2015 — 2026 · Ho Chi Minh City
No case studies. No gallery. Just the trade-offs I faced and the calls I made — from a fintech startup to a game millions of people played.
How I think about product
Product is the job of seeing the trade-off clearly, making the call, learning from what the data says — and doing it again.
Every good option costs something. Name what you're giving up.
Make the call with what you know. Own it out loud.
Let the data and the users tell you if you were right.
Take what you learned into the next trade-off.
Ten times over ten years. Here's each one.
Part one · 2015 — 2019
A legal-tech startup building software for private capital transactions. Engineers everywhere, design still finding its place.
Ship more screensvs.define what "good" looks like
Not just what to design — but what design should mean inside the company.
To make sure what shipped actually matched the design standard we had set, I stopped handing off designs and built most of the product's front-end myself.
Time spent designingvs.a product that matched the design
Own the outcome, not the artifact.
Part two · 2019 — 2025
Its first product designer — three months before Axie Classic, the company's first game, went live. A tiny team building a game where players owned their creatures. No playbook existed yet.
A stable path in fintechvs.an unproven team, pre-launch
Bet on something nobody had a name for yet.
I designed version one. It was rough — but the layout made buying and selling NFTs obvious, and that's the part other NFT sites cloned.
Visual polishvs.a clear market, live sooner
Clarity before polish. Polish can wait. Trust can't.
I built the Product Design team and had a hand in every Web3 surface the company shipped — Ronin explorer, wallet, bridge, the Axie Marketplace, staking.
Doing the work myselfvs.building people who could do it without me
Scale judgement, not just headcount.
06 · 2021
The company grew faster than any org chart could hold. Ronin and Axie split into separate squads.
Breadth across every productvs.depth where it mattered most
Own Axie Web3 end to end. Advise Ronin until it had a product leader of its own.
Head of Product, Axie Web3 — app.axieinfinity.com, staking, and the economy around every Axie. Still running a team of product and graphic designers across Axie and Ronin.
The craft I was known forvs.the problems that mattered more
Move from design into product — and own the outcome, not the pixels.
08 · 2022 — 2024
The market turned and trading dried up. Plenty of people still played Axie Origins — they just never touched the chain. I worked with the game team on retention, and built Bounties: on-chain quests for Axie players. Holding special NFT collectibles earned players Slips every day. Spending Slips let them reroll a quest for a higher score and climb the leaderboard for a bigger prize.
Wait for the market to come backvs.give the players we still had a reason to go on-chain
Stop waiting for traders. Bring Web3 to where the players already were — inside the game.
A new MMO for the Axie world. A young team, a slipping deadline. I stepped in as PM, cut a new NFT character and player-owned land, moved the date publicly with the community — and shipped the first playtest.
The full visionvs.a date the community could trust
Cut scope, not trust.
10 · 2025 — 2026
Keep the titlevs.time with my son, and a skill set rebuilt from scratch
Relearn how to be a good product builder with AI — because building products is about to look very different.
Built in the gap year
The same loop, at a smaller scale: pick the trade-off, make the call, watch what real people do, ship again.
11 · Now
I'm looking for a product worth spending the next few years building.
Talk to Leoh →