Episode 10: Designing for SAAS vs Consumer Products with Mike Chen, Head of Product Design at ShopBack
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Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core. Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year.

Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest who is working in UX design. All right. Good evening, everyone. This is Dalen here. And it's so great to have all of you join us this evening. This is the live session for our podcast, Working in UX Design with Mike Chen. Mike Chen is the head of design for ShopBack.

And he's also someone I've known for several years since his very entrepreneurial days. And we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about that as well. The current company he's working with, which is Shopback,

and the previous company he worked for which is Zendesk, a B2C company and a B2B company. Very very different softwares and design. We're gonna have a chat about design and building a team in design and also how he has evolved as a designer over the years itself.

So I'm really glad to have Mike join us, but let me just read his official bio so that we can get started. So Mike was a co-founder of an interaction design company. And today he's a product design leader who's highly experienced in product and experience design with over 10 years in the field.

He was previously at Zendesk as a product designer with product managers and engineers to create beautiful and simple business software that skills and he's currently the head of product design at ShopBank. So Mike's philosophy is to make software simple with a data-driven design process and he's heavily influenced by the

the works of Flow by Mihaly. And forgive me, I really cannot pronounce his name. But we all know that book about Flow and rework by 37signals. And he also enjoys...

conversations about building company culture, lean/agile UX and design processes. So yeah, we're gonna have a good time talking about some of these things. Well, it's nice that you shared your favorite book. So maybe let's start off. How has these two books flow and rework impacted the way you work like?

Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here. So the first book was Flow, right? And really, so I come from a place where I do a lot of sports. And one of the most formative experiences I had growing up was being together with a bunch of close friends that

We play soccer together and you know, whenever we play, we were like, you know, secondary school, right? So 13, 14 years old. We'll be able to win against like the big boys, you know, like people who are in the upper secondary level and, and, and all that. And,

So this feeling of being able to pass your teammates without even looking and just being part of a team that you know where you are going to see them, where they're going to be, is something that was a great experience growing up. So when I went into the workforce, I was trying to find out how do I replicate this feeling in my work, people, the teams that I joined. So definitely

Flow is one of those ideas or concepts that I was really in love with. So Flow was like his version 1, right? So this version 2 is about team flow. So version 1 Flow is like it was really about personal productivity and the idea that the happiest place that you can be is when you're in the state of flow, right? Where nothing else in the world matters. You're super focused on what you're doing.

and a lot of time, design work is a bit like that, right? That's the happy place. Earlier on in my career, it was... I found that happy space probably like, you know, in the late at night and early hours of the morning, right? And I'm pretty sure a lot of designers go through this, right? Where there's no more meetings, like everything else is just quiet and you're able to concentrate and work on that. And for a long time, I was chasing that feeling.

But the more that you get into the craft of it, what you realize is that a lot of times when you sit at a computer and push pixels, you're solving one type of problem, right? As you go further along, you start to realize that, wow, it's about stakeholder management, it's about influencing people, it's about convincing people, communication and all that.

that's when you realize that you can't just like sit at a computer and be a Mac operator, right? You used to call them that. But rather you have to be able to work with other people. And the more that I extend my career in this industry, the more I realize that it's

industry of interdependence, right? So there's going to be multiple things within the company organization that you do that influence the user experience, right? So it's not just about one designer designing one screen or even like a team of designers doing that. But as you go along, you realize that there are things like

like reliability, downtime, you know, that kind of thing affects too, right? I'm a gamer, right? So I think one thing that highlighted that was, you know, when FIFA or like when Diablo 3, when it launched, there was a very famous incident where it was downtime, right? People who paid money to play the game, they couldn't get onto it because the servers were down. So all these things add up to user experience as well.

can even get refunds and things like that. So when you think about user experience, no longer is it just like a matter of looking at screen designs or UI and getting that right on a micro level. But also what I'm interested in these days is like how to get people to collaborate together

How do you form these teams to be able to band together, come up with a vision of how you want the experience to be like and the journey for the user, and then create that awesome experience? So a lot of that is really about team flow. And then if you can do that in a way that feels intuitive, you know how to work with the other person, you know what they're like and how best to slot in and help each other.

That's like the dream state that like Nirvana to reach, right? So a lot of my career has been focusing on how we can build cultures and your collaboration like that. Well, thank you for sharing. And yeah, I can see why you love those two books, which is Flow and Rework. I happen to have Scantru, both of them as well. And I was wondering,

How different are you as a leader today versus earlier in your career where I understand that you were running your own agency? So my leadership journey has been very spontaneous, I would say. So I started the design agency with my uni friend really early on in my career. I think I was like one year into my career.

So my first job was at a San Francisco tech startup and the co-founders were 19 years old. So that got me thinking, wow, if they can do that straight out of college, I can probably do that too. Probably. What I didn't know at that time was, yeah, it's easy to register a company.

But there's all these like accounting stuff. There's all these sales stuff you can do and that's really time-consuming, right? So that's the hidden cost of it. Like at the beginning, I guess I was just in love with the idea of like, hey, I don't want to work for a boss. I want to be my own boss and I kind of just unintentionally like became sort of like a co-founder.

The day I became a leader was the day that we hired our first designer or employee. And through that time, it's always been, I don't know anything, but I can learn how to do it. So it's been really just super experimental, trying things, see what sticks, you know, and then like relying on mentors, right, which is like super important to me. Back in

those days, which was not so long ago. But back at the time, I really didn't know a lot of people, right? So I just had coffee with people that were willing to have coffee with me, right? Silicon Valley had this like saying that you can build a business out of having 50 coffees with people. I would talk to these like mentors and people who have been there and done that, right? And it kind of gave me a direction of where to look. But after that, it was really just about

like zooming in on certain topics, like how to do sales. Wow, I didn't know how to do sales. I didn't know how to negotiate contracts and all that kind of stuff. And on the way to work, on the way back on the train, just reading up and reading Medium articles, you know, listening to podcasts and just really trying to absorb as much as possible. And so it's kind of been a habit. These days, not so much because I have kids now, so it's a little bit difficult.

But it was really about just forming that habit of learning, trying to get better, experiment, trial and error, make mistakes, get the scars. But let the scars remind you of the mistakes that you made and what to do better in the following times. And that's how slowly I've grown as a leader. So there's the different stages of my career, right? The first part was running a design agency and

It's a different type of leadership, right? As a founder, it's a super hard job, right? You should know this Dylan, because like, you're a founder yourself, right? It's about keeping the morale up, it's setting a vision for the team, even the small little things like making sure that everyone has a conducive environment,

office equipment The day that we bought a TV in the office was my happiest day and the founder was like "Wow, I can finally afford a TV and we can do presentations and things like that" But after a while I think like

I've always been good at helping people to grow. So early on it was about taking fresh graduates and bringing them to mid-level, right? And during that time, what I realized, you know, towards the end of my time at Mini Theory, which was my design agency, was that I myself have a ceiling to break. I took people from fresh graduates to mid-level, but after that, you know, when they're seeking

for guidance from me to take the next level. How do you get to a senior level? I myself at that point of time, I've not been a senior designer. So I found that maybe the best way to grow was to go somewhere else, right? So to me, like I've always been super focused on what is the best environment and for me to like grow further. If it's like tapering off at a certain point, then maybe I need to have some different kind of stimuli.

Another way to put it is that if you get into a comfort zone, then you kind of want to put yourself in a zone of discomfort, right? Because if you don't, then that's not how you can grow, right? So I mean, I don't know if you go to the gym or what, but my PE teacher used to tell me that when you go to the gym, right, and do weights and all that kind of stuff, the soreness that you feel is like micro tears in your arm.

And then when you rest and recuperate and all that, more muscles grow back into it, right? So that kind of like pain is important to growth. And that's what has stuck with me. That's really great. And back then you were just managing a few people. Today at Shopback, you're probably managing a lot more people. How is the challenge different, right, in this case? Yeah, it's super different.

I think the industries are different, the business model is different, right? The responsibilities for agency running a business, there's a lot of real stuff like monetary stuff that you need to deal with. Some transferable skills, of course, there's like budgeting and all that and shop back. But essentially, the growth of the team is plotted in a very different way.

So with the agency growth was really why do you want to grow? It's because the business model is like that, right? So accounting firms and design agencies and law firms, you grow on a linear curve. In order to grow your revenue, you need to just add more bodies and you need to like just take in more clients and projects, right? And then it grows like that. Whereas like for Shopback, the growth is like

hockey stick growth. It's super fast. We've tripled in the last two years, the company as a whole. So right now it's like 600 people and 100 headcounts that we're trying to hire. So it's crazy fast. And so the growth at Shopback is more dependent on the company itself. So it's a little bit different. So then you look at

in terms of the structure, the needs of the organization, how we're going to support based on the objectives that we want to have. So one interesting way that I am currently thinking about and experimenting with is I've always thought that the best way for a designer to operate within a company like Shellback, a tech company, was to have designers embedded within the engineering team.

So I've been spending a year and a half at Shellback now and I realized that there's a lot of, because it's a fast moving business and we always want to try new things and we always want to test out certain business models and all that. So Shellback is a startup and then sometimes we might have, start out within startup.

And then there's structurally, there's a tension there, right? On one hand, there's all these things that you commit on the roadmap and there's all these things that

You want to get designers to be able to support the teams and be super specialized in those domains and follow up with things, right? But at the same time, there's all these ideas and fast moving like business environment initiatives, right? So what I'm thinking about trying is to slice like some

some of the team and you know maybe form like an internal agency or design kind of system right so you get a hybrid system and we started off hiring a ui motion designer which is something that i've always wanted to do because it's so shop.com is a consumer product and we want to make the product more lively and engaging right and

It's funny, I don't really have an animation background so I don't really have an idea what that looks like but I watch Pixar movies. Just kidding. We'll become experts after watching. Yeah, I know. I talked to a few different people in the industry and also internally because we have motion designers on the brand side, right? And we're trying to figure out what are we looking for.

One of the things was actually I was talking to one of the candidates and about like how should we define the role, right? And she gave some really good ideas and we eventually end up hiring her, which is interesting, right? And also like that's kind of gives you insight into what a culture is like, right? So we're pretty entrepreneurial. We like to have fresh ideas and we're pretty open to

it's not a linear path right we always know that where we go is is probably through trial and error and failing fast right and that was an interesting journey so that was this is how i'm currently thinking about growing the team at shopback yeah it's really nice you have this remit where you get to try these things and and that shopback is also at this really right phase where it's growing exponentially and the teams are also growing as well and i was wondering

Are there any lessons in the last one and a half years, you know, being in a company that's growing exponentially, lessons for other people who are in companies who are also growing really, really fast, especially maybe they are asked to lead design teams or they're asked to like grow very fast as a designer. Yeah. Do you have any tips and advice for them?

So you just got to go and try out, right? So I think a lot of times when you are growing very fast, there will be responsibilities placed on you where sometimes you're not ready for them, right? But the thing is,

you may never be properly ready for it. I didn't feel like I was ready for marriage, but we got married. I didn't feel like I was ready for kids. We just had the kids and you learn along the way. Nobody was born like a good husband or good father. But when the situation is thrust on you, you kind of just figure it out.

And so like what is probably on a lot of people's minds as they try to take on new responsibilities is, you know, the old friend called imposter syndrome or that feeling that you don't feel like you're good enough, right? And I mean, this is a well-spoken about topic, but my input into that is that I think all these things are just labels, right? Self-doubt is always going to be there.

And it's so common in the design industry in particular because we're perfectionists and we would demand perfection from ourselves as well. I've seen this from senior designers, senior leadership, even up to VP level. And it's just self-doubt. It's a feeling you acknowledge it, but it's temporary and it's transient and it's going to go away. Because if you don't put yourself in a position where it scares you, then again, you're in the comfort zone.

and you don't grow in the comfort zone. Yeah, I fully agree with that. And I can tell as well and I can hear that maybe fatherhood and being a husband has brought new experiences for you and through that you have also matured from that experience. And thanks for sharing that perspective on having this growth mindset, especially when you're in a company that grows really, really fast.

I was just wondering, you were in Zendesk, right? At that point in time, it's quite unique because Zendesk just got acquired. Zendesk got acquired but rather Zopim got acquired by Zendesk. Did you join Zopim or did you join Zendesk after? I joined Zendesk at that point of time. Zopim had been acquired for close to three years.

Yeah, so you joined after. So at that point in time, Zendesk is trying to grow its Asia Pacific operations and you're in one of the best design teams I know in Asia Pacific. I would fully endorse that. In fact, I try and tell a lot of people, please go join Zendesk because they have one of the best design teams in APAC. And how is this

experience for designing in a B2B company versus like right now, right? Like you're in a startup, you're in a consumer space. Like if you were to compare and contrast, how is it different? Taking leadership aside, right? Yeah. It's quite different.

So, you know, if you look at a business model, then this is a SaaS model, right? Software as a service. So users pay monthly subscriptions and the people who pay are the businesses, right? And it's different, right? Because the people who pay and the people who use the software are different as well. And so it's a different way of engaging with the users. You know, you look at their workflow, you look at what kind of features would help

the customer support agents, but also the team leads and admins. They all have different requirements. And then of course, what kind of features the company on the enterprise level they require. Sometimes that could be features like redaction, things that protect your privacy or protect the customer's data.

And that's completely different from Shopback, right? Where consumer is the end user and they are the ones paying, the ones making money for you, right? And so the way that you engage them is less restrictive in a sense where

you can go directly to them and no problem, right? And you're able to just like have chats with them. And in terms of geography, it's very different as well, right? So for Xandex, like international companies, you know, and we supported like over

over 20 or 30 different languages. So the way they approach the system and design is that you want to make it as global as possible, as accessible as possible to different cultures and different languages and different ways of thinking. Whereas for Shopback, it's about local, being local and catering to different needs in different markets, especially in Southeast Asia context.

and some of these like consumer behavior and all that would be super different whereas like for enterprise software um and especially the the companies who buys and there's a little bit more international so there is like some like common way of uh thinking about business workflows and automation yeah so those are the differences thanks for raising these differences i i would say based on what i hear you say the

for Zendesk is a little bit more homogeneous and for ShopBike it's a little bit more diverse. There's a lot of localization involved. And someone in the chat asked, do you feel like Zendesk has the best design team then? I think, I personally think it has the best design team because I know a lot of good designers joined the Zendesk design team. But what did you think? You're an insider. Yeah.

Well, shit, you're putting me in a very difficult position. We're talking about the past, so it's all past, right? So it's all good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I really love the team at Zendesk. One of the reasons why I joined was... Actually, I'd known the folks a few years before I joined. I flew some Drupal meetups and all of that. And they were always a team that I wanted to work with. And I would say...

I wasn't a product designer until I joined Zendesk. I learned so much from the folks there. The level of detail is insane, right? I realized I wasn't a good designer compared to them when I joined and I was really felt like I was playing catch up with them. And this was on top of all the domain knowledge, the knowledge about the backend systems and all of that. It's like just crazy, right?

I think also the team when I joined it was evolving. So it was about like close to 1000 people when I joined and when I left it was like 3000 people, right? So the design team had like grown a lot. And what was interesting was having the chance to work with a lot of like super senior folks, very, very senior, especially like in the US and Europe, right? I was like, wow, it's like these people have been in companies

that are multiple times the size of Zendesk. I always remember there was this engineering SVP I was talking to, right? I think previously it was on Microsoft. And I was like, "Ah, you know, Zendesk is getting big. How are we gonna get our processes right and communicate?" And he was like, "Oh, you think 2000 people is big?"

He came from a company that has 20,000 people and all that, right? So just the sheer amount of scale. And it was really eye-opening to see how different functions within that company and also the more experienced leaders they later brought in, right? How they helped to scale the system, what kind of processes they put in place. And it was definitely a huge...

influence in my career. I definitely learned how to be a proper designer there. But I will also say that we're building a great team. At Shotback, you know, we've got people who are ex-Grab, ex-Carousel and it's grown like quite quickly. So we've grown from the time I joined, it was like a team of four people and we're probably going to end up with 20 people by the end of the year.

So what I try to do is like, you know, I asked around like, Hey, who do you want to work with? Like who's on your dream team, right? Let's, let's try to work with people or hire people that we want to work with. And then I go and try to hire them. So far, it's like one of the people that we managed to hire was a research lead, Nanning. So I've known her for a few years and

It was one of those things where, "Hey, I think we need a research lead now." "Who can we think of?"

this person, like then we went out and tried to see if he's interested and yeah, I managed to hire. So yeah, we're putting together a pretty nice team now and we have openings by the way. So if... Yeah, that's great. I wanted to ask about that and I'm sure the people in the audience are also interested. It does remind me that you're kind of like Nick Fury from Avengers trying to recruit all your Avengers into your team. So tell me a little bit,

Who are you recruiting and what type of Avengers are you recruiting? My boss gave me a challenge. Can you hire seven people? I was like, oh, wow. Within this quarter...

So we have openings in Singapore and in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, and also in Taipei as well. And it's been pretty interesting, the profiles that have been coming in. As I said earlier, we tried this experimental role, the UI motion designer, and we're pretty happy with who we managed to hire. So then the two roles that we were trying to

or the two types of roles that we're trying to hire is somebody who is a little bit more versatile, able to work within an agency or studio-like setting and be pitching concepts like how should we go forward in Shopback for the next few years, right? Coming up with interesting ideas to engage users, right? At the same time, we're also looking for people for

Singapore local market, specifically for Shop at Go. So that's like a very location based service that we have. Yeah, so there's a few roles that are going around. And if anyone knows anyone in Taipei or Ho Chi Minh, please let me know. I'm trying to figure out how to get into those committees and who are the good designers there, which is all new to me. Yeah.

Yeah, I think those are excellent choices. The people there are very hardworking and also easy to work with in general. Yeah, and thanks for sharing those openings as well. And someone asked you, how did you get over your imposter syndrome? Do you still have imposter syndrome? Yeah, funny enough, we were just talking about this in a team retro. And I would say that for some reason, designers more than...

like others have faced this all the time, right? And I don't know because we overthink or we tend to spend a lot of time in our heads dreaming up things or not, right? But definitely that has been something that has always followed me. And it's also something that I've learned to cope with, right? It's not something that you cure, right?

as with other things. But also like I said, imposter syndrome itself is a diagnosis. It's a mental health issue. And sometimes I find that people self-label where the condition might actually not be so severe. And we tend to over extrapolate on that. I would say yes, there will always be self-doubt

when you're trying new things and experimenting of course you know because you're taking risks right of course there's gonna be fear if you're riding a bicycle for the first time i'm pretty sure you won't be like super confident i don't know if y'all uh ramble as a kid or even like you know the most recent thing was like going to a water park with my kids it's that moment of like before you go down

The slide that is the hardest part, right? That's the most scary part. There's fear, but fear is sometimes intermingled with excitement. And sometimes we mistake one for the other. And it's easy to be pessimistic and give that label that, oh, I feel self-doubt. But also, you know, it could be just like, yeah, it's excitement. It's an air for growth.

It's easy to forget that even your boss or whoever, they get promoted along the career path. This is the first time they're doing all this stuff as well. So I think everyone experiences at some point or another, but we don't have to make a meal out of it every time. But also at the same time, if you do feel like that's something that is a little bit more severe,

look for a support group for help and definitely like talking about it and acknowledging it and normalizing it definitely is something that will help. Yeah, thanks for your honesty and around this topic and subject and I'll also ask you about how are you helping your teams to manage this right and more because

You mentioned earlier in Shopback, your team takes a lot of risks, right? And you're also experimenting with new team structures and things like that. So my guess is that people are feeling naturally anxious and trying new things. How are you helping your team? How are you enabling your team as a leader?

Structurally, what you want to try to do is create a framework or support system, right? So one of those things that I'm trying to do is to build out a layer of management or leaders within the team. We have some designers on the senior level who I think are ready. But I think what I've seen is that managers are somehow always airdropped. It's like either somebody leaves, the manager leaves and then like, hey, you're next in line, like,

it's kind of like a battlefield promotion kind of way to inherit a team, right? Or the more common scenario also is like experienced manager hired in into another team. So there's different like ways to do that. But also like what I would love to see more and what I'm trying to do also is how do you plan ahead for these senior folks in a career? Do you plan like one and a half years in advance? Like, so for example, one of,

my designers super experience and I figured that we probably need a lead designer at a certain point as the team grows bigger for that unit right and I was like alright I'm going to give you the first option because you've been with us for very long and we will have this need at a certain point but do you want to give it a try right and so we set out

few different milestones along the way. Like, you know, first get your hands dirty with hiring an intern, managing debt, and then it's like junior designers and then, you know, grow to two to three, right? So at a certain point when you have five designers under you, you probably

in a styling scale, you're probably not going to do as much individual contributor work. You're going to probably have to switch over to full-time management at some point. So yeah, this was actually another thing that I picked up working with some of the more experienced managers at Zendesk. And definitely that has been beneficial in helping to form or create some of these structures.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And I really like how deep we went on leadership on this one. And I'd like to also understand how you develop your team members, how you grow them. There seems to be general sentiment in market that there's a lack of mid-weight designers, right? Mid-weight meaning designers in UX with like three years of experience or more. There seems to be like a lack of that. So just wondering how...

how you see the problem and how you're managing it through whatever you're doing. But that has always been the problem, right? Since even like 10 years ago, right? Lack of mid-weight and even up to senior level in some regards. I think part of the solution at the beginning was to hire from...

overseas, right? I mean, talking about the Singapore context and I think initially you saw a lot of people come in, but also you saw some of the mid-level people in Singapore go out to the valley and a lot of those countries, right?

At the beginning, there were a few things that I tried. One was an apprenticeship program. So I was thinking about how to bridge. Because you have schools that help people career switch, like Curious Call.

And what I typically found was actually there's still a little bit of gap between a graduate from such a course and being able to come in and slot in as a full-time designer. But it feels like internship is very short. How do you build up that portfolio for that person and also then mitigate the risk on both sides?

A couple of years ago what we tried was some form apprenticeship program, so lasting about a year. And this was for engineers also had as well. And, you know, kind of think of it, we didn't really pick up on that after a while. Then I joined Zendesk and Zendesk had the opposite problem, right? In which like,

it was already a well-known brand name, right? And people are attracted to these kind of companies when the profile is a bit higher. So then you solve different kind of problems. I used to lament this problem and feel very anxious about it. But I think the only thing that you can do

is to be part of the development of these designers and the talent. So the way that I've been thinking is, once we have enough senior designers and managers in, then we can start to offer more mentorship to these junior designers. That's when we start bringing people in. And to some extent, we've started that.

As a course provider, I'm also quite curious about this part. Since we run a career accelerator, you say that there's still a little bit of gap, right? People who come out of these bootcamps, these courses, what is that gap? What is that lack of polish that requires you to get them to do a one-year attachment with you? So I'm generalizing, right? So when I talk about the accelerator and all that, that was like...

eight years ago. So I think courses have become a lot more sophisticated from when I look at candidates these days, always comes with very nice case studies detailing the processes and all that. But of course, like the one thing is something that the course cannot provide, which is like real life experience or real life projects and kind of like a breadth of projects. And

just shipping stuff and the stories of mistakes or failures and how they overcome some of that. So I think to your point, I think the most important thing is like, how can we get the students to work with engineers to ship things and not just like have the attachment with the client companies, right? And follow through with them and actually work through some of those

beyond the handoff, follow up, design QA as well. I think that's like 50% of the work. But yeah, to be honest, I haven't really figured out what's the best model for that. But some of the things that I would love to get some of your students to try is to really add more to your portfolio by doing redesigns or just taking initiative.

The ones that I do want to give more time for are people who have shown initiative, like they are self-aware that, oh yeah, I may not have that body of work yet, but have been trying side projects, volunteering, try to bridge that gap. Because I do see a lot of

good candidates who maybe they have backgrounds or careers where domain is like very suitable it's just that we need that bit where you able to execute and then once you have that i think having work experience already definitely like helps compared to someone who's a fresh graduate from school

Thank you for sharing and yeah, you're right. Bootcamps and courses have actually gotten more sophisticated and the bar has been raising and I've also been trying to raise the bar. We're actually one of the only programs out there that offer real clients, real project work for our students. And we would definitely love to work with engineers and we tried working with an engineering school as well.

and there's some exchanges and all that, but you're right, like the design QA process, the handoff process and all that, that's very hard to replicate unless you are actually building a real product and shipping it out there. There's no easy answers. And even if we sort of like built something that allows someone to try this entire process, it might not be very scalable as well. So it's quite a challenging problem on my end to correct.

I was just wondering, in terms of talent development for many of the people here, some of them are looking to break into the industry. They're looking to be UX designers. If you look back as yourself, because like you said before you joined Zendesk, you felt like you were not really a good designer. What would you have done? What could you have done to prepare yourself more or actually just be a better designer? What kind of advice would you give them to the audience over here?

I think the most important thing is to design more, but also like to also reflect on your processes afterwards, right? Not a lot of people know this, but I applied for Zendesk multiple times before I got in. It was a really tough interview process and I didn't get it the first time, I didn't get it the second time. But like it's all about you just keep knocking on the door and just keep trying, right?

I think like when one of the things is to really just in your communications, if you don't get in, like how do you do like a graceful farewell that opens up the door for future opportunities? Just be a nice guy. You know, I think that helps a lot. Yeah, I think that has helped me. And I also noticed you mentioned you already knew some of the team members at

who were working in the Zendesk design team, did you feel like that helped as well? I mean, even though you knew them, you still didn't pass your first time around, right? Yeah, they were super strict, man. So like, but would you still encourage people to kind of like get to know people and network and talk to other people? Yeah, definitely. Because like that surfaces opportunities and when opportunities come in,

they might look to you as well. And I mean, the thing really is like you never know, right? So a lot of the times you think about networking as a way to learn from others. But also, I think it's a way to create more luck. Just so happens that the more people you know, the more lucky that you can get. I like that building luck. I think that's a really wonderful tip and advice. Yeah, because all you need is one lucky brick, right?

So getting my first job was a lucky break. I just so happened to have a uni friend who recommended me into the startup, right? And then getting my first clients as part of the design studio was also, it's just referrals. Just do good work. And then people...

refer you and that's how it rolls on right and zendesk as well and even for shortback i was mentoring someone she was the one who recommended my boss to to have a chat with me so yeah it really helps you to create those lucky breaks what goes around comes around i think like all these other things you're doing it's it's wonderful that you built your own luck and when we look at sort of

Working in a fast-growing startup, working in a startup itself, you work with different stakeholders. You work with engineers. You work with product owners. What's one thing you wish product owners would know about designers? Or what's one thing you wish engineers or engineering managers would know about UX?

I think there's more than one thing. Sure, we can do a few. So my philosophy, I will turn the question around, is that it's easier to change yourself than the world around you, right? So I think that it's more on the designer's side, right? To really find out how to speak the language of business.

how to speak the language of engineering and if it's technically complex domain then learn about the complexity if it's in the sense of there's expertise or knowledge that you need then go and learn that knowledge all of that helps you in your work and helps you to communicate better with them and work better with them so i really think it's

It's about owning your own change that you want to see. Some famous guy said that.

Be the change you want to see. Yes, I've heard of that quote. Yeah, so yeah, definitely. Thank you for being so honest throughout the entire interview. I was really quite surprised by that. And I'll also be honest and tell you, I'm actually a very late user of Shopback. Even though I've heard about it for a long time. And Henry is actually one of my Facebook friends, the co-founder. Nice.

For a very long time, I didn't understand how Shopback works. Right, right. Yeah, and I think it was only until my staff told me, "Hey, Dalen, why don't you download the app? We can get free croissants over here." And I was like, "Okay, fine." I'll just download it and I get a free croissant. And I was just wondering, like, why should people join Shopback now? Why is it an exciting opportunity since you're hiring as well?

Wow, it's a fast growing company, definitely. So join for the growth, personal and also as part of a growing team. Join if you like to take risks and you don't want a boring job. Definitely every day is a different set of challenges to resolve.

join if you your life to be too predictable right and i think that's interesting is also like the the people that we have right the thing that swayed me when i was doing the the interviews was talking to some of the leadership right some of these leaders are super experienced in in their domains right and for me what attracted me i was like oh

How does a Singapore company expand so quickly in so many different markets in such a short span of time? What kind of approaches do they take? What kind of business strategies do they employ? What is it like to expand to different business verticals as well at the same time? It's a little bit crazy, but somehow we execute well.

And that's something that is exciting for me. And with that, I think executing well, one of the key reasons why you should join ShopBack, other than, of course, working with a leader like Mike, who I have found to be very, very humble and very, very open in terms of sharing his past failures as well. So thank you, Mike, for spending time with us this evening.

from your family and also taking time to share with the young designers over here how they can actually craft their career and join the UX design industry. We will come back next month with another session with another head of design from Grab this time around. We'll see you all very, very soon. And good night. And thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you. Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.