I'm Shawn Lin, in Singapore. Eleven years of product work across MNCs and the public sector. I build products, and I run platforms. The small ones are how I stay current, and I have been building with AI since 2020: chatbots for SMEs, a model that checks a hotel room through a photo, detection that learns what normal looks like on an industrial network. Right now that means Parsnips, which reads Parliament and points every sentence back at the words it came from. The benefits calculator gets the 2027 rule change right for children born before it.
Day to day I serve at the other end, running enterprise platforms at scale. Four years owning a global Linux estate at Bosch, holding strict IT compliance together with what developers need. Inside Bosch the Linux platform is another product line, so the title stayed product manager, which is accurate: the platform is the product and I own its roadmap. That work is mostly a decision problem, a great many people wanting different things from the same estate, and the useful answer is the one they can all live with. The clearest example: a release was not done until installation was one click, because at that scale every extra step becomes hundreds of support tickets. Before that an intrusion detection product, government cloud, and the frontend of the SG50 national app.
Different technology each time. The same job: take something messy and make it hold up, then make it checkable. Small products have a shorter feedback loop, so the new tools get tested there first and the patterns carry back.
Checking the work is the difference between a demo and something a business can rely on. That is why Parsnips refuses to let a model write a quotation. A wrong one would discredit the whole thing, and the calculator carries 129 tests for the same reason.
The short version
- Now
- Product Manager, Enterprise IT Workplace (Linux clients, global) at Bosch ASEAN, since September 2022. I own the roadmap and run global development and support for enterprise Linux workstations. That means holding strict IT compliance together with what developers actually need. The estate has grown about 30% under it.
- Before
- Technical Product Manager and Product Owner for cybersecurity at MicroSec. I directed product strategy for enterprise intrusion detection in OT environments, and led an agile team of 25 to 30. That work was commercial as much as technical: presales, demos, and solution architectures for industrial IoT sensors in smart factory, energy and automotive settings, plus proof-of-concepts with executives.
- Before that
- Six years at aZaaS, as technical consultant then technical product manager. I led operations for Government Commercial Cloud platforms, which carried a million API requests a minute at peak. I delivered enterprise business process automation products, working with UX, dev and QA teams. I built the frontend for the SG50 national app, a Cordova build, which passed 200,000 downloads during the Golden Jubilee.
- Education
- Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. Information Technology at Temasek Polytechnic. Professional ScrumMaster I.
Why the small tools exist
Most of what is on this site started as a question I could not get a straight answer to. What does a second or third child actually cost, year by year, once the grants and reliefs land. Which parts of a sitting of Parliament were worth my time. What I wanted was the answer, in numbers, correct at the edges, and I could not find it. So I built it, and then I kept using it.
Singapore is home, and so are three kids. That is the honest reason a family-benefits calculator exists. A generic answer does not help when you are working out how housing grants stack on one flat, and a spreadsheet gets old fast. Having them means I build in the time I have rather than the time I would like. That turns out to be a useful constraint.
Working together
Not everything I have built is on this site. Some of it was for clients and belongs to them: a lean-certification provider in Malaysia, and a chiropractor with three clinics in Singapore.
The part I enjoy is solving enterprise problems: different stakeholders want different things, and finding the outcome that is fair and actually works for all of them is where I am strongest. That is the platform half of the day job. It is also a decision problem before it is a technical one.
I take on self-contained work that I can see the edges of, usually weeks rather than months. If something on your side is still manual, or there is a report that has to be right every time, that is the kind of problem I am good for. The four things I get hired for has the detail, or email shawnljj@gmail.com.
If a problem on your side looks like something I have built before, tell me about it. I will give you a straight answer on whether it is a fit, and quickly. If it is not, I will say so.