About
I'm Rae — Sun Qirui — a product manager in Singapore.
I spent my first seven years in cybersecurity — enough corners of it, from products to platforms to the operations behind them, to learn how a whole security system actually runs. This site tells two of those arcs in depth. At QiAnXin I grew up as a PM inside a network-security policy platform — rebuilding it module by module, carrying a national flagship delivery, then redefining it against global competitors. At China Telecom's security division I built a secure recursive DNS from zero, took over SecCat, and re-platformed it onto the resolver I had built, selling through all 31 provincial networks. Security turned out to be a demanding teacher, and what it taught went beyond security: think in whole systems, because failures don't respect your org chart; expect risk to live in the seams between components, not in the components themselves; and treat trust as a thing you engineer — audited, evidenced, earned in small increments — never a thing you declare.
At 31, I made the least efficient-looking decision of my career: I paused it. I stepped off a trajectory that was working, moved my life to a completely new market, and went back to school — because I wanted a systematic reflection on my own path, done properly, not squeezed between sprints. That became a master's in Engineering Management at NTU, finished with a 4.9/5.0 GPA on the Dean's List. The credential mattered less than the sorting it forced: which of my instincts were actual principles, and which were just habits that happened to have worked so far.
The reflection refused to stay theoretical. Midway through it I was building again — seven months as Product Lead at Estha, an AI app-building startup: a bot library for on-device AI, channel go-to-market, and the AI-native operating system that let one PM carry a whole product function. The two threads met in my capstone: a conversation analytics framework for Estha's platform, built as research and as product at once, graded A+.
The through-line hasn't moved: I like products whose real work happens below the waterline. Complex systems — building them, abstracting them, making them buyable, deployable and trustworthy — are what I intend to spend the next decade on.
What I believe about product work
The data model is the product. Distribution beats features in underserved markets. Constraints are design material. Trust, not speed, is the bottleneck in the AI era. And growth compounds when you write it down — the six case studies on this site are my attempt to practice that last one in public.