Principal of UX · Vancouver, BC

Design leadership that outlasts the leader.

Fifteen years across enterprise security, identity, and agentic AI. I scale design teams, reframe product direction with evidence, and build practices that keep working after I leave.

Explore the work Get in touch
How I lead

Three problems.
One operating system.

Each case study is a different leadership problem — a first-mover AI product, an identity platform under a hard deadline, an organization that had never done research. The approach underneath is the same.

Reframe with evidence, not opinion.

Every directive I changed — "build a chatbot," "reuse B2C" — moved because customer research was framed in commercial terms leadership could act on without losing the timeline.

Give designers problems, not features.

Teams organized by problem space, each designer owning their workstream end to end — including presenting to HQ. Four promotions to senior across two projects is the proof.

Build structures that persist.

Design systems, research cadences, decision frameworks — designed as organizational assets, not personal practice. The real measure is what keeps working after I leave.

Placeholder — portrait of Yosuke Shinto
About

UX exists to see the gaps nobody else is positioned to see.

I lead a team of 10+ designers, content strategists, and researchers at Samsung Electronics, reporting into product leadership in Canada while aligning to VP-level stakeholders at HQ Suwon and Ingolstadt.

My view of the job: UX exists to understand the full end-to-end customer journey and surface the gaps that neither engineering nor product management can see from where they sit. The three case studies here each show that instinct applied to a different problem.

Domains: enterprise security · identity & access · agentic AI

More about me and how I lead

Contact

Building a design organization?
Let's talk.

I'm most useful where the product problem and the organizational problem are the same problem.

yosuke@ydshinto.com LinkedIn