From Big Tech Product Manager to AI Startup Founder: Kelly's Inspiring Journey
Asia vs. Europe, Big Tech vs. Early-Stage Startups, and So Much More!
In today’s newsletter, we kick off our tech stories section with a remarkable guest: Kelly Drecourt.
Kelly’s career journey is nothing short of inspiring. After excelling as a Product Manager in several Big Tech companies, she has transitioned into the world of startups, founding Tilf, an innovative Ed-Tech AI platform. Tilf leverages AI to provide feedback on humanities essays, guided by official exam board mark schemes, tailored for GCSE and A-Level students.
From studying law in Paris to pivoting into tech in Singapore and eventually settling in the UK, Kelly has navigated a fascinating and diverse career path.
Today, we delve into her achievements, explore her unique story, and uncover the personal lessons and insights she’s gathered along the way.
So, let’s dive in!
1. From studying law in Paris to building a tech career as a Product Manager in Singapore, what was key to making that transition?
“It was very hard.
I studied law, as you mentioned, and graduated from university, but I knew almost immediately that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. After five years of studying, I realized the career wasn’t for me, and I started panicking.
In France, the mindset is very traditional: if you study law, you’re expected to pursue a career in law—end of story. Transitioning to another field, even a less qualified role, is seen as extremely difficult. So there I was, with a degree I didn’t want to use and a path I didn’t want to follow, feeling completely stuck.
At the same time, I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to go to Asia. I didn’t care where exactly; I just wanted to return. During my gap year, I had traveled there and fallen in love with the region. That desire to go back was my driving force, and I was ready to take any job just to make it happen.”
Moving to Singapore
“I chose Singapore simply because it was the only place in Asia where I could easily get a working holiday visa.
Once I arrived, I started bombarding companies on LinkedIn with applications, trying to land an internship. Eventually, I secured one at Foodpanda (think of it as the Asian version of Deliveroo). The internship paid less than 1,000 Singapore dollars per month, so I had to live on a tight budget—pasta became a daily staple.
Transitioning into tech was incredibly challenging. In fact, it might have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
There I was, a fresh graduate in Singapore with zero work experience and a law degree that wasn’t remotely connected to business or tech. Degrees like mine—or ones in fields like medicine—don’t provide much that translates to broader, workplace-related skills. And to make things even harder, I wasn’t in my home country. I was on a six-month working holiday visa with no long-term work authorization.
Every single day, I sent out around 50 job applications on LinkedIn. At one point, I stopped reading the job descriptions altogether—I just applied to everything I could find. I kept this up for over six months, day in and day out.
It was a LONG way.
At some point, I managed to secure another internship at OCDC, but it was unpaid.
In the end, after sending out around 1,000 applications, I had about 10 interviews and received five formal job offers. However, out of those five, every single one fell through at the final stage due to visa issues—even after I had received the offers. That left me with just two options:
The first was an Account Manager role at Agoda in Boracay, a tiny island in the Philippines—probably only about 10 kilometers in radius. It’s a well-known party island! (Laughs.)
The second offer was the job I ultimately accepted: a role at a Singaporean FinTech startup. However, this wasn’t exactly ideal either—the job was based in Indonesia, where I would be working as a Call Centre Manager in Jakarta. To make matters more challenging, most of the team barely spoke English, if at all. It wasn’t the most appealing prospect, but I chose it over Boracay, which definitely didn’t feel like a serious option for me.
It was incredibly tough in the beginning, but I pushed through.”
Curating a Product role
“For my onboarding process, I started working from the Singapore office during my first month to immerse myself in the company culture. Only after that month would I be sent to Indonesia.
Interestingly, during that initial period, I didn’t have much work to do. It felt like the company wanted me to spend most of my time meeting people and networking. They gave me a Salesforce account and essentially told me to explore it however I wanted. They even created a fake task to keep me busy.
I decided to dive deep into Salesforce. I spent every single day—weekends included—figuring out how it worked from an operations perspective. I began automating emails, reactivating users, learning how to acquire new users, and exploring everything related to marketing.
Before I knew it, the sales team started noticing my work and asking for more. I somehow became known as "the Salesforce girl," to the point where the sales team didn’t want to send me to Indonesia anymore—they needed me to stay in Singapore.
During that month, I even managed to get an engineer to build a Salesforce integration, which meant I had technically built my first team from scratch.
By the end of the month, my manager offered me a new role: Salesforce Operations Manager, allowing me to stay in Singapore instead of relocating to Indonesia.
After working with Salesforce for a while, I realized that the leads we were generating weren’t of good quality. It became clear that we needed to rethink our landing page strategy to attract better prospects.
I collaborated with the engineer on my team to redesign the landing pages, ensuring they were more aligned with our goals. That experience marked a turning point for me—I essentially stepped into the role of a Product Manager without even realising it at the time.”
2. Having worked in multiple tech hubs and cities, how would you say London is different from the others?
“London is very work-focused and business-driven. The pace is fast, and there's a constant sense of urgency, which is something that really stands out compared to other cities.
In contrast, countries like France and Spain offer a better work-life balance. While tech is still developing there, the emphasis on personal life and slower pace is much more noticeable.
I’ve also worked in Oxford, but it’s a smaller, more academic-focused city. It’s more centered around PhDs and research, so it’s not as vibrant or dynamic when it comes to the startup scene.
Singapore was certainly more vibrant in terms of energy and innovation. However, I found that it lacked the deep tech expertise you find in places like the US or Europe, where you’ll encounter a broader range of specialised skills and a more established tech ecosystem.”
Asian Tech culture vs. Western Tech culture
“The way Western and Eastern tech cultures approach things is very different.
In the East, tech is more driven by sales and marketing. Companies tend to focus heavily on promotion, giving away free products, and emphasizing user acquisition. When it comes to design, they tend to add a lot of features, which is the opposite of how big tech in the West aim to design apps.
And even though Singapore is known as a tech hub, it’s harder to develop as a product manager. While you can find a diverse pool of engineers—thanks to Singapore’s global talent base (with people from places like India, Europe and Australia)—it’s harder to find experienced product managers. That’s because most companies in Singapore aren’t headquartered there; they’re simply regional offices or satellites that focus on localization, rather than innovation.
So when it comes to product development, I’d say London is so much better.
Singapore might be more interesting for engineers, but London offers a better environment for product roles.”
3. Having worked at multiple Big Tech companies like TripAdvisor, Spotify, and Crypto.com, what’s the best advice you’d give to someone who wants to work in Big Tech?
“Honestly, being a Product Manager or an Engineer in Big Tech is not the same as working at a startup.
In a startup, you’re doing everything. You need to move fast, be scrappy, and figure things out on the go. There’s no room for perfection—you just get it done.
At Big Tech, they joke that it takes six months to release a button, and while that sounds funny, it’s actually kind of true. It can take months just to get familiar with the code because it’s so massive. You can’t afford to mess things up, so it takes forever just to get something right.
Building and shipping features at Big Tech can be frustrating because it’s so slow. You won’t ship anything unless it passes all the testing standards, and most of what you build won’t even make it out there because it’ll be A/B tested, then scrapped, or refined endlessly.
Some people at Big Tech spend years without ever shipping anything substantial. You could be working in a platform team, just maintaining things or fixing bugs to keep everything running.
But here’s the thing: if you do ship something, 500 million people could end up using it. So when it works, it’s huge. But depending on your team, you might never even get that chance.
In Big Tech, your job is to build systems that scale and are rock solid. In a startup, though, it’s all about moving fast and just getting something to work. Someone who’s amazing at Google might not do well in a startup, at least at the start, and vice versa.
At a startup, you’re focused on speed, on delivering something that works. It doesn’t matter if the code is perfect or scalable as long as it’s doing the job. Sure, you might not be building for 500 million users, but you could be building an entire payment system or app from scratch.
To sum it up: the rewards and skills are really different.”
4. Which advice would you give to Software Engineers willing to work in Product teams?
“In my opinion, an engineer who can't think beyond just coding isn't doing their job well. The best engineers I’ve worked with were those who could wear a Product Manager hat. They understood the product and the users—because when you understand the product and the users, you can actually guide the product manager and the team to a better solution.
For me, that’s the difference between a junior engineer and a senior engineer, or a good engineer and a bad one.
If an engineer is just there to code, it feels like outsourcing—just someone doing what I say without adding value beyond the task at hand.
This is actually more common in Asian companies, where there tends to be a lot more hierarchy. I think that’s also why product development can struggle in those environments—because engineers don’t always have that understanding of the users.
An engineer needs to know why we're building something. Who is it for? What are their needs? Does this feature even make sense? Is there a better way to do it? A better solution?
The Product Manager should also be technical, but they may be overseeing things at a higher level. As an engineer, you can contribute by offering a realistic estimate. For example, you might say something could take 3 months, or you might tell your PM that a different approach could get it done in 2 weeks—still close enough and faster.
I think engineers need to be curious about the users, the product, and even the business. Even if figuring it all out isn't their responsibility—that’s what the PM does—they need to ask questions and stay curious. This is also why I think engineers sometimes get into a tough spot: If their PM is bad, or doesn’t understand the business or the users, it’s hard for the engineer to give good advice.
At the end of the day, it comes down to teamwork.”
5. Last year, you decided to take a pause from your role at Crypto.com to build an AI software company in the highly competitive Ed-tech market. What advice would you give to people in tech, especially engineers, who are thinking about doing the same in the future?
“I’m not sure I’m the best person to give advice on this — honestly, I’m still figuring it out myself. I’m comfortable giving advice on product and tech because that’s my area of expertise, but when it comes to starting a company, I’m still in the trenches.
Most of the advice I could give you, I probably read somewhere else.
But there is one thing I’m certain about:
You have to know your motivation.
I’ll throw in the disclaimer again —I'm not saying I'm an expert on this— but one thing I’ve noticed, especially with engineers, is they sometimes underestimate the commitment it takes to start a company.
Engineers are great at building stuff —that’s their superpower— but it can also be a curse.
The beauty of engineering is obvious: you can build anything.
But the curse?
Well, engineers can be noncommittal. They’re great at building products, and when one idea doesn’t work or gets boring, they’ll jump to the next. They overestimate how much the technology itself will sell.
Just because they build something amazing doesn’t mean people will automatically want to buy it.
Another thing I see is engineers thinking they want to become entrepreneurs. They think, “I can build a product, so why should I work for someone else?”
But then they realise that building a company isn’t just about coding —it’s about all the other hard stuff. They often miss the comfort of a good salary and the stability of a nine-to-five. After a while, they think, “Why would I struggle so much without money when I could just go back to working at Google?”
So, to summarise, my advice is simple:
Know your motivation, don’t overestimate your tech skills, and remember to see the bigger picture.”
6. At the end of the day, which skills do you think are necessary to build a sustainable career in Tech?
“There are so many skills, but the most important one is being scrappy.
That’s the beauty of Tech, and that’s why I love it.
In Tech, unlike in university where someone tells you exactly what to do or which exam to prepare for, you get to frame your own career.
That level of freedom is what I love about it.
It’s also why I hated law—it was so traditional, rigid, and non-flexible. In Tech, it’s the exact opposite!
Take a look at my career: I started with a law degree, then went to Asia to become a call center manager, and now, I’m building a product career. It’s been a messy, but rewarding, journey —and that's what makes it exciting.”
And we ended up loving this conversation!
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