Hello, I'm Trang

What I’m good at is the part most people find tedious — working out why a team keeps missing each other. Usually it isn’t skill or effort. It’s that two groups are running on assumptions nobody wrote down.

So I ask a lot of questions, until the pattern shows itself — usually a layer down. And once I see it, I fix the cause, not just the symptom.

About

Three foundations I build on

Academic excellence

It started in school. Coming to the United States as an international student meant learning to navigate a new environment, a different worldview, and a different way of doing things. I learned to pay attention to my surroundings, ask better questions, and reflect on what I could do better — a discipline that kept me grounded and ultimately led to honors and scholarships.

Professional practice

Then came a decade of putting that mindset to work. Across pension administration, intellectual property, product development, and people operations — coordinating with teams and partners across different countries — the underlying work stayed the same: helping people collaborate across their differences so that a group could move forward together and deliver results.

Sustainable leadership

Now, my leadership style is less about authority and more about enabling others to grow and succeed in their own ways. Whether I am leading a team, collaborating with teammates, or training someone earlier in their career, I have found that trust is built over time — through the same principles every time: Listening, Respect, Consistency, and Follow-through.

Professional experience

Aligning people, processes, and communication

A decade of international experience connecting people, organizations, and systems to solve problems and improve operations in complex, cross-functional environments. Employer names are withheld here and may be provided upon reasonable request.

Career Shift & Reflections

Vietnam · 2025–present

After an unexpected employment termination in 2025, I treated the year that followed as a project rather than a gap. The first part went to the labor dispute — the documents, the lawyers, the court appearances — and the judgment was in my favor. In between, it went to something harder: examining what I thought I knew about management, and why practices that had served me for a decade did not translate here. The answer is not to keep operating on the model I brought with me, but to work out which parts of it hold, which parts belong somewhere else, and what a practice looks like that draws on both.

The rest of the year has gone into learning how far current AI tools can actually take a single operator in building an online presence, workflows, and contact management channels. This site is the first thing I built with them. Alongside that, I’m applying for graduate study in the United Kingdom to extend what I know about international management through its education system and standards. I intend to turn what I learn into better practice — starting with my own, and then for the people and organizations I work with.

People Operations Manager

Vietnam · 2024–2025

Responsible for how a 110-person, multi-team software development company functioned day to day. I matched project requirements to staff capability, rebuilt how Scrum teams communicated across functions, and restructured training after survey data showed where it was failing — cutting organizational defect rates by 20%. Most of the work sat between the Vietnamese development teams and their Netherlands clients, where the expectations each side held had not been written down.

Intellectual Property &
Product Development Manager

United States · 2019–2024

My work spanned four countries: product development in the United States, manufacturing and material sourcing in China, design in Hong Kong, and intellectual property in the United States and Canada. I brought trademark and copyright filings in-house to reduce costs, secured a major U.S. irradiated-gemstone license that ended a single-supplier dependency, and coordinated the company’s presence at JCK — the world’s largest jewelry trade event — across 30+ international stakeholders. Most of the job was aligning communication across different groups to agree on what had actually been decided and move forward.

Senior Pension Benefits Analyst

United States · 2015–2019

Sitting between pension teams in the United States and offshore delivery teams in Manila, the Philippines, I translated payment and calculation processes into training and documentation that people could execute accurately without me in the room. That program supported a multi-process transition that contributed to a 35% cost reduction. It taught me that a process only really exists once someone in another country can run it from the page.

Honors & education

Recognition along the way

2015

Bachelor of Business Administration, Management

United States · Summa Cum Laude · GPA 3.9 / 4.0

Degree

2013–15

Goolsby Leadership Academy Scholarship

Awarded to the top 10% of university business-school students

2014

Rotary Club of Arlington Great SW — Harold Key Scholarship

Awarded for leadership and service

2013

All-Texas Academic Team Scholarship

Awarded to the top 1% of college students across the state of Texas

Associate of Arts

United States · Magna Cum Laude · GPA 3.8 / 4.0

Degree

2012

Distinguished Officer of the Year

Selected from across 63 college student organizations

2011

Presidential & Student Ambassadorial Scholarships

Awarded for academic excellence

Leadership & service

Where I learned to lead

Long before it was part of a job description, leadership was something I practiced in student organizations and community work.

Rotaract Club, university chapter

President

United States · 2014–2015

Led a 30-student organization serving local communities. I ran officer training based on The 8 Dimensions of Leadership, a DiSC®-based framework that helped students understand their leadership styles, strengths, and blind spots — my first experience teaching leadership rather than simply practicing it.

Rotaract Club, college chapter

Co-founder & President

United States · 2011–2013

Started the chapter from nothing, with support from local Rotary clubs. We raised $3,000 for a children’s medical center and sent 75 pounds of school supplies to an orphanage in Vietnam — the first project I organized that reached home.

International Rescue Committee

Resettlement Intern

United States · 2012

Supported refugee clients through the resettlement process across the local metroplex and translated their documents from English into Vietnamese. Most of the friction I saw wasn’t between people who disagreed — it was between people who couldn’t hear each other.

Richardson Adult Literacy Center

ESL Volunteer Tutor

United States · 2012

Volunteered and practiced English with immigrant learners seeking better lives and opportunities, translated materials into Vietnamese, and embraced cultural differences — another early experience that taught me: communication starts with meeting people where they are.

Outside the work

A place to unwind

I go toward whatever is alive — mountains, coastlines, and any animal that will let me. Give me a free day, and this is all I want: somewhere green or blue to walk, something with a heartbeat to say hello to, and a hot latte waiting at the end.