From Coal Mines to Live Commerce

My first product was a barge scheduling system for a coal mine in Indonesia.

No Figma mockups. No user research panels. No sprint retrospectives. The “user” was a logistics coordinator who needed to know when the next barge was arriving so he could dispatch trucks to the loading dock. The “feature request” was: “Can you make it so I do not have to call three people to find out when the barge is coming?”

I built a system that pulled scheduling data from dispatch, formatted it, and pushed updates automatically. The scheduling update cycle went from one day to under an hour. The logistics coordinator stopped making phone calls. That was the product.

I did not know it at the time, but that project taught me the core skill I still use every day: understanding an operational workflow before proposing a technical solution. The logistics coordinator did not need a dashboard. He needed information to arrive without him asking for it.

Why I left mining

After a year of mining projects — barge scheduling, weighbridge automation, fleet management, safety monitoring — I had a realization. The problems were fascinating, but the technology environment was constrained. Legacy systems, limited budgets, and long procurement cycles meant that innovation happened slowly. I wanted to work at the pace of software.

I joined Accenture and worked on a digital transformation project for a major telco. Different industry, different scale, but the same fundamental challenge: connecting systems that were not designed to talk to each other. I built middleware, wrote test cases, and created an automation framework that cut regression testing from four hours to five minutes.

The Accenture experience taught me how enterprise systems connect, break, and resist change. It also taught me that I wanted to be closer to the product decisions, not just the technical execution.

The ByteDance chapter

I joined ByteDance in 2021 as an Associate Product Manager. Four years later, I was managing product modules across six Southeast Asian markets. The scale was different from anything I had experienced: millions of sellers, billions of transactions, and engineering squads larger than entire companies I had worked at before.

But the core skill was the same. Understand the operational reality. Map where the system breaks. Build the product that fixes it. The barge scheduling logic and the buyer routing algorithm solve the same fundamental problem: routing resources to where they are needed, faster than a human can do it manually.

Why Paragon after ByteDance

People ask why I left a global tech company for a national FMCG company. The answer is simple: I wanted to apply what I had learned about platform-scale product management to a different domain. Paragon operates one of Indonesia’s largest beauty and personal care businesses. Their supply chain, inventory systems, and distribution networks are complex, and the technology layer is still being built.

I lead Product Business Solutions there now. The work spans inventory integration across enterprise systems, logistics route optimization, and retail partner management. Different industry from e-commerce, but the same systems-first thinking: map the data flows, find where they break, build the integration that fixes it.

What carries forward

Each transition carried a skill I did not know I would need:

Mining taught me to respect operational constraints. If the barge does not arrive on time, people do not work. Technology serves operations, not the other way around.

Consulting taught me how to communicate with stakeholders who care about timelines and budgets, not technical elegance. The best solution is the one that ships on time, not the one with the cleanest architecture.

E-commerce taught me scale. What works for a hundred sellers breaks for a million. What works in one market fails in six. Scale forces you to build systems, not features.

Every transition felt risky at the time. Looking back, each one was the right move because it added a dimension I was missing. Mining gave me operational empathy. Consulting gave me enterprise literacy. E-commerce gave me platform thinking. FMCG is giving me domain breadth.

The career is a triathlon, not a sprint. Three disciplines, two transitions, and the transitions are where you grow the most.