Meet Jeremy Yuan, a Product Marketing Manager at mmhmm. See how he is taking full advantage of CEO Phil Libin’s mantra, “Work where you can have the best job, live where you can have the best life.”
Who are you?
My name is Jeremy Yuan, and I'm a product marketer at mmhmm.
Where are you in the world right now?
I’m in Taipei, Taiwan. I've been here coming up on eight months. It’s funny because I came here with the intention of only being here for three or four months. My plane ticket back to the US was in October, and I just kept pushing it back. I'd love to find a balance of maybe five months in the States, seven months in Taiwan, or something like that.
What is the nature of your work?
I’m a product marketing manager, and now I specialize in data and analytics. I used to focus more on performance measurement, but Ben, our marketing operations manager, now specializes in that through paid and email marketing.
Our mighty team of two works primarily with the marketing team to identify and execute new initiatives, and with the analytics and product teams to increase the intelligence and impact of our marketing stack.
Ben is in Australia, which is yet another time zone on our vast time zone map within mmhmm. It's particularly hard to balance because we have, for example, Will and Ivan in Brazil and Christine in Paris. But the way we approach asynchronous work really makes that possible. Not every decision has to be a synchronous discussion; it couldn't be if it needed to be. So, I think Ben joining unintentionally reinforced the way we work and how we conceptualize distributed work in 2023.
What is something you wish that you knew when you started working with a distributed team?
Despite being in Taipei, I keep Eastern (US) hours. It’s good for the team to be on the same schedule to respond if things come up in a timely manner. I didn't want my presence here to be a distraction, so I was happy to sign up for maintaining the Eastern hours. But, I wish I had been fully aware of the sacrifices that could be present sometimes in my regular life here.
I have rather vampiric hours. I don't see much sun on any given day, or have normal weekends in the sense that Friday nights when my friends and family are winding down from work and starting their weekends, my work day hasn't even begun. Regular day trips or doing things on the weekend becomes really hard when you're waking up at 2 or 3 PM.
How do you incorporate mmhmm into your workflow?
I couldn’t work without mmhmm. With so much of my day spent on video, it’s critical to being as engaging as possible in meetings by creating slides on the fly while staying on screen with my content. Recordings have been a revelation for me, as it requires a certain amount of thoughtfulness to get it right. This forces an organization of thought deeper than if I were to “wing it” as I might for a synchronous meeting.
What is your favorite way to use mmhmm?
My recorded presentations tend to be fairly information-rich, with complex ideas that fold in on each other. To try to do something like that over a synchronous meeting would be difficult. mmhmm allows me to make a final package that I can really control the quality of in a way that you could never do if you were to do it off the cuff. That for me is worth the price of admission.
