It was time to take a step back from product management and put a stronger focus on Design, as the team grew in numbers and our business now needs to better control our design outcomes.

From January 2021, I took on a product Manager role for our supply business. I led a cross-functional team of 10 members and I was in charge of the performance of our supply products interfaces (for App/Web Publishers) until March 2022. This was the first second-degree management opportunity I’ve had as this team also counts one PM in charge of specific products. After a little more than one year of kicking off this mission team, we’ve recorded several KPI improvements, with most products refactored for greater interconnection, paving the way for further opportunities.

In April 2022, I started an entirely new mission team that acts as a startup inside the startup. This new mission will define our next monetization products, to grow our customer reach. Setting up a new vision and product strategy, hiring the team, and going through product discovery are the tasks I am currently busy with lately!

Since 2018 I’ve been facilitating amazing mission teams. The first mission was about giving the company a strong focus on improving our overall customer experience. This was a cross-disciplinary team and it happened right after our company moved to a matrix organization, adjusting our structure to accommodate the many newcomers and be more scalable. Followed a couple of other close-ended missions I had the chance to initiate and complete, until late 2020. These were priceless experiences that nurtured a strong interest in product growth, expanding the reach beyond product Design only. Life lessons really, learning through hit-and-miss experiences. Amazing opportunities to rinse & repeat my leadership and management processes throughout multiple, short experiences.

Alongside my current role as Product Manager, I lead a very compact and efficient team of rockstar designers. Considering my resources, I focused on building a very agile and autonomous Design work process based on high-quality hirings and autonomous workflows. All Designers are performing Peer reviews to promote feedback while all of us belong to different mission teams.

Designer

No matter my title, I am and always will be a Designer. This is in my DNA, and it affects everything I do (at work just like at home). I have a true passion for Design methods and I always do my best to advocate them inside or outside my company.

Design leadership

Design teams like any other specialty, require adequate guidance. From a function-led organization to a cross-functional one, my leadership had to evolve a lot during all these years. Despite my other responsibilities inside the company, I always took pride in leading this amazing Design team, making sure that the methods, tools, and technics all designers use are the most adequate for the job. The most important aspect of this job today is about hiring and coaching designers and acting as a supporter.

Hiring expertise

Over all these years, I had the amazing opportunity to interview dozens of talented designers. Hire and coach a few of them. I spent hours learning, trying, and building recruiting strategies and expertise. In a competitive environment like Seoul, I had to be on top of all the latest technics to recruit talents. In the process, I also got close to our recruiting team, to better collaborate.

Design Systems

With an intent to achieve more with what we have, I initiated the creation of what composes and rules 100% of our Product & Brand design outcomes: Design Systems. These include UI libraries, but also Design principles, methods, and much more. All Designers are permanently participating in making this system evolve. We’ve set workflows and peer reviews to secure its quality so that anyone inside the design team or outside can use it with the most up-to-date assets. A couple of years ago, we also released a light version of this system on Figma Community.

CMS group (previously 3S Informatique) offered me my first long projects. I spent more than 3 years working in research labs. I could adjust the methods I learned at school, learn how to interact inside a development team, and publish my very first research paper in Tokyo.

The real test

I started working for a Research Lab incubated by CMS Group, an IT consulting company based in Paris. Most of my work in the first year happened to be in the Arts & Metiers campus, closely working with a team of researchers to shape the concept of what will keep me busy for the next 3 years. My workplace changed to CMS Group (formerly 3S) Product team after the research, identification, and ideation phases of the design thinking process were done. This same year the team got founded by the E.U. as a research project.

Interest in coding to better design

I’ve learned a lot while closely working with a team of engineers from the early stages of our product to the alpha version. I’ve learned from mistakes, iterating fast. I built my first UI system based on Bootstrap. With this live UI library, I could control the entire appearance of our LMS throughout these CSS/JS-based style guides and layouts. This decision was based on the many headaches I encountered to hand off my Design to developers (There were no Figma or Zeplin at that time!)

When Design meets Research

Because outcomes were worth sharing, I co-published a paper called “The CO-SI Card method: how to refine and validate concepts through a scenario generator framework” at IASDR Tokyo about co-design with Cédric Mivielle. Around 2013 the project moved to the alpha version. I’ve been allowed to assist and collaborate with the Randstad training team to test the platform in real conditions. From that point, our product got decoupled in different variations based on that same tech, with different purposes.

Time to wrap up, communicate on achievements & move on!

I’ve introduced my experience as an Interaction design Alumnus during some open days at my former school l’école de design de Nantes Atlantique.

I’ve participated in a European Campus which was about UX Design and learning services organized by the University of Poitiers. I lectured about being a UX designer working on a professional training platform as well as being a UX designer part of a panel of UX professionals (video in French).

After recruiting and onboarding another Designer to replace me, I’ve finally decided to end my journey in this Lab and Paris to move to Seoul! ✈️ 🇰🇷

Later this year I participated in an amazing workshop at KAIST, regrouping artists and designers from all over the world, engineers from the KAIST campus, and kids from local schools to be imagining Daejeon city in 2050.

Head full of dreams and a true passion for Product Design

I graduated from the excellent L’École de design Nantes Atlantique with a Master in Interaction Design with Honors. I graduated from L’École Normale Supérieure des Arts et Metiers with a Research Master in Virtual Reality & Innovation with honors.

I got an amazing last year internship at a Parisian startup called Domolib, creating home automation systems. In 6 months I could see my very first iPad application being published with positive reviews (it shortly made it into the Top10 download in France!). It was about a cooking app, the twist being that you could navigate through the steps without having to touch the screen as the App could detect a clap-clap as an indicator to move to the next step.

Freelancer, first client interactions, first responsibilities!

During my school years, I created my own company to freelance on a few projects. Mostly about Website and brand design. I’ve learned the importance of communication and how difficult this can be as part of a Design project with direct client interactions. It helped me become more aware of what surrounds a designer’s job and understand the development constraints.