Chapter 02
The Bridge
2015–2017
From dev lead to project manager — learning that the hardest problems aren't in the code, they're between the people.
The pivot
I didn't plan to become a project manager. Revo Digital gave me the chance to take a more leading role — stepping from development into PM — and I took it.
It wasn't a career strategy. It was curiosity. I'd been leading a dev team and noticed that the gap between what we built and what clients actually needed was where the real problems lived. Someone had to stand in that gap. I wanted to be that person.
Myanmar's first OTT TV app
The biggest project was PyonePlay — Myanmar's first over-the-top television application. Live TV and on-demand replay, streaming free to anyone with a smartphone.
The channels included MRTV-4, Channel7, and others. The target audience was broad — essentially anyone in Myanmar with a phone and a data connection. Which, thanks to the 3G rollout I'd watched unfold in the previous chapter, was suddenly a lot of people.
The project taught me something no tutorial or certification ever could: real-time crisis management.
During a live SEA regional football match broadcast, concurrent traffic surged beyond anything we'd planned for. We worked with infrastructure consultants in real time to keep the stream alive. That night, I learned that risk management isn't a document you file — it's a skill you perform under pressure.
Building for garment workers
The second set of projects came through SMART Myanmar — a programme funded by the European Union and implemented by sequa (Germany) to improve conditions in Myanmar's garment industry.
We delivered two applications:
Shwe Job was an educational app for garment factory workers. It taught occupational safety, health practices, and Myanmar labour laws through stories, illustrations, and voiceovers — because many workers couldn't read well enough for text-only content. It included a salary calculator so workers could verify their monthly pay.
We launched it on International Workers' Day 2017 in Hlaing Thar Yar Township, Yangon — one of the industrial zones where the garment factories are concentrated. About 120 workers attended the launch.
The context that made this project meaningful: smartphone ownership among garment workers had grown from under 1% to over 90% in just four years. We were building for an audience that had leapfrogged from no digital access to smartphone-first in the time it took to complete a single project cycle.
The MGMA digitisation project brought the Myanmar Garment Manufacturers Association's application processes online. Less dramatic than Shwe Job, but equally important — it was the infrastructure layer that made the industry's digital transformation possible.
How it ended
It ended well, on good terms. Revo Digital pivoted toward digital marketing. I wanted to pursue digital transformation — building platforms that change how industries work, not just how they advertise.
I chose to join rgo47, an emerging local e-commerce player that was trying to do something ambitious: transform how Myanmar shops.
What I learned
This chapter taught me four things:
Building for the real market, not the ideal one. Even though smartphone adoption was exploding, wifi availability and adoption remained extremely low. Most users were on 2G or 3G without wifi. That meant they weren't on the latest OS versions, and phone models varied wildly — from flagship Samsungs to no-name Chinese handsets with barely enough RAM to run a browser. Going for the latest technology or features without considering these constraints would guarantee your app failed in the market. This is something you simply can't experience in a mature, developed market — and it permanently changed how I think about product decisions.
The translator's value. Engineers and business stakeholders speak different languages. The PM's job isn't to pick a side — it's to make each side's constraints visible to the other. I'd been a developer long enough to understand technical risk instinctively. Now I was learning to understand commercial pressure just as deeply.
Diverse portfolios build range. In two years, I managed an entertainment platform, EU-funded social impact apps, and an industry digitisation project. Each had different stakeholders, different success metrics, different failure modes. That range — holding multiple project contexts simultaneously — became a core skill.
Crisis reveals character. The football broadcast incident taught me that preparation matters, but composure matters more. The plan will fail. What you do in the next thirty minutes determines the outcome.