“I wanted to build an internet service that new web users would engage with the first time they ever went online.”

This is how Mercari’s Chief Product Officer (CPO) Takaaki Shinohara (@unryu-in) describes the origins of his career. Invigorated by his experience of making an online purchase for the first time at the age of 10, he has gone on to gain a variety of experiences in the internet industry and now leads the growth of Mercari’s Marketplace business.

Through his career, Takaaki has tried to create his own formative experiences—in other words, to make his experiences a part of him. As evidence of this, when asked about what he values in his work, he doesn’t quote other people and instead explains his thoughts in his own words. In this edition of Mercan, we ask Takaaki about what he has learned through his career, what he keeps in mind in his work as CPO, and what he sees as Mercari’s potential.

Updating the user experience of the Mercari marketplace

— Could you tell us about the areas that you are in charge of?

As the CPO of Marketplace, I’m responsible for the growth of the Mercari marketplace app. The vision I have put forward is the creation of a product that will substantially accelerate the circulation of value for all people. To achieve this, we set not just numerical targets, but also qualitative goals (like providing certain experiences to users) three years down the line, and work toward those targets and goals.

— What kind of user experience are you trying to create?

We are looking at three things. First, we want our users to be able to do more than just buy and sell items; we want them to be able to connect with the things they like. So for example, in the process of using our service, a surfer would be able to come across items related to their interest naturally. In addition, we would like to enable users to create communities where it’s easy to get information on things like what equipment is recommended for beginners to buy.

Second, we want to provide a user experience that makes people want to visit Mercari every day. For example, there could be events scheduled for a certain time each day that are tied to different user interests, allowing users to have the experience of coming across people and items incidentally at an offline flea market. I would like to enhance the excitement that Mercari can provide.

Thirdly, I’d like to create a discovery experience centered on listers. These days, consumer behavior centers on social media and influencers, and yet there aren’t a lot of people using their own name on Mercari and linking their activities to their social media accounts. This is because, in many cases, it’s hard to associate selling unwanted items to a user’s personal branding. I believe that resolving these pain points will lead to a new user experience.

The lessons learned from my formative experiences before Mercari and the importance of winning habits

— The updates sound like something to look forward to. Have you always been interested in creating services and products?

Yes, absolutely. The first time I had a job building things was when I was 18. I started making web pages as a freelance web director. I learned about things like coding by watching YouTube videos, managing to somehow deliver my products, and then repeating the process.

I worked as a freelancer for four years, and then when I turned 22, I joined GREE, Inc. Working as an individual freelancer, there were limits to the number of people I could be involved with through the creation of a service, and in order to increase the return on investment (ROI) on the time I spent on my work, I wanted to be involved in creating a service with a lot of users. At GREE, I gained a variety of experiences like launching a development studio specifically for native apps.

— I understand that you then went to work for BizReach, Inc. Why did you decide to switch jobs?

One day we were discussing whether to implement a marketing strategy for a service that I was in charge of, and because of my lack of experience, I was completely unequipped to make a decision about whether to use TV commercials. However, the people who had been at GREE since the beginning had past foundational experience of growing the business using commercials. Seeing my colleagues’ confidence, it occurred to me that I should build my own formative experiences at a company that had not realized its market breakthrough just yet, and so I switched jobs to BizReach, which had a headcount of about 150 members at the time.

I joined BizReach to work in sales, but after my fourth month of achieving my individual monthly OKRs, I was transferred to a PM position to work on new business. I experienced what it was like to be in charge of a business and also experienced the journey of going from launching a service to growing it.

— Are there any experiences from that time that you still use now?

I’d have to say that the most important lesson I learned was the habit of winning. BizReach is the kind of company that always achieves its goals regardless of how rough-and-tumble the task at hand is. I had started at the company in sales, so at the end of each month I was always hellbent on getting appointments that led to orders. The company president personally kept everyone at the office fired up and put all their energy into celebrating with us the successes that we achieved. That office environment taught me not to quit and to yield results. The lessons I learned at that time became my foundational experience.

The impactful experience at 10 years old that played a major role in my decision to join Mercari

— What was it that prompted you to change jobs and join Mercari even as you were put in charge of business at BizReach?

There wasn’t really anything like a clear turning point that prompted me to change jobs, but when I launched the new business, I got my hands on a daruma doll* and colored in one of its eyes. The day I achieved my business goal and colored in that second eye just happened to be the day a friend invited me to Mercari for an office tour. This is where I had a one-on-one meeting with Takeo Iyo, who was in charge of Product for Mercari in Japan at the time. This then led to a job interview that saw me join the company.

There was absolutely no negativity involved in my reason for leaving BizReach. It really was a matter of chance and timing. But I guess if I had to give a reason for why I joined Mercari, I had actually wanted to work on a consumer-oriented product for quite a while. The reason I wanted to work in the internet industry in the first place was my experience using Yahoo! Auctions for the first time when I was 10 years old.

*A daruma doll is a traditional Japanese talisman often used when setting a goal. After buying a doll, which has no eyes, the owner colors in one eye and makes a wish to accomplish their goal. When they achieve their goal, they color in the second eye.

— You used Yahoo! Auctions at age 10?

I did. At 10 years old, I used Yahoo! Auctions for the first time to buy a video game. The experience of purchasing a video game from someone I didn’t know who lived in Hokkaido, where I had never been, was a revelation. As a kid, I enjoyed the experience of selling something I didn’t need in order to buy a new game.

Because of that experience, which became the root of my motivation for working in the internet industry, I want to build an internet service that new web users engage with the first time they ever go online. I felt a strong affinity with Mercari, a service with a simple UI/UX that even someone younger than 10 years old could use to buy and sell things (as long as they had permission from their parent or guardian).

— I understand that after you joined Mercari, you had a variety of roles. Was there work that particularly left an impression on you?

There are a few, but one of the bigger ones was when I launched the Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team, which works to enhance the trust our users give us. At the time, Mercari was nearing its IPO, but because we had been focusing on “offense” areas like growth, we needed to reinforce “defense” areas like our user experience and customer support.
On my team, I worked on improving our keep rate and fraud prevention (trust and safety), VOC and NPS, as well as feature development for customer support tools. To give you an example of what we did, at the time it took several days from the time we received a user inquiry to the time we were able to respond. By launching the CRE team, cutting down on inquiries, and improving the user experience, three months later we had shortened our response time to our target service level or better.

After that, the number of chances to be assigned as project owner for anti-fraud countermeasures and incident-related projects increased, and before I knew it, each time an incident occurred, regardless of what kind of incident it was, people would call on the team (laughs).

Then, after leading the alliance project at Merpay, I led the launch of Souzoh, Inc. as the Head of Product in late 2020. Following Souzoh’s release of Mercari Shops, we launched Japan Region Trust and Safety (TnS) in order to strengthen anti-fraud measures across our Japan-based businesses. (TnS is a team that works on feature development and operation building, mainly from the perspective of anti-fraud measures, in order to make Mercari a safe and secure service for our users.)

At the time, each business unit applied anti-fraud measures separately, but we consolidated all of the development teams, operation teams, and analysis teams related to anti-fraud measures for our businesses across the Japan region. After we had eliminated high-level latent risk, I was appointed CPO of Marketplace, which is the position I currently hold.

— What were some things that you paid attention to as you built your career?

I like career building through serendipity. Joining TnS was very different from anything I’d experienced on my career path so far. At Mercari, there are a lot of unexpected opportunities like the ones I received; by continuing to give each of the things I worked on 120%, I was able to open up even more opportunities for myself.

Moreover, specifically because I was a generalist without any particular expertise, I was able to view problems objectively, involve members in each area who did have the necessary expertise, and resolve issues. I think these actions fostered my ability to manage programs and projects overall.

Overall commitment, self-management, and team building: My work philosophy as CPO

— Is there anything that you now pay attention to in your work as CPO?

There are a few things, one of which I consider to be a major prerequisite of mental preparedness: “Stop thinking small when it comes to your sense of belonging.” If you wear only the label of the team you are on, the scope of your leadership and role will narrow. To give you an idea of what I mean, in my work I think about what I should do in the interest of Mercari Group.

In addition, when it comes to self-management, one thing I keep in mind is that self-evaluation is a matter of reading your personal candlestick chart. Just as you would watch the movement of a stock in terms of gains and losses posted on a stock chart, whether things are going well for you or not changes depending on where on the timeline you choose to look when tallying your accomplishments.

If, as you forge ahead on a project, you evaluate yourself just as you trip on something, you’ll probably end up with a negative evaluation of yourself. However, if you recover from that failure to achieve results and evaluate yourself then, you feel positive. Especially when taking on a new challenge, don’t engage in daily or weekly self-evaluation and worry about what everyone around you thinks. Taking the long approach and focusing on following through until you cultivate a win is an important part of stabilizing your motivation.

— This sounds like what you said earlier about learning the habit of winning. Is there anything else?

This is something that is closely related to the job of a CPO, but I think it’s important to have the ability to involve other people.

Even if you have great ideas, you won’t be able to deliver them to the user without collaborating with internal and external stakeholders. A lot of the members at Mercari are highly trained experts, and if you build teams and systems that allow them to fully exercise their abilities, your ideas will likely be amplified several times over.

I’ve remained acutely aware of creating product visions and roadmaps with cohesive power and setting out to win as a team.

— How do you go about creating a vision and roadmap with cohesive power?

Since we are a profit-making business, if the vision and roadmap are not clearly linked to business contributions, the initiatives within them will not be prioritized. This is why the vision and the roadmap first have to be linked closely to the mid-term business plan.

However, there are also goals that can’t be discussed just in terms of numbers. Items involving safety and security are examples of this. They are used to mitigate future risk, so it’s difficult to assess them in terms of ROI, which can complicate the process of making judgment calls on resource investment. The same is true of emotion-driven projects we’d like to take on and never-before-seen challenges.

In order to tackle our initiatives rationally, we are obligated to put our vision into words. This is why we broke down the Group vision into qualitative goals and put them together to form our current product vision and roadmap.

The practices that you work on are what create your formative experiences

— From your perspective, what kind of company do you think Mercari is, and how would you describe the people who are most likely to thrive here?

I think that one of the things that makes Mercari a great place to work is that anyone can make suggestions. This is also tied to what I talked about at the beginning of this interview when I said that my reason for changing jobs and joining BizReach was to create my own formative experiences.

At Mercari, you go through the process of identifying issues yourself, doing the planning, making suggestions to members in management, and then turn all of that into formative experiences. Through that feedback, you learn what perspectives you are missing and can move to make changes. This way, if an initiative you’re working on fails, you’re able to learn just how far off you were with your suggestions as a result of not having accounted for something. If it still fails, seeing the outcome of something that you put so much thought into becomes a formative experience.

This is definitely not something that I could have obtained just by executing my work as told by my supervisor and co-workers. I think Mercari’s work environment is great for people who
like to think about an initiative until they can confidently say that they want to back it as a proposal and build formative experiences that will guide them through their future.

— Are there any unique challenges that Mercari will have to offer (to potential job applicants) going forward?

Mercari is a leading company in the C2C marketplace domain, so our members are in a position to participate in projects that will create the norms of tomorrow. In addition, in recent years we’ve been aiming to become a leading company in the ESG area, and I think that the time to launch this aspect of our company in a big way is coming.

I won’t get into specifics, but to give you an example, we have our eyes on creating mechanisms that would upcycle the surplus materials and waste produced in corporate activities for reuse and resale. With Mercari’s platform, we could also create a group that gathers broken things from the world over and repairs them, and then the people who repair each item could list it to earn cash.

Groups like these wouldn’t have to be just from our company. I think it would be even better if we could work with companies launching businesses to help protect the environment. “Eliminating waste” is one of Mercari’s fundamental ideas, so partnerships that transcend corporate boundaries are something that I think we should invest our efforts into going forward.

I believe that Mercari really will become a globally transformative force including through our ESG initiatives and the creation of crossborder value exchange. I look forward to meeting more people who want to take on these challenges with us.

Bonus: My Mercari hacks!

One of the things that I buy a lot on Mercari is the garbage bags that the municipality where I live specifies that residents use. You can usually buy them at supermarkets and convenience stores in bags of 10, but if someone buys a set because they are moving, they’ll usually only use one or two and then have the rest left over. So when I see that someone has listed garbage bags for a good price, I buy them up. They’re one of those things that never go on sale, and since they’re low-priced, they’re a good way of using your points. What this means is that I almost never have to leave home to buy garbage bags.

Also, I think it’s important to try new devices and products, so I list my old devices on Mercari to lighten my load. It’s important to learn about features, designs, and price ranges, so in order to know how a product has evolved, I like to try new things. I recommend this way of using Mercari to anyone whose job involves products.