DU060 - ProtoPie - Jenna Yim Interview

Introduction

0:00Hello everyone and welcome to Design Untangled and me Chris Mears and Carla Lindarte and today we're joined by a very special guest all the way from South Korea, Jenna Yim who is Chief Strategy Officer at Protopai so hello welcome to the podcast. Hello. Yeah so what we like to do

Jenna's Background

0:34first generally with our guests is just if you could give a bit of intro about yourself kind of your background how you got to to where you are now. Okay cool so as Chris mentioned my name is Jenna Chief Strategy Officer of Studio Seed the maker of Protopai. So I studied industrial design and studied my career as a UX designer at Samsung and LG and in 2004 I decided to go to Canada suddenly because my English was English was really terrible and I have a lot of funny stories of

1:09going arriving in Canada and not being able to speak English anyway so in Canada it was really my first time being abroad and experiencing a brand new culture so different from Korea and it was really eye-opening experience to me. So after experiencing the culture I really wanted to get a job there because I mean as a UX person it's very interesting I wanted to know more about how these two different cultures and the countries approach UX differently. So I got the job and then after working as a UX

1:45expert and then as my career grew I started becoming more and more management role and then strategic role eventually I led the digital business so publicist in New York Canada and after working in a digital consultancy for 20 years in the marketing world I always had a dream to have my own product. I think as a UX person you want to see how my product can grow and then see it I mean maybe almost like taking care of a baby right and then fortunately last year I met Tony who is the CEO of Purupy so we

2:22went to the same school actually we both studied industrial design together and then he asked me to join the company because Purupy they wanted to grow globally and so I joined and then ever since I worked at the CSO helping the company grow globally as well as the develop the brand vision growth and customer success of the company. So I'll say How old was the company when you joined?

2:53How was my company? How old was Purupy? So when I joined last year in July it was really really we were just just starting to get the funding stage of the series A extension and also I'll say the company was five years old and it was really you can think as like a typical startup really great designers and engineers focusing on making amazing product which they have done amazing job but I say yeah about the making great product in terms of the sales or marketing or brand you know or thinking

3:31about the global perspective it was maybe not as advanced so a lot of parts that I wanted to make sure that people think more globally as well as we put more thinking towards our brand you know there was a lot of work to do.

Career Change

3:48So it's interesting that you say that moving to a new country not speaking the language I actually experienced exactly the same when I moved from Colombia to Australia trying to get a job in the industry and I can see that you kind of started more to in the kind of advertising side of things right in publicists so what and obviously iso bar etc so how was the change from like moving from that world into you know a product startup environment was that how did you experience that?

4:22Yeah it's a really good question I mean even though I was working in the advertising companies but most of the my role was more as a digital user experience and then strategist thinking about the long term of uh my clients business but definitely moving into more marketing side coming into the product side was very interesting and very different obviously the pace is different and then also you cannot just think about the short term right you have to really think about the long-term values of the brand and the

4:54company and I think the biggest difference is probably is um in a software industry we have to think about not just about um the software and the features but we need to think about ultimately what we want to do and then how we want to influence in the workflow I think um that was probably the biggest uh mindset change for me because I mean in the marketing or advertising world you cannot you can sometimes work in maybe airline business but sometimes you maybe work in the manufacturers or sometimes maybe

5:29use the promotions to sell more you know drinks right but in a software world especially as you guys know design tools changing tools uh requires a lot of investment this is your portfolio this is your career and then for company this is your business and then um you need to always thinking about the efficiency and the process and though every aspect of it so I'll say definitely coming from the marketing advertising world uh is a plus plus thinking about how we can think about the go-to-market strategy and the market fit but I had to really go

6:04digging into deeper understanding our customers deeper and then making sure that we found the right value in their um existing day-to-day workflow um I'm interested in digging into a bit more like the culture shift between how

Company Culture

6:22different companies run like um in North America where you obviously spent some time and now South Korea like is there a noticeable difference in I guess just generally like company culture there and more specifically like tech company culture that you've observed

6:41again this is interesting question um I first of all I don't want to over generalize it but it's based purely based on my experience um I'll say maybe not North America but I compare between Canada and Korea so in Canada as a UX person when I joined um the company there the most interesting thing that I found was um the focusing on minority and inclusive design so in general in Canada for example I was working on

7:13wireless service company uh website in the digital experience and the brief was basically they wanted to make sure uh include people from 20s and all the way to the 90s so I did a usability testing for 80 years old grandfather whereas in Korea it was more focusing on technology and a lot of times the design is inspired by technology it's the same wireless service company in the leading um in Korea and then I did a project in back in 2004 and back then they had a video streaming available for the online and they wanted to use that

7:52technology and implement it in the site to show that we are leading edge company and the brief was like um we want to focusing on people in 30s because they are the one most spending time in the e-commerce so it was very different mindset so I'll say Canada was more about supporting diversity and minority versus in Korea it was more inspired by technology yeah it's always interesting when you test with those older demographics because yeah as we know the population is sort of naturally getting older so

8:25that's going to shift as time goes forward and obviously age introduces a whole host of different kind of design considerations and stuff so it's definitely good to hear that they were doing that in Canada quite a while ago now um hopefully it's that trend has continued it's also um i'd be interested to know as well because um coming from a a background like a background of of um you know a different background that is not in Colombia etc being a woman in leadership is actually very tough um you

8:59know where i know where i come from um and then obviously moving into uk australia etc is it is also tough but it's a slightly different so you've obviously um had quite important roles both in Canada and now in Korea how do you see the difference like as a woman in leadership um for you

Women in Leadership

9:20i have between the two cultures oh that's a really tough one um i mean in Canada uh i was woman but also i was asian woman and also immigrant so i had all this combination and i'm sure Carla you have experienced that as well and i think um there are some commonality in both culture one is um it's very hard to find

9:50role model in this um as a female leader but also especially in Canada um there were a lot of my mentors as well as a lot of the um my managers they were all male white male so i think um in the beginning of my leadership i think i i had a little bit of identity challenge because um it's almost like a Korean woman trying to manage like a Canadian man and it took me a while to kind of find my own style

10:22and then eventually i was able to merge their culture and in Korea though i'll say it's not it's not it's not just about male versus the female thing but i found um people are very uh strict about uh compliments and and there are a lot of people um with a lack of self-esteem or confidence issues so i i actually find it very interesting that especially the designers that people

10:52they think they their work is not good enough and they push it harder and harder a lot maybe more than uh what i've seen in North America um so i think i try i really try to um raise that because sometimes i found especially Korean man culture uh you can see um they are not as maybe talkative you may have seen the movies like a lost in translation i mean that's a movie in Japan but there are a lot of the kind of the stereotype of typical uh male leaders who may be not as talkative

11:26you know or maybe not giving as many compliments and praises so i i actually trying to use um my female side to embrace that and then uh contribute to the culture i hope that answers the question it was quite difficult question um have you used any kind of specific techniques for that to kind of encourage like i suppose praise or honest feedback stuff like that like design crits or anything like that oh yeah i think it's very very difficult i think first of all we have to make sure breaking

12:01down the task into the smaller chunks so in a way that uh people can see the completion of task but the measurement of the task is very clear you know when you just say oh i want you to design this really well then how do you measure that right but if you say um this element is of the purpose of this and then i want you to make sure consider this aspect and then when it's delivered obviously we should celebrate the little moments every day in the business i think i try to use that a lot making sure

12:32that when i tell people what i'm expecting it's very clear and then when it was delivered that there's never a good a good day to celebrate it's basically every day to make sure that people

Protopie Overview

12:43hear the feedback cool so yeah i guess we'll move on to protopie itself now so for those that kind of haven't heard about it can you describe sort of what it is and what makes it different from other tools on the market at the moment okay so uh protopie uh basically the name comes from prototyping as easy as pie so basically it's a no code um easy learning but super powerful uh proto interactive prototyping tool um i'll say um maybe if i have to just summarize in one sentence then

13:18it will be a design tool uh that empower designers and engineers to express their ideas through interactive prototyping um the part that i want to emphasize is that um expressing ideas um because we found it um sometimes it's very difficult especially these days when digital experience is getting more and more complex sometimes um you have a really great idea but you cannot really uh think about what would be the best way to show it to your stakeholders or show it to your team without

13:51engineers or heavy coding involved um for example let's say you want to design a content is payment experience but you want to make it better how the two phones maybe interact with each other right so we wanted to develop a tool where uh previously you cannot imagine how these things could be done easily without coding uh such as using sensors you know hardware controls or multi-device experience we're trying to provide opportunity for designers and engineers to uh exploring the idea um with uh with

14:26the less time spending learning the tool i hope that makes sense yeah no that does so obviously there's quite a lot of competition in this space now you know you've got figma xd etc um as you mentioned like changing tool or bring a new tool on can be quite an investment for a company so is there anything kind of specifically you would say this is you can only do this in protopi and and nothing else like is there a standout kind of reason designers should check this out or consider

14:58it over and above one of the other ones on the market at the moment um so i'll say the biggest differences are um it's um we support not only mac but also pc and all the other environment but especially in the ecosystem a lot of times that for existing prototyping tools the output is the browser but in our case um we can literally support anything that has screen so you can use your cell phone or you know maybe kiosk or even the displays in an automotive vehicle um we actually have a lot of

15:34customers use our tool to um prototype their concept car uh experience uh so i'll say uh the ability to uh use the multi screens as well as the any digital displays uh even including voice and audio so i think that is definitely uh the key strengths but at the same time we do believe that no tools can survive in isolation so we actually see big mask schedule all the other tools as a complementary tools

16:06so we want to make sure that uh we support the smooth transition between tools uh in each tool and then making sure that when they use purple pie they can really get into more high fidelity prototyping and more highly interactive uh experience that sounds really interesting i'm interested to know what kind of what are your users who are the kind of they um the kind of people that are using your product at the moment oh yeah so i mean beyond you can think about just a

16:36typical websites or mobile apps uh the interesting cases that are using our product probably microsoft so the latest microsoft neo and duo they actually fully prototype the experience using our tool because the product actually has a multi-screen and then you have to think about the how the two displays interact with each other depending on the context and scenario of the use cases so that's one and also google chromebook used our tool as well and like i mentioned the automotive industry a lot of

17:10the automotive manufacturers in europe as well as america use our tool to develop their in-car experience yeah and and we were very fortunate actually um like i mentioned before i joined the company the company probably didn't spend much at all in marketing and sales but we were able to gain like over 100 countries of the customers uh from all the high-tech industry and then all global leading companies

17:41great sorry i have to say that i have a delay um when i talk so if you hear like a silence it's just me trying to talk oh no worries at all okay so um i want to ask you so what's your role there can you describe what you do and what's your team look like yeah so uh as chief strategy officer uh i am responsible for everything but making product so brand growth sales customer success so i actually um our

18:18company there's a three main division one is gcs growth and customer success and then second is obviously product and the third is its information transaction and security so i lead the gcs division and within gcs we have a team in charge of the brand and then customer engagement customer success and growth and digital experience as well so basically we want to make sure that um we inspire our uh customers customers as well as the potential customers what they can do

18:56using our product but also we're trying to help providing as much as support possible so not only you know initially um maybe giving them the trial whether selling the product but we want to we want everybody to be an expert using our tool and then also become the front line uh hearing the feedback from everybody who touches our product so basically that's mainly my role i'm interested to talk a bit about the the whole fundraise so just remind me were you at proto pie when that

19:27kind of series a stuff was happening or did you join after yeah so basically the starting from the first week i joined that was my main focus in the beginning so yeah so it was a very interesting experience because like i mentioned um i was in different side of the world in the business you know and this is my first time working in a startup working in a software company and also first time doing um uh the fundraising so it was a lot a lot of learning and very exciting yeah so can you talk us

19:59a bit about like what the process for that was how how does a startup gear for for going in front of investors and saying you know give us a few million dollars um i think um it really depending on what stages you are in you know so for example if you're in the oldest stage versus the series a series b um it will be very different but in our case series a mostly series a stage mean you already launched

20:30the product and you have a good momentum in the market but now you want to get the funding to really accelerate the growth right so first of all when you meet the investors you need to make sure you wow them right and then second of all you need to think about what the vision is uh how you want to grow your market and um and also what is the really the value that nobody can replace uh your product right and uh and the fundraising starts from literally just going to any conference any conferences or

21:04fundraising event and talking to so many investors it's almost like a blind date you go in and then talk to like a five ten minutes and then meeting so many different investors to all the way actually you reach out to the investor you want to work or actually in uh north america there are a lot of and a lot and a lot of the great um investors specialized in software industry and also especially design tools so it was very interesting during this process we got a lot of calls from the investors

21:38who actually already know about us and then they wanted to learn more about us to see that if this is the right tool and one great thing that i um a i found during this process is that people are very interested in uh design process and obviously the design is really important these days more than ever so people do see that value having great tools and toolkits supporting this design workflow as well as the

22:09the championing the digital transformation within the company so i'll say in this kind of cases we can actually learn from the investors as much as um uh we're trying to tell them you know why they invest in us so i value this type of relationship a lot yeah i'm just interested to know it probably depends on the investor i guess but do you feel that having that that kind of vc money in a company affects or influences like what you have to produce so investors looking for you to do a certain amount of

22:44things in a certain amount of times and does that affect the decisions you might otherwise have made if you didn't have that investment yeah i mean i heard i actually i do hear that a lot but i think we are very lucky or maybe um maybe it's because of but we have we were very clear on what we want to do and then our investors actually support that journey uh we haven't actually had an experience in a way that our investors are pushing us saying you have to make sure go to market by this time or you have to launch

23:16this type of feature um we we i actually feel that with our investors it's very strong partnership sometimes i actually ask them their guidance on how we want to approach the market and then discuss but i think the trust is definitely really important part and probably the biggest changes after i joined the company is that i really trying to share our uh short-term as well as the long-term vision making sure that we are in control of our product and i think once you have that um there will be less

23:50engagement from the investors or less push from your investors saying you have to do this in this way because they actually trust you that the executive team are fully in control of your product that is really really really interesting thank you for that it's kind of gives me um an idea of what that looks like so thank you so much um i would like to ask of um you know something that everyone is talking about right now COVID-19 um so obviously everyone is working from home and i think that's impacted how teams are

COVID-19 Impact

24:22working anyway so how has been your experience and you know you do you think this will have a a lasting impact in the world of design um i think definitely yes and no um i do think there's an immediate impact is obviously you know we cannot really do things that we used to right like for example you may have to consider remote usability testing versus actually in-person testing right

24:52um those are the kind of things that immediately impacting but in the long term i do think i mean we will overcome this hurdle for sure but this this brought the opportunity and emphasizing the importance of the communication and you cannot just rely on for example in-person meeting face-to-face but how can you collaborate in remotely and i think this is not i mean obviously this got accelerated because of the COVID-19 but the globalization overall people are not just working locally right

25:28we have a more and more staff globally so i think this is something that we should work on but this kind of brought it making sure that companies play that it's been in the process of making this change very quickly um but protopie uh we are very lucky because um in south korea first of all um very fortunately it wasn't as um as a severe impact compared to other side of the world so i'm very um grateful about that but also our company when even it was in the middle of the COVID-19 we already uh had the

26:05culture of the remote work basis as well as the people have a very flexible hours we have a staff everywhere around the world so yeah it hasn't impacted us as um dramatically but it did impact in one area which is we definitely prioritizing some of the features that was in our roadmap but maybe trying to bring it um more earlier to bring into the market because we think this will be more critical than ever and for example one of the features is interaction recipes um because it's a

26:40pearl pie you know pie and recipe you can kind of this you know connection uh but basically it's a um handoff experience basically we built um as you um as you know you know uh there are a lot of the handoff discussions especially um from the graphic design to coding but when it comes to interactive design it didn't it doesn't matter even if you created an amazing high fidelity prototype you at one point you have to hand this off to the engineers and the communication is really difficult sometimes after

27:17making amazing prototype you have to make pages and pages of documents and we wanted to make sure to make this easier and that's why we made this feature you can basically record and then um exactly show your intention of the design and then engineers will be able to see based on the recording the timelines and then code aspect is generated i it's hard to explain i really recommend you to take a look um but um we we wanted to bring this feature earlier sooner than later because we felt that especially

27:52the time of kobe 19 the communication between engineers and designers become more critical than ever and we wanted to make sure that uh how we can support this kind of the workflow um uh in these current challenges that's um really great and interesting how you guys prioritize your features based on what's going on in the world so that shows the flexibility of how you guys work um and obviously we can put a link in the podcast notes to the video that showcase that feature um so people can

28:28understand what you were talking about it's really it is it is hard to explain but it's really cool um i looked at it it's really cool um uh one it could be a stupid question but what kind of design tools do you use apart from protopie that i guess you you guys use um just just curious to know what how what kind of tools do you use as a team um to keep everyone connected we actually use so many different tools like any other design team um but um yeah on top of protopie we do really like figma a lot because of the

29:04the collaborations but uh also we use um all the other tools as well like adobe and sketch making sure that we know how to test integrations and everything and this is not necessarily designed tool but we because of we work in the remote environment you know notion zoom and or slack and technically if you just name any of the hot softwares that people are using that we are using

29:37yeah everyone is um zoom um everyone uses zoom now everyone is the same now i'm just wondering you know because you guys do a prototyping tool what kind of other prototyping tools you use but it's interesting that you use pretty much like other design teams yeah it's available yeah and also actually we do we use our other tools that are in the same um uh competitive set as well i mean because like i mentioned we don't actually see any tool as a competitor so we do test you know a lot of times

30:08with envision or a framer you know principle yeah we're basically open to use anything do you find that that causes any issues within the design team like people loads of different people using loads of different things or is it still like although you're using lots of different tools you're all kind of using the same lots of different tools um i think um definitely in the process there will be more major tools than uh others right and i i actually think the workflow is very more important than

30:44what tools you are using and obviously uh the design systems and um the language that you are using making sure that there's a consistent experience those are a lot more critical but in terms of the tools we do believe that you need to explore more because it for us it's not just a part of the workflow but it's a research process as well right oh yeah and actually i did hear your last episode about um specialism and you talked about you know how these days like people are looking for more generalist

31:16specialist and we are actually going more opposite direction um we do really value the specialist a lot um and that's one of the things that after i joined the team we really tried to bring the specialties because i really don't believe that one person can do everything and if a company requires that i'm not sure if it's the right way because it's almost like you have a one role and then beat person into that role versus you know every individual have a different strengths not only to mention

31:48different roles right yeah so we try to making sure them bring different perspective and if there's a role for ux there's a role for product design the role for interaction designers and role for brand designers right so uh i also i wanted to mention that we are hiring researcher so if anybody is interested you can contact us i'm sure there will be plenty of listeners who are on the job hunt maybe myself as well oh awesome i have to say our team is really nice and very friendly right well i think we kind

32:26of go into the end of this interview thank you so much for your time and we normally when we have um guests in our podcast we ask them a question at the end which is um if there is anything you can recommend to like young designers or maybe just older designers like us to um read or a book read or someone to follow or something to watch um just to help them be better at their jobs what would that be on top of that we support the future designers and provide all students and schools for a pipe for

33:01free so you can try that but on top of that my recommendation is um i really recommend maybe searching product-led growth as an overall theme and maybe take a look because i do believe that product is become the brand and the value uh and as you do the research you realize how much design and great use and great experience of the product supports the overall ecosystem of the company so i think it will be definitely a lot of a lot of the great resources out there but

33:36if you are really want to getting into the product world i say product-led growth is definitely one of the hot keywords that you may want to take a look cool thank you um so yeah that about wraps up today uh so thanks for joining us it's been great to have you on hopefully we can have you back on in the future and see you know what new stuff proto pi or or yourself gets up to thank you so much kristen kala for having me search and subscribe to design untangled using your favorite podcast app and leave us a review follow us on the web at design untangled.co.uk or on twitter

34:10at design untangled become a better designer with online mentoring at uxmentor.me