NAVER

NAVER is a technology company from Korea, with its primary businesses such as search engine, AI, user generated content platforms, fintech, Line messenger, and cloud across Asia & Europe. Joined to build a new team around incubation and new product development.

Role

Head of Design, Emerging Products.
Head of Studio, Incubation.

Year

2017 Jan - 2020 Jan

See company at

navercorp.com

Incubation studio at NAVER. How we design and work.

Overview

Head of Design, Emerging products
2019.4 - 2020.1
Supported a team of 14 product designers, visual designers, motion designer, and PMs focused on the experience of the emerging products at NAVER (Whale browser, Papago translator, Alpha program). Managed a combination of individual contributors, a lead, and a manager.

Head of Studio, Incubation
2017.1 - 2019.3
Founded and built up a product & design team focused on discovering and incubating new products. Grew the team from 0 → 11. Responsibilities included
• Designing new concepts as a potential venture or experiment for NAVER
• Directing an interdisciplinary team of designers and engineers (Engineers between 2017 - 2018)
• Interviewing and hiring talent.
• As the team started small, driving hands-on design and engineering work during the first year.
• Starting and championing NAVER Alpha, an outlet for experimental projects across the company.

Notable work

Click on projects with thumbnails for more detail.

Focusbot
2018
Spend a day with fewer interruptions and better focus. Shipped on Android.

Tarte
2017
An intelligent to-do app experiment. Shipped on iOS, Android.

Alpha program
2018 - 2020
An outlet for experimental projects and an intrapreneurship program to encourage bottom-ups incubation across the company.

Global Design Internship Program
2018
Company's first global internship program. Drove recruiting, raising NAVER's awareness abroad, and running the internship program.

Whale browser
2019 - 2020
Whale was a modern web browser focused on omnitasking. Supported the design team during this period. Whale design became a recipient of the 2020 iF Design Award for the new designs explored & shipped during this time.

Papago translator
2019 - 2020
Papago was a translator product focused on breaking down the language barriers to bring people together and knowledge closer. Supported the design team during this period. It served over 10 million monthly active users at the time our team was responsible for the product design.

Jump to top ↑ Overview Notable work