About me

I'm Jesse, a product designer and engineer based in Japan. Over ten years I've helped businesses build products people can actually use, but the work that lasted was rarely the interface. It was the surrounding things: design culture where there was none, design-driven development workflows, and design systems that stay maintainable after the people who built them move on.

That comes from an unusual mix. My career began in product design; curiosity about what happens beneath the interface pulled me into engineering, and I formalised the move with a Master's in IT in Australia. Today I design and I write production code, so usability, business goals, and engineering constraints stay in one decision instead of getting traded across a handoff. I've spent most of my career inside constrained environments — legacy systems, small teams, industries where digital transformation is still an unfamiliar idea — where the job is making sensible trade-offs rather than ideal ones. I work in Chinese (native), English, Japanese, and Korean, and bring a global perspective to Japanese business practice, which matters more than it sounds: most of what I do is translation of one kind or another.

What I've done

DEN Inc. — social welfare, seven years. I helped a 20-person facility running on paper become a multi-facility business of nearly 100 employees on AI-assisted digital workflows. Employee productivity and profit both moved, and several thousand dollars of monthly revenue now runs without anyone touching it. Social welfare is among the least digitised sectors in Japan — none of this was the default outcome.

Zerospec Inc. — energy, first designer on the team. The main product, a web app for fuel-delivery efficiency, had shipped with no deliberate UI/UX design behind it. Balancing usability, business goals, and real resource limits, I introduced a progressive, prototype-driven, implementation-aligned process that shortened feedback loops and made design-to-development handoff close to seamless, then built the design system to hold it together. The harder half was cultural: moving a company where no one took design seriously into one that plans around it.

WAmazing Inc. — ski-pass booking, design and delivery. Legacy code, a complex architecture, and a business whose peak season leaves no room for downtime. Every proposed change had to be priced in engineering risk before it was worth making. As the only product designer on the team with real development experience, I did that pricing — coordinating design and build so that improvements and new features shipped consistently, without destabilising the service.

Money Forward Inc. — HR Cloud, frontend lead. I led frontend development on an enterprise HR SaaS product, and held the team to one rule: a change to the code had to be justified by a better experience for the user, never the other way around. Engineering convenience is a quiet, constant pressure on interface quality. Being the person who could argue both sides of it — in code and in design — is what made the rule hold.

What I'm working toward

I'm most interested in AI-native design workflows built responsibly — tooling that changes how designers work rather than removing the need for them. In practice that means treating design rationale, documentation, and reproducible process as the real deliverable rather than the artefact; bringing software engineering concepts into design practice so that what gets designed can be built and holds up against business objectives; and working directly with business owners to rethink how operations run, using design, AI, and whatever else proves genuinely useful.

I'm open to roles and collaborations at that intersection. Find me onLinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram.