Innovators in Japan Podcast: Brad Ellis
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovators in Japan podcast with your host, Shohei Narron.
It might be easy to imagine that differences in a country’s culture can greatly influence the sales culture in that country. Sales is inherently a personal endeavor, and how people interact with one another and navigate relationships depend on how people interact with one another in general in each culture. How about other fields like engineering? Aren’t certain processes objectively better than others? In a field like engineering where hard, cold output matters more than fluffier concepts like relationships, can your work still be influenced by the greater culture around you?
Our guest Brad Ellis fortunately has some insight into this. Brad has worked for both Japanese and American companies (Google and Mercari), for both the Japan and US offices, giving him the ability to evaluate engineering cultures and how they are created and maintained regionally, and at the corporate level. Currently working as Director of Product Management for Mercari USA (but in Tokyo as an expat), he’s got a unique perspective on how to turn communication style differences between the US and Japan into a corporate strength, how different national UX sensibilities can end up splitting a product into two independent products, how to diversify your thought by living and breathing a different culture than the one you’re used to, and what Silicon Valley can learn from Japanese service standards.
I hope you enjoy the show!
Some highlights of the conversation include:
- How to think differently in order to make a well-known product in one country successful globally
- Differences in UX preferences between US and Japan-based users
- Cases when local customer feedback turned out to be wrong
- How writing down meeting progress improved everyone’s understanding and output for international team members and 1–1s
- How to successfully deal with the high expectations for customer service in Japan
- Hints from Japanese teams on how to improve Engineering and Product Management quality
- How understanding another culture’s perspectives helps improve decision making (and makes life richer in general)
