First of all, thank you to Eve, Maverick and Ani for helping to film our pilot podcast episode yesterday at UTown! Despite the administrative blunder (yesterday was actually a school holiday and the libraries were closed), we managed to have a successful filming session - featuring myself and Kayleigh, as we reflect on the origins of our club. To those looking forward to it, it should probably be released in mid-January, don't miss it! Also kudos to Sherise and Clara for assisting the Podcast Team as well, although y'all weren't available yesterday. I think the PM1101E reel was a good preview of the upcoming efforts to come, so good job so far!

Anyway, after filming the podcast yesterday, I thought it would be a good opportunity to perhaps share my personal thoughts openly at least to our O'Comm members on how far our club has come, as well as what I think would be ahead of us moving forward.

Just a recap of what we have done so far, categorised by the respective teams:

• Operations: email signatures, OSA registration (in progress), event admin for fireside chats, new email domains, venue booking, other general club admin, cohesions

• Publicity: logo design, routine event coverage and recaps, website (with custom domain), renewed brand assets and post templates, blog article drafts, podcast filming and scripting, (pull-up) Banner Design Competition

• Curriculum: PM1101E runs, workshops, ideation of Product Case Competition, PM Career Series P1 & P2

• Partnerships: fireside chats, IA, planning for PM Career Series P3 (networking event), sponsorships

Just for everyone's information (and since this will be going public on our podcast soon as well), my working dynamic with Kayleigh has always been complementary - filling each other's holes while overseeing our club's activities. Officially, I oversee the Partnerships and Publicity Teams while she oversees the Operations and Curriculum Teams. From a more macro point of view, she is more of the "ideator" while I am more of the person who "scales things". One example would be PM1101E - where in Sem 1 she was more involved with ideating the curriculum with the instructors, while in Sem 2 I'll be overseeing PM1101E more to finetune the operational side of things.

Moving forward, given my additional responsibilities and contributions over the next semester - including personally conducting the Product Analytics Workshop in Sem 2 Week 6, as well as now co-leading the expanded Publicity Team together with Eve, the way Kayleigh and I have reassigned ourselves to oversee the following main initiatives next semester are as follows:

Harry: PM1101E, PM Career Series P3, Sponsorship Kits

Kayleigh: Industrial Attachments (IA), Product Case Competition, Career Resume Workshop

It was probably bound to happen that we would have to oversee all 4 teams together eventually, but our defined roles remain the same - she ideates new initiatives while I scale the existing ones. Nonetheless, we'll still oversee each other's aspects when absolutely necessary to cover one another during our respective busy periods.

Another key philosophy that probably explains how this complementary dynamic has worked well for us may also be because of our backgrounds. As you may have noticed, the respective pairs are both complementary in their majors as well, giving fresh perspectives especially when discussing new ideas:

PVP - Harry (Data Science & Analytics), Kayleigh (Business Administration)

Operations - Darice (Economics), Ryan (Statistics)

Curriculum - Joanna (Business Administration), Clare (Information Systems)

Partnerships - Jane (Economics) & Sean (Business Analytics), Nicole (Business Administration) & Junhao (Computer Engineering)

At the end of the day, whether you are from a tech or non-tech background, the mission remains the same - to spread the fun and joy of product management to students from all backgrounds, and such complementary pairs have played a key role in it.

As the under-appreciated backbone of our club, our Operations team handles the bulk of our admin procedures, including registration processes and venue booking. Headed by Darice and Ryan, they basically settle all matters which are considered tedious - including spreadsheet monitoring of interviewees and budgeting matters. In particular, the main task at hand right now would be our club registration under NUS Office of Student Affairs (OSA) - which could not have been accomplished without the assistance of Lionel as well, tapping on his past expertise as a former OSA-registered club President. Through this registration, hopefully our club can be supported with more resources - including an annual budget and the Residential Assistance Scheme to support our members who are in need of campus stay in the near future.

Also another aspect that I've assigned Operations to take charge of would be welfare/cohesions. When students join such clubs, they normally utilise such avenues to network and make friends, especially since in university it's really difficult to make new friends from class alone. By honing this aspect, we hope to build a cohesive community especially within our O'Comm, to ensure that our respective teams are well-bonded not just in carrying out our club's operations, but as potentially life-long friends as well. While we did have cohesions before the start of Sem 1 and Reading Week, along with our various events, Kayleigh and I felt that we should provide more opportunities for bonding - especially with our club's increased O'Comm membership recently.

As such, we are exploring the idea of monthly cohesions - with our January plan consisting of TWO back-to-back cohesion days, one as a formal O'Comm meeting + cohesion in school, with the other conducted in a more chill setting outside school. This is to ensure maximum engagement with our O'Comm members, so that our new members especially feel welcomed into our close-knit community.

I think given the mass amount of publicity given to our OG Publicity Team members especially from our recent articles, there's not much that I need to cover in this section. What I will share - however, are some of the key efforts that our new members especially have done, namely:

• Kay Woon: for being on the ball with my ad-hoc requests, including the new zoom backgrounds and PM Career Series sponsorship kit! It has been a pleasure working directly with you so far, especially now that I've inserted myself in the Social Media Team along with Eve and Jing Xuan. The Christmas zoom background + our "line and stars" Canva template for our baseline posts in Sem 2 are a great addition as well :)

• Sherise: for working together with Maverick on the CapCut video for our PM1101E marketing campaign. It was superb and helped us to gain more traction than we needed. Looking forward to our actual podcast videos!

• Jing Yun: for working tirelessly with Izzati to draft our blog articles to be released over the semester! Hopefully they are beneficial for the wider audience, or at least provide some complementary entertainment value to our other upcoming content.

With more events coming up in Sem 2, hopefully our expanded Publicity Team can continue their good work in capturing our club's greatest moments - which we will all treasure in the future when we look back to these good times.

• PM1101E - our flagship programme that had its successful first run. What else is there to say? Moving forward of course, we are fortunate to have our participants-turned-O'Comm members Swareena, Xinping, Kyle and Norman to take over the helm of our next run, along with Clare who will be leading this new team, given her experience in Sem 1. With more participants and additional instructor expertise, we can't wait to see how our next iteration will unfold.

• PM Career Series - Cleon and Chi Sin, technically the co-creators of this event series with SMU Product Club, have left a lasting impact that will influence our future relationship with our other local university equivalents. With Parts 1 and 2 being a major success, Part 3 will now be handled under Partnerships as our 3 clubs are now facilitating the planning for this networking event in Week 9.

• Product Analytics Workshop - leveraging our connections with NUS SDS, Cleon, Henry and myself will be conducting this workshop in Week 6, comprising both a theoretical and hands-on component using Tableau. This will be an extension of PM1101E Session #5 (PRDs, Metrics, Product Cases), since there is no session on Week 6 due to a short break for midterms, so hopefully this workshop can fill the void for that to ensure our continuous curriculum over the semester.

• Career Resume Workshop - speaking of NUS SDS, another element that I'll be carrying over from my previous club would be this initiative, which is meant to assist students of all seniorities to apply for their first internship and/or full-time job. Joanna and Hilman will be taking the lead given their seniorities, along with a potential return by Yao Feng, one of our past speakers from Sem 1.

• 2-part collab with SAGE (Sharing and Giving Experiences) - perhaps our most ambitious collaboration yet from Curriculum, this will consist of a Product Case Competition in Recess Week, followed by a Career Discovery Workshop featuring NUS CFG in Week 8. For our Product Case Competition in particular, Joanna, Chi Sin and Hilman will be leading the efforts behind this initiative, which consists of finalising a problem statement for our participants as well as planning the format for the actual half-day event. As of this writing, we are planning to have preliminary discussions with PMs from Visa and Airwallex, before moving forward to secure other judges and logistics such as sponsored prizes, refreshments and venues.

• Fireside Chats - As the foundation of our engagement activities, the 3 fireside chats that we held in our first semester provided a good glimpse into the lives of full-time PMs and their careers. By collaborating with full-timers from Singapore Maritime Foundation (Jun Bin), Shopback (Jane, Janelle) and Ninja Van (Marcus Yeo, Clare, Henry), our students were exposed to the perspectives of working in different industries, hopefully inspiring them to launch their careers in the near future.

• IA - As our main priority in Sem 2, our new Co-Heads Junhao and Nicole have worked tirelessly to ensure that our initial run will be a success over the coming months, with a structured 10-week programme and training workshops loosely based on PM1101E aimed to assist our student participants to gain relevant product experiences working with our start-up partners. Together with Janelle, Bing Yang, Susan and Marcus Ang, we hope that this new initiative will contribute to our long-term pipeline - especially since IA was originally intended to be an extension of PM1101E, with a twist that now IA is no longer exclusive to our PM1101E alumni.

• PM Career Series P3 (Networking Event) - bearing in mind the original vision of Jane & Sean to facilitate networking opportunities between students and full-time PMs in a casual setting, our club is working closely with SMU Product Club and NTU Product Club to plan for this large-scale event which will be hosted at SMU. While as of now myself, Yi Zhen (President, SMU Product Club), Ivyn (Vice-President, SMU Product Club) and Jocelyn (Co-Founder, NTU Product Club) are facilitating the higher-level planning at the moment, our Partnerships Team will eventually be joining the fray upon SMU's approval to start approaching guests and sponsors for this event.

• Sponsorships - given our heavier load of events next semester, we would require sponsored items for our various activities. Thus, I have assigned Kyle (Curriculum) to assist our Partnerships Team in this initiative, especially with his past experiences. Kyle will assist to find sponsors for PM1101E and Product Case Competition, while Nicole will ideally lead our Partnerships Team to source sponsors for IA and PM Career Series P3.

As my good friend and mentor Jet New once told me: "A CCA is so precious - members (you) willingly volunteer their time effort, take on stress and risk their grades, just so that they can learn and contribute to the community that they believe in". While it is true to some extent that my position dictates the pace and standard on how the club operates, I believe that everyone in our O'Comm deserve the full credit as well - no matter how big or small your role is, and whether you've contributed in the past, present or future, you've all been instrumental in our success so far, and I look forward to how our journey continues as the first batch of O'Comm, especially with the exciting lineup of events that we have for Sem 2.

Against some people's advice, I'd probably say it again - I never wanted to be the President of this club, given the sheer amount of time, commitment and attention required. Especially for the people who know me personally - including close friends and past colleagues - it's just "not my thing", at least from their first impressions of me. But since this is a valuable position entrusted to me by others, I hope I did try my best to assist you all in your various efforts and learning experiences, especially as an O'Comm member. But of course if anyone needs any additional assistance or advice, I'm just a text away - just like how many of our O'Comm have directly contacted me to provide feedback over the past months on various club aspects @antcabbage

Thank you all once again, and see y'all soon (hopefully) in our next cohesion! Also, happy new year and I hope you all have a fruitful 2024 ahead xx