Hello, I'm Yosuke Shinto
I'm a design leader who builds world-class teams, extensible design systems, and AI-first product experiences — and connects all three to business outcomes.
Great products are built on understanding people — not just users, but the emotional, complicated humans behind every click. I bring strategic design leadership and deep empathy to cross-functional teams, turning ambiguous problems into experiences people love. From standing up design practices to driving products from research to delivery, I make design work that works.
15
Years of design experience
10
Years in design management
120
People managed
45
Designers managed
Leadership Values
My design leadership revolves around placing people at the core of excellence. Embracing a people-centric approach, I emphasize what I term the four pillars of leadership.
People success
I grow designers into leaders. Through mentorship, honest feedback, and genuine advocacy, I build inclusive teams where people do their best work — and know it matters.
Partnerships success
Design doesn't work in isolation. I build trust with stakeholders early, maintain alignment through structured communication, and make design a partner in business decisions — not a downstream step.
Projects success
I protect maker time, drive shared ownership, and keep quality high without slowing teams down. Every project is an opportunity to elevate craft and create something worth shipping.
Process success
I bring research and strategy into product development from day one. I address design debt, establish quality principles, and evaluate process ROI — so design scales with the organization, not against it.
Organizations I've helped
A decade of experience leading the design of high-impact product ecosystems for world-class brands, including:
Testimonials
I had the pleasure of working closely with Yosuke for nearly 6 years at Absolute under the User Experience team. Yosuke has been one of the most impactful people I’ve worked with. He is a highly knowledgeable and passionate individual. His enthusiasm for his subject matter especially User Research is infectious. He is consistently identifying the root cause of user pain points through his capability of bringing up good questions to elicit various angles of a user story.
Yosuke has a significant ability to build relationships and trust quickly. He is no doubt a team player. His supportiveness and trustworthiness are not limited to his direct team but at the cross-team levels. Yosuke is a likeable person with a lot of positivity to share.
Anh Nguyen, Sr. User Experience Designer @ Absolute Security
Yosuke was a great communicator, an awesome collaborator, and all in all a very smart and reliable designer! He’d move mountains to solve problems and ensure that they are indeed, usable.
He’s a rare self-starter who took initiative to develop various innovative ways to make things easier not only for our clients, but also for our internal team.
It was truly fun working with Yosuke, and I would work him again in a heartbeat!!
Vilia Ingriany, Co-Founder & Partner @ SixtyTwo
Yosuke is one the best user experience designers I have had the pleasure of working with. He routinely develops smart and innovative solutions to complex user problems. He is skilled at working with technical resources during concept to ensure feasibility of solution which you don't often see from UX designers. As an account person, I really appreciated that Yosuke would give me the opportunity to see his work early and often which would allow me to ask questions and help me understand why certain directions wouldn't work for a specific problem.
Yosuke is absolutely someone I would recommend working with. You'll be glad that you did.
Jacob Goldman, Principle Product Manager @ Algolia
Yosuke is one of the most talented user experience designers I've had the pleasure of working with. His methodical work process leaves no thought or question unanswered. He leads his craft by not only supplying extremely detail-oriented wireframes but goes a step further in building click-through prototypes that easily illustrate the core content strategy and user experiences of any visual component. Yosuke takes initiative in everything he works on and continuously aligns himself with multidisciplinary teams to better his learnings and successfully achieve any design challenges that he’s faced with. Simply put, you want Yosuke working with you. Seriously.
Eddie Leffler, Software Architect @ Side
Yosuke is one of the most methodical yet thoughtful user experience designers I have ever worked with. He thoroughly understands current user experience trends, and his ability to extrapolate the direction that user experiences are moving in the future is nothing short of brilliant. How he leverages the resources around him, both technical and non technical to help tailor the experiences he is defining is a rare quality not frequently seen. He works with highly skilled technical teams to understand the under the hood implementations of the technologies being used. And uses those collaborations to ensure the defined experience best supports both technology and business needs.
Yosuke is someone you want to work with, someone you want on your team, and someone who raises the quality of work of everyone around him because of his dedicated passion and skill in his craft.
Brandon Bilfield, Frontend Platform Engineer @ Mural