Hello, this is Tiffena!
I’m a product builder working at the intersection of user experience, multimodal AI, and modern engineering. I navigate complex systems — technical, cultural, and human — by uncovering hidden needs, overlooked patterns, and the structures that make clarity possible. That same ability helps me resolve conflict: when the real needs and patterns come into focus, people understand each other differently, and alignment becomes possible.
I prototype fast, ship early, and learn in public. Whether I’m optimizing LLM inference, designing recommenders, or connecting people across disciplines, my work is about helping people make better decisions.
This blog is where I document my discovery while reading, tinkering, and traveling. Here you’ll find notes on Japan, Asian business trends, NLP and AI engineering, DevOps experiments, book reviews, meta‑learning, and the small practices that keep a mind steady and well.
Everything I build, write, or photograph comes from the same instinct: understand complexity, reveal what’s hidden, and share what I learn along the way.
Career & Education
Senior PM
Microsoft | till 2015- Led data-driven website feature/content design
- User acquisition, conversion & retention
- Community development
Freelance | present
- Multimodal search & RAG
- Recommendation systems
- Content strategy and production pipeline
BSc. Computer Science
Oklahoma State UniversityProfessional Certificate - AI Product Management
Duke University | 2024Professional Certificate - NLP
DeepLearning.AI | 2024Professional Certificate - Recommender Systems
University of Minnesota | 2024
Interests
Learning
How humans learn and its analogy with machine learning and meta-learning and transfer learning. Specifically, I am interested in ways to understand a novel concept and break it down to the simplest form for personal growth.Social Design
Products and services that employ good design to solve pressing social issues such as aging and social isolation in hyper-developed countries like Japan.Consumer Trends & Psychology
Historical/social context and psychology of spending, especially in the ultra-fast moving East Asian metropolises.History & Strategy
History as MBA-style case studies, turning it into a massive treasury of lessons in strategy, leadership, psychology, etc. It enable us to examine how/why people made key choices in crucial moments that affected millions of lives, and the major actors/factors contributing to events and how things evolved in time.
Latest
Blog
Projects
Kihon
