I’m Angela 👋🏽
I care about ethical tech, balancing life-growth-and-career-growth, and intentional parenting.
I’ve been in
market and media research for 6 years,
UX research, UX design management, and digital product strategy for 10,
service design for 4,
advertising for 1.
[I was also a gymnastics coach for 5 year-olds when I was in college, and a national athlete at one point in my life. As a middle-aged adult, though, I’m out here doing mobility exercises from Youtube, and getting back to hobbies I loved in my 20s.]
I’ve worked for a whole gamut of company types in the past 20 years:
– a TV, radio, film, music, talent management, publishing, and Internet news conglomerate
– a 50 year-old commercial bank
– an early-stage to growth-stage AI automation startup
– a 0-to-1 personal financing tech startup
– the top university in the Philippines (based on 2024 stats)
– a multinational ad agency
– a research agency, a digital agency, and my independent consulting brand.
I have this dream of listing every single digital product or project I worked on (which is something I was still able to do during my 9th year of working), and I’ll probably update here as I complete it.
[WIP] Project rundown
Coming soon.
Sample from 11 years ago:
Where am I at now?
I went back to school to study Technology Management formally, specializing in AI Management.
Why?
First: My two latest roles showed me the communication gap between modern software teams and IT decision-makers in legacy institutions.
Second: Yes, I was formally trained in quant- and qual- research, but I wanted to validate my “school-of-hard-knocks” capabilities in product strategy and enterprise digital transformation. I’ve been a self-taught person in tech for fifteen years now – learning UX, digital strategy, and digital transformation in a pre-bootcamp era.
BCIT (in Metro Vancouver) has been awesome: It’s truly hands-on, and grounded in practical industry experience. It’s also given me a whole suite of complimentary skills that I wish I knew 10 years ago: ops management basics, quantitative methods for forecasting, business statistics, business law, and economics.
Aside from my formal classes, it’s been eye-opening getting to attend talks from Simon Fraser University that are open to the public – on democratic infrastructure, dialogue, labour education, and creative facilitation. I’m happy I get to see this whole [different] side to facilitation skills — going beyond tech and the private sector, and more for the community.
For context, this photo (a sentimental one, for me) was from the time I had transitioned from a comfy market research role, to “starting from scratch” in a UX position, with 0 knowledge (at that time) of software development.
I’m so grateful to the generosity of the early Internet (A List Apart, Signal VS Noise, Intercom, Steve Portigal, Brad Frost, Alan Cooper, Jason Santamaria, and many others), and my frontend engineer teammates – all the ingredients that helped me learn the ropes back in 2010. This is a photo of one of the first “Human-Centered Design” workshops I ran, when I was so new to product development that I followed the IDEO handbook to the letter.
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