Yifan Wang, Global Head of Operations at Firework, gave this presentation at the Product Operations Festival in May 2023.

Hi everyone, today I'm going to cover the topic of good product operations and great product operations. This is inspired by a very famous article called ‘Good Product Manager - Bad Product Manager,’ by A16Z.

This presentation is based on a lot of my personal experiences of building a team, developing different things, launching different products, and collaborating with many different functions.

Product operations at Firework

To give a quick introduction about myself, my name is Yifan Wang, and I’m currently the Global Head of Operations at Firework. I'm also one of the founding members of Firework.

Firework is a technology platform that provides shoppable short videos and shoppable live stream solutions to lots of different customers. We allow them to use shoppable short videos and live streams on their websites and their mobile apps.

Our customers include Walmart, Samsung, Levi’s, Gap, and different services like American Express and even Westfield. So you can have a lot of fun just by watching, engaging, and continuing to shop directly from their websites through quality entertainment experiences.

Firework has had a very interesting journey. It’s been running for six years now, so it’s still a very young startup.

We actually started with everything focused on B2C. We created an app and had a lot of users coming in. They started watching and browsing different kinds of content and continued to engage with that.

After a while, our business pivoted to a B2B focus and we changed our business model.

I've been focusing on global operations and managing and building a team around the globe. I’m very passionate about digital innovation, as well as creative strategy. I grew up in China and spent almost a decade in Hong Kong, so my areas of expertise also touch on a lot of FinTech and branding as well.

Today, I'm actually going to touch on a few things that I experience a lot day-to-day. I also see a lot of questions popping up in our community chat and Slack channels.

The areas I'm going to focus on are:

  • Mindset
  • Goal setting
  • Communication
  • And team growth

Let’s get started.