Interview with Melissa Ng – Founder of Melewi, Product Design Strategist, Nomadic Entrepreneur
My name’s Melissa Ng, originally from Singapore. I’ve spent the last 8 years travelling and working – of which the last 6 years on my business Melewi, which is a location-independent Product UX UI design studio, working with a fully distributed team across 7 countries, and clients all around the world, including McDonald’s, Visa and Samsung.
Interview with Julie MacArthur, MacArthur Productions, Digital Nomad
7 questions about her experiences and insights as a digital nomad
The term to me, means a person that does not actually have a permanent residence and considers any place with decent internet a possibility to relocate to. My office is not constrained by borders, and I am not required to be in the same location as the companies I work for.
There are a few other considerations when I look into relocation, such as visitor’s visas and how long I can stay, safety, is it a place that interests me and cost of living. Being here in Granada, I meet people from around the world, who inspire me to look at other destination and they also provide me more information that I would not discover on a website.
What are the soft skills required to make it anywhere in the world? And how do you utilise these skills in a globalised job market? Here are three simple and easy to apply success factors from my personal experience.
In addition to your technical expertise your intercultural competence is crucial to the success of an overseas experience. Train your ability to understand underlying beliefs and values. Learn about the driving forces of your colleagues’, partners’ and customers’ behaviour. Put your own culturally determined view repeatedly to the test.
I studied computer science, more exactly I studied Artificial Intelligence, maybe because of those beginnings I often found myself thinking of people while I was developing programs and working on computer projects. Years later I realised there couldn’t be computers without people and that it was from their relation what great things could happen. So I shifted my line of work towards usability and user experience. To understand and improve how we, humans, interact with technology and how to improve those interactions.
The move to Germany was a combination of professional and personal objectives. I was part of an international community already while in Portugal, but I wanted to work in a more international environment. Vodafone Group projected that path for me and in 2009 I moved to Düsseldorf.
