Principal Designer

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Job Description

Assignment:

• Upon joining Mercari, you will be assigned to a specialist team reporting directly to Mercari’s CXO as a Principal Designer.

Career development:

• After demonstrating business results within the specialist team under our CXO, you will be in charge of UX decisions for one of Mercari’s businesses in place of the CXO.
• Once you have expanded your scope of responsibility, you will be able to further develop your career on one of two avenues, to take over the position of CXO for Mercari’s Japan businesses or continue to contribute to Mercari as a Principal Designer.

Responsibilities

Specific work responsibilities include the following: 

• You will be asked to plan, evaluate, and find solutions for business strategies and product direction from the perspectives of design consideration and user experience. For example, you will design and lead the process of identifying customer insights from ethnographic research and transforming them into ideas for businesses and services.
• In particular, you will be asked to communicate with leadership who have an overall view of Mercari’s Japan businesses (marketplace, payment, credit, cryptoassets, on-demand work, and other new businesses) and rapidly drive the creation of a five-element UX model.
• You will also be a role model and help develop future talent as a leading figure in the company.

(Learn more about Mercari’s mission and values here.)

Unique and Bold Challenges

• Experience cross-use initiatives involving many different markets
• Since our founding, we have stuck to a “one UX” approach for the Mercari app—we ensure that the marketplace, fintech, and on-demand work markets are all part of the same customer journey, and aim for growth using cross-use strategies. Most companies that expand into multiple businesses have different styles for promoting each of their businesses, but since Mercari has one unified customer journey, we recommend that talented designers who understand all of the business areas take charge of designing the entire app.
• You will be able to gain experience similar to that of creating a community, covering many different markets at once.
• Experience product design at all phases of product development
• This position is full of opportunities for you to test your design skills in different phases since Mercari is constantly entering new markets. We often have products in the launch phase (going from 0 to 1), the product-market fit phase (going from 10 to 100), and the innovation breakthrough phase (aiming to go from 100 to 1,000), all at the same time.
• Drive projects in all areas from strategy to delivery through design
• At Mercari, we actively assign experienced designers to take charge of businesses and demonstrate their leadership, while also enabling them to deliver products they are satisfied with. This means that one designer is in charge of the entire process, from understanding business challenges and management strategies, communicating with leadership on a weekly basis, and creating the user experience to working together with PMs and engineers to ensure a proper product-market fit.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Shared belief in the mission and values of Mercari Group and its various companies
• At least 10 years of experience designing UI and UX for apps or websites　
• Leadership skills and ability to drive projects in collaboration with team members　
• Experience using development tools such as Figma and InVision
• Frequent use of Mercari’s services for buying and selling items

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working on design in the system development phase of an app
• Experience in people management or enthusiasm for creating a design organization
• Experience working in an English-language environment　

About the Company

Circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in all people

"What can I do to help society thrive with the finite resources we have?" The Mercari marketplace app was born in 2013 out of this thought by our founder Shintaro Yamada as he traveled the world. We believe that by circulating all forms of value, not just physical things and money, we can create opportunities for anyone to realize their dreams and contribute to society and the people around them. Mercari aims to use technology to connect people all over the world and create a world where anyone can unleash their potential.For more information about Mercari Group’s mission, see Mercari's Culture Doc.

Equal Opportunity Hiring

Here at Mercari, we work to realize a world in which no one’s potential is limited by their background and everyone has the opportunity to freely create value. We also firmly believe that a mindset of Inclusion & Diversity is essential for us to achieve our mission.This, of course, extends to our hiring practices as well.

Mercari is committed to eliminating discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, physical disability, and other such factors so that anyone who shares our mission and values can join us, regardless of their background. For more details, please read our I&D Statement.

Team’s Mission / Work Responsibilities

The mission of Mercari’s design organization:

• Mercari Group’s strategy is to circulate value, as is shown in the image below. Our mission is to embody this circulation in our products and design all the components necessary for our users to obtain the things they want and achieve their dreams.

Expected roles:

• Ever since Mercari’s founding, we have innovated as a product company taking into account not only our users, but also growth and profitability, in all of our roles.
• As a result, we have grown into an enormous platform with a number of Mercari accounts equivalent to approximately half of Japan’s population (48 million people) and 23 million monthly active users.
• In the process, we have worked to maximize opportunities for our users to enjoy Mercari, by offering a credit card tailored to making purchases on our marketplace, bitcoin features enabling users to transform their sales balance into a new type of value, and recently, the Mercari Hallo service, which supplies easy-to-find work locations for anyone who has verified their identity on our platform.
• Unlike other companies that work to create their own ecosystems, Mercari aspires to captivate users with engaging products to achieve disruptive growth. As a designer for the Mercari app, you will use your polished design techniques with an eye to all of Mercari’s businesses to thoroughly carry out communication with our users, while taking responsibility for the UX that you create leading to growth and profitability for the company.