RAKUTEN

Senior UX Design Manager - Design Team Manager.

I currently hold the position of Senior UX Design Manager within Rakuten's Travel Innovations Design group. In this capacity, my primary responsibility is to guide and facilitate a smooth transition in the UX and UI of our existing online products, services, and mobile applications. Additionally, I play a pivotal role in concentrating on travel-related initiatives, serving as a leader and advocate for both our global and domestic travel teams.

Simultaneously, I oversee a small team of 8-9 specialized UX/UI designers, steering efforts towards establishing a "Lean UX" team/organization. This involves a dedicated focus on user-centric design methodologies, research, data analysis, and the development of design system foundations and component libraries. Currently, my team is in the process of transitioning to a pure Agile Scrum Design and Development model.


Accomplishments, Roles, Responsibilities…

  • Attained promotion to Senior UX Design Manager within three months of joining the company; subsequently promoted to Design Team Manager after one year.

  • Demonstrated leadership by example and effectively advocated for executive management teams on integrating the processes of an agile UX Design team and a unified UI Design system within Rakuten's culture, Product Design Management teams, and engineering groups.

  • Collaborated across multiple business and UX Design teams to establish a centralized platform for sharing design ideas, UX processes, obtaining feedback, and engaging in general design conversations.

  • Recognized and advocated for the addition of UX Researchers at Rakuten, currently in the hiring phase.

  • Implemented continuous enhancements to the UX and UI design consistency of our Life and Leisure design products through the application of Lean UX methodologies.

  • Advocated for and facilitated the creation of a consistent Design System for our platform based on Rakuten's design system guidelines.

  • Collaborated with HR to institute an improved system of screening practices for vetting and hiring new talent.

  • Successfully released our MVP inbound travel product Website, SP Web, iOS, and Android apps, achieving our KPI goal of 10% inbound market share within 30 days of release.

What do my days look like?

Support design team members to proactively remove blockers and provide solutions and systems that align with stakeholder teams and company goals.

  • Empower team members to lead based on their talents and strengths, stepping in to fill gaps when necessary.

  • Fostered a culture of goal-setting among team members, emphasizing their strengths and encouraging them to work outside their comfort zones.

  • Steer and balance talent and abilities to create knowledge and talent redundancy across the design team.

  • Maintain constant communication with our design-development and stakeholder teams to identify and resolve issues, ensuring seamless collaboration.

  • Facilitate weekly design team activities, conduct 1:1 meetings, and lead team meetings.

  • Manage the screening, hiring, and onboarding processes in collaboration with our talent acquisition teams and HR.

Some of my work

My team has just released our MVP Rakuten Travel Japan Inbound website and iOS & Android apps. The apps are not available in the Japan app store, only outside Japan. I will show more about the process of how we got this far as soon as I can. But, here is a teaser of our launched MVP…