes your product management skillset much better. So the point here is to not stay in one role and try to expand into different areas, and reach both your appeals from your employers as well as giving yourself a broad skill set so you can grow in different capacities.

Host:You mentioned moving jobs – what would you say was the difference in workplace culture moving from job to job?

Yuan:That’s a great question. Every company is different: different technology, different culture. Also, each company is at a different stage in its life cycle. A start-up company has a very different mentality than a large fortune-500 company, and then there are mid-sized companies that are kind of in between. For me, what I learned was that the most important thing is people. It’s never about working on the coolest technology. Who you are working with and the company culture, whether you’re able to fully be yourself and make an impact, having a supportive environment is important. None of us are going to be heroes by ourselves; we all need a supporting system that, when you start your career, you need to be in an environment that helps you to grow, learn, and gives you exposure to different things. Whether you’re in title, a composition is not number one. Others will catch up very quickly. So my advice for young graduates is that for your first couple of jobs, it’s really about finding a place where you can truly learn. Learning is something that needs support. If your employer expects you to keep doing the same thing over and over again so they can derive maximum efficiency and leave you no time to pick up new skills, I would advise against it. I would rather go into a place where one, [it] uses your skill sets but views you as a young, emerging star and gives you time to learn. Two, company politics is ever at work and don’t be afraid of it, but definitely work in teams and with people you enjoy working with. Don’t force yourself into a position where you’re like “I don’t want to talk to anyone, I just want to be by myself”. That to me is definitely not a good sign. You want to be in an immersive, collaborative environment where you get to truly explore different things.

Host:Across these interviews, collaboration has been a very constant theme and having a good support system is vital to doing your work. So my question is: Has there been a specific mentor that has really helped you on your journey through STEM?

Yuan:Yes, absolutely. I’ve had a number of mentors that almost everyone I talk to has had a mentor in their career. When you start your job, there’s always someone to look up to. It could be your director, manager, or a senior staff on the steam that gives you a lot of advice and tips. For me, yes. Every step of my career, there has been a mentor that has helped me in different capacities. My first mentor, he was in aircraft, and [back] then I had basic training on coding and what OS is but I’d never been on a big project before. So he was the one that really introduced me to how to operate large team environments, how to grow in terms of technology complexities. Then it was my own experience growth, and my next few mentors who gave different sets of knowledge or leadership guidance. Again, it’s not just limited to STEM. STEM is just a specialty, and your mentor could come at a later part of your career. Your mentor probably comes more from a leadership angle, people who help you grow in your capacity and help you make a bigger impact. Because at the end of the day, the more you know, the more impact you should be able to make. That’s where the mentor comes in, they help you understand how to elevate yourself to the next level of your career.

Host:Talking about levels (laughs) this is kind of a fun question. How would you graph the structure of your life in terms of past, present, and future.

Yuan:Well, that’s kind of a ten-thousand foot question. I’ll say that looking back in my career, it’s really about the impact. Impact in the sense of yourself, the company you work for, but more importantly for me now is “Am I working on a product that’s going to have some sort of a lasting impact to the customers I serve?” And ideally I want to look back when I retire and see that I’ve done a few good things, a couple projects that I’m proud of, and creating those lasting impacts for people. Those are the things that I’d like to keep, not just growing in titles and salaries. Those are important, but my real motivation right now is really about “Am I working on a project that gives me that satisfaction that I’ve done something good?”

Host:Thank you so much. I think this is a good place to conclude it, and I just want to say thank you for coming out today and allowing me to interview you. So that is the end of our interview for Unlocking STEM.

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