Sai Ma

Why PM — a note for the hiring manager

Shared loneliness is how connection begins

It was a seemingly trivial moment that manifested my existential loneliness. One morning, just before leaving my apartment and rushing to another day at the office, I paused and saw the street light. In broad daylight, the brightness of its still burning bulb stood out from the other lights all gone to rest. For just one moment, I found myself free from the hectic motions of my routine and felt instead an uncanny connection with the light pole. "Another lonely entity, hard at work," I thought to myself. "Another lonely entity like me."

The street lamp recalled to mind that a paradox of loneliness was the core theme of my earlier humanities-oriented research. As an undergraduate studying abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, and later, as a graduate student at Stanford University's Center for East Asian Studies, I discovered in a comparative study of Chinese writer Lu Xun's short story, "The Loner", and Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki's novel, Kokoro, that the first-person narrators of each work experience in common a deepening sense of isolation as they receive letters from their respective protagonists. The letters, whereby the protagonists attempt to convey their lonely interiorities, in fact serve also to pass on the feeling of loneliness to the reader, thus creating a paradoxical connection not only between the isolated characters in each story, but also between the stories and their audience as well, wherein a mutual understanding of isolation becomes the basis for a unifying experiential intimacy. The two stories, as if foreshadowing the inevitable contradictions of the coming "Information Age", reveal that loneliness often stems not from truly being alone, but rather from a failure to realize the common experience of each person being alone in themselves. This realization in turn compelled me to ask:

"To what extent does the connection afforded by shared information cause loneliness, and in what ways can a shared understanding of loneliness in this information-penetrated world produce an awareness of being lonely together?"

As strange as it may sound, I found my answer in the moment with the street lamp: true connections, and therefore the key to banishing loneliness and creating togetherness, are found in the empathetic understanding of our shared reality. Fostering this empathetic connection between people with each other and, by extension, with the world — through the products I build — is my mission as a PM, and why I am dedicated to this work.

The second reason is that product management eases my own existential loneliness: relationship-building is central to the craft, and I love connecting with people and collaborating with them — which is why I built this resume as a bar in the first place.