principal product manager · director of product

Most of the job is knowing where to push.

15+ years in product, including eleven at Zillow and Axon. I work in the tangled operational middle: many actors, unclear ownership, no obvious next step. My own projects give me a place to apply that judgment and build with AI: a personal operating system, tools for rental operations, and games with my kids. This is the record of what I build, how I use it, and what I learn along the way.

See the workExperience

What I am building now

all projects →

Live build logs, updated as the work moves. Grounded in real git history, including the wrong turns.

in progress2026

PersonalOS

A personal operating system evolving toward faster shared context, AI autonomy within guardrails, and continuity across models and devices.

obsidianpythonsqliteautomation
in progress2026

projectwong.com

This site, treated as a build log itself: a Next.js portfolio with a mirrored design system, gated household dashboards, and its own decision records.

next.jsdesign systemverceldashboards
in progress2026

Fuel the Dream

A fundraising site and a real nonprofit built in a morning so my son's baseball team can get to Cooperstown, with live Zeffy totals and a donate button that fails closed.

next.jszeffynonprofitfather-son

Latest activity

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Every check-in and every project, most recently touched first.

PersonalOSVault v2: Capture Works. Search Is the Hard Part.Notes now travel from Claude on my iPad into my real Vault. Search is proving harder. What shipped, what failed, and why the benchmarks stay unchanged.15 OctprojectPersonalOSA personal operating system evolving toward faster shared context, AI autonomy within guardrails, and continuity across models and devices.15 OctPersonalOSBuilding Vault v2: Making My Second Brain DependableCapture works end to end in test. Retrieval still has to prove itself. A checkpoint on building one dependable second brain across devices and AI tools—and the failures that made this my longest PersonalOS build.14 OctCompassBuild your own Compass: the system is now a public build kitI turned the useful parts of Compass into a public, privacy-first repository that another person can hand to an AI coding harness and use to build a job-search system around their own decisions.13 OctprojectCompassA completed job-search and relationship-management project, now packaged as a public build kit for creating your own private version.13 OctPersonalOSPersonalOS v2: Giving AI more room to workV1 was starting to feel slow, and approving every change was slowing me down too. PersonalOS v2 gives AI more authority, makes shared context easier to reach, and builds toward a more useful daily operating system.12 Octprojectwong.comThe site caught up with the workThe site had fallen behind its own projects. I brought the story forward, closed Compass, removed the counters, and fixed a theme change that was interrupting the reading.12 OctSpooky HollowSpooky Hollow: Still playing, taking a break from buildingHannah still plays Spooky Hollow, but development is paused while I start a new job and school, sports, and other activities fill the family calendar. We may return to it later.12 Oct
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Illustrated portrait of Michael Wong and his family, at a table of sewing supplies, a baseball, and a notebook of product sketches
who I am

The pattern repeats across every job I have had. Someone hands me a domain where the work is messy and operational, a lot of people are involved, and nobody can say what should happen next. I learn the operation until I can argue with the people who run it, then I build the thing that makes the next step obvious.

Eleven of those years were at Zillow and Axon, and almost none of that work is mine to show. This site is where I document my own products, built end to end with AI tooling for the problems in my life: managing context, running rental properties, and making things with my family. I’ve accepted a new role, and this work continues alongside that next chapter, with the real build log and the wrong turns included.

full history →