My Story

Hi, it's Ly Vu here :)

Career

I started out in business. I studied commerce at UBC Sauder School of Business and worked in marketing  before I found my way into product design. That background still shapes how I work, so I tend to think about every touchpoint a person has with a product, including the ones outside the app.

For the past 7 years I’ve been a product designer at startups and small teams. Most of that time has gone into 0→1 work, where I get to talk to customers often and take an idea from strategy all the way to polished UI. I care about whether what we build works for the business too, and I’m happy to move fast when the moment calls for it.

Life

Outside of work I’m outdoors as much as I can be. I’m usually in the backcountry on my splitboard in winter, and climbing or hiking once the snow melts. I only picked these up in my late 20s, and being a beginner again has kept me humble. It’s taught me to be okay with being bad at something for a while before it starts to click.

I’ve lived in Vietnam, Canada, and Italy, and traveled to more than 35 countries. Moving somewhere new, sometimes without speaking the language, has made me pretty comfortable with ambiguity and figuring things out as I go.

AvyLab started from my love for the outdoors and wanting to utilize my product skills. It’s an avalanche safety training platform for backcountry riders, and I’m building it on my own with agentic engineering workflows. I’m still figuring a lot of it out, which is most of the fun.