Samuel Chen— A W-shaped mind

I drifted into being a generalist. I started in English translation, then product management and UI/UX, then domestic Xiaohongshu and overseas Instagram/Facebook operations, then frontline sales. The path looks like a W on paper; in practice it is mostly what happens when you say yes to projects other people are too busy to take.

Most of the systems I have built came out of need, not ambition. A process that was breaking. A spreadsheet someone was maintaining by hand. A workflow eating the afternoon. The first one was in 2022 — a cross-border study-abroad mentorship platform I built end to end as Product Manager and Full-stack. The next was at AIGS in 2024, WeChat and Xiaohongshu operations plus a certificate-scanning mini-program. The current ones are at GUILD, where I run two ecosystems: one for the global social and website operation, and one that turns a single QR code into a cross-brand bridge between the Lab and the Institute. Both are still being extended, which is the ordinary state of a system that is in use.

On the creative process — I think I work in what the MBTI / Jungian system would call an N-Intuitive mode. The way I get to a good answer is rarely a straight line. It is a walk, a pause, a half hour in a park, a structured form filed at the end of a long afternoon. I wrote a longer note about it on the writing page.