Working in UX Design

Jonathan Yap is a design leader and community advocate exploring the evolving identity of design in Southeast Asia. Through Design Pay Asia, he dives beyond surface-level salary data to uncover deeper insights about career growth, education pathways, and the changing value of design in the region. With 15 years of experience across WeWork and Visa, and currently leading design standards at a Singapore bank, Jonathan brings a unique perspective on how design roles are transforming alongside technological advancement. His work combines quantitative insights with nuanced understanding of cultural and educational shifts in the design industry. As someone deeply invested in nurturing future design talent, he regularly speaks about the intersection of design education, industry needs, and regional identity in Southeast Asia's growing tech ecosystem.

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With over a decade in design, Yin has done everything from print and branding to working with startups, leading event creatives, and managing an indie band’s branding. After 5 years in consulting, where she worked across different industries and regions, she now lead the design and product teams at Naluri, pulling all that experience together to create impactful digital products.

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Kicking off his career through hackathons, Isaac Lee quickly transitioned from payments into wealthtech. With a passion for solving problems at scale, he's revamped wealthtech apps, overhauled customer service workflows, and automated everything from onboarding to exclusive investor products. Now, he’s discovering just how far technology can elevate wealth management as a senior product manager at Endowus.

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Shery is a design strategist with a flair for unconventional thinking and excels at tackling complex problems in creative ways. After nearly a decade in New Zealand, this Singaporean returnee has built a solid track record across Aviation, Education, Digital Consulting, FinTech, and more. As a cheeseboard layout expert, amateur wine-enthusiast and lazy food lover, she set up the Innovation Design Club as a support group for wayward designers like herself. Now part of the care Innovation team at SC Ventures, she leverages her talent for connecting the dots to drive ecosystem considerate thinking and achieve meaningful growth.

A strong believer in outcome-driven collaboration, Shery is passionate about reinforcing future-proof strategies through people-first approaches. With deep experience in service and product design, she’s led impactful initiatives in digital transformation, customer experience, and partnerships across diverse industries.

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- Skillsets of an Innovation Designer (or Consultant)

- Building a community like Innovation Design Club

- Consulting vs In-house Design Team

- Innovation theatre in enterprises

- Sustainability practices

Adela is Director of Product Design and User Insights teams at Zalora, working across various SEA markets. She has been at the forefront of designing user friendly and intentional products, services and experiences. She has been both on client side and consultancy side having worked across continents in Americas, Europe and now in Asia.

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Norman is a senior design manager based in Singapore. At Grab, he drives strategy, design, culture, and growth across the organization with a focus on elevating user experiences across support, comms, safety, and family experiences for 600+ million people across Southeast Asia.

He’s deeply fascinated by how businesses, communities, and ecosystems are built, broken, and evolved and why we make the choices we do. Outside of work, he shares his insights as a writer, moderator, and speaker. He’s been nominated as a young gun by Antalis 10-20-30, a judge for Singapore Good Design and has been featured in Business Times, Singapore Economic Development, The Straits Times, art4d, MTV Asia, The Breakfast Show, and Juice magazine.

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- Managing and partnering up in a corporate environment

- Building a diverse in-house design team that thrives

- Engaging others on the possibilities and potential of design

- Building sustainable talent practices with new capabilities and approaches

- How do you push yourself to be better as a design leader?

Izwan Ismail is a digital and design leader with over a decade of experience that encompasses startups, scaleups, and corporations. He has advised a government on building startup ecosystems and built the nation's digital and design capability.

Izwan builds and leads teams of world-class designers, product managers, engineers. He believes in tying together the user's need, technology's feasibility and business viability to achieve digital evolution's success.

He also co-founded VLT Labs, a venture builder that builds, launches, and invests in startups across South East Asia, Australia, and Europe. His venture builder successfully merged with McKinsey & Company in 2017. As an Expert Associate Partner In McKinsey, Izwan led the design for Digital Labs in Southeast Asia. He has experience delivering impact in education, banking, insurance, energy, and oil & gas sectors.

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- Managing upwards in a corporate environment

Eyad's a venture bricklayer with his recent experience primarily being in the digital sector for energy, renewables, commerce, media and fintech, from early-stage strategy and product concept development to securing resources required to set-up and operationalize new products and services. He tends to surf the sweet spot between product management, business development and technology. He is interested in positive and sustainable change and is energized and enthused by great design and great experiences. Today, he supports the commercialisation aspiration of a large, diversified renewable energy firm in Malaysia.

He scored top in the 2020 Oxford Fintech Programme with Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. In 2019 he was invited to join the Advisory Council of Gerson Lehrman Group for Technology, Media and Telecommunications. In 2014 he had an award-winning technical paper published twice (in Malaysia and Australia). He's a Certified Innovation Practitioner and Train The Trainer. He holds a Design Thinking Facilitation certificate from the Copenhagen Institute for Interactive Design. Eyad recently became an accredited Angel Investor. He's based in Kuala Lumpur with his son.

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Meet Johnny, a seasoned designer with over two decades of experience spanning various industries, including comics, automobiles, mobile apps, and secondhand goods. He is driven by the belief that exceptional design should seamlessly blend into our lives, offering intuitive experiences that feel like second nature. Johnny's mission is to simplify our increasingly complex world through the creation of digital interfaces that are not only visually appealing but also user-friendly, making information readily accessible. With a wealth of expertise in product design and a track record of shaping UI/UX strategies for tech companies in Malaysia, Johnny is deeply passionate about all facets of design. And, by the way, he's also an avid coffee enthusiast!

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- Johnny's UX career working for startups like Carsome and Mudah.my (part of Carousell Group) and with larger organisations

- What leaders need to know about the Malaysia tech ecosystem concerning product talent

- Johnny's career conversion journey from Art Director to UX Designer

- Why build a community of design leaders through an event like Design Leadership Kuala Lumpur?

With over 13 years of experience spanning digital agencies, e-commerce (11street - a joint venture between SK Planet and Celcom Axiata), and telecommunications (Digi in Malaysia and Smartfren in Indonesia), Faidzal strongly advocates for a research-first approach. He emphasises the importance of data-driven decisions and continuous design experimentation. Currently, Faidzal is the UX Design Lead for Global Commerce at LINE in Bangkok, Thailand.

He focuses primarily on building and strengthening the 3Ps:

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