Today we’d like to introduce you to Yanyi Mai
Hi Yanyi, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I have always known my career would lie within the domain of some creative boundaries ever since high school. Nothing really really sparked this certainty, but started taking art lessons when I was 11 defnitely planted a seed for this pursuit. But when I got to college, I actually chose applied math/statistics and economics as my majors for a good two years, because as a textbook “perfect” Chinese child, I was expected to study something useful like math. The deal I had with my family was I would study math/econ like they wanted me to while taking a few design and art classes on the side (as GPA booster but also because I was still passionate about art & design), but in return, I will get to choose my own career path. The deal broke during the summer of my sophomore year when my family openly forced me to look for internships and extrarricular involvement in finance or consulting. That’s when I had my first “f*ck u all” moment and decided to take the risk and “accept my fate” if my life ends miserably because I switched to art & design.
Starting in junior, I made a hard exit on math/econ and started taking art classes along with freshmen and sophomores to catch up. I was still under the pressure of graduating in 4 years pressed by my family. I knew I was passionate about having a creative career but was certain that I had no gifts in being an artist, an animator, or graphic designer. I enjoyed studying people and learning about psychology. I enjoyed logic planning, problem solving, and just optimizing things like processes and how things were organized . The experience that surely introduced a very clear and attractive career path to me was joining a student-run design consulting club at Berkeley. This club is a big deal now at Berkeley for the undergrads as in their clients are all big tech companies exclusively, but when I joined, the club was small and focused primarily on startups around the Bay Area.
The consulting projects I participated in were with startups that had no more than 3 employees. The startups all had great vision in the industry and the product they were building but couldn’t afford to hire a full time product designer. That’s when my club saw the space where we provided design consulting at a very affordable cost. We went through the whole user-centered design methodology from user research, ideation, testing, iteration and prototyping. But since most of our clients had either only industry experience or technical background, they didn’t know a thing about design. It was like they knew how their products would work but had no idea what it would look like. So my projects with these startup clients had a lot to do with communicating with clients to understand their (potential) user needs and product vision before we could even sit down and start sketching what the first screen of their web app would look like.
I stayed in this club for 2.5 years and not only did I participate as a student consultant, I also got “promoted” to work as a mentor/project manager where I lead groups of student consultants in their client meetings, help plan out their sprints, and provide internal design feedback. Joining this club made me very excited about my professional future because I felt very lucky that I could find a job that matched all of my interests and strengths and get to enjoy doing it – I find design geniunely enjoyable even now when I am design B2B SaaS tools.
Fast forward to graduating from college, I went back to China and worked there for about 3 years with 2 full time opportunities. It was easy getting a job because I just wasn’t aware of such things called “fall recruiting timeline” or “securing a return offer from internship”. I was all over the place due to some mental health troubles. I didn’t intend to stay in China for 3 years, but a family medical emergency happened, and then Covid happened. I thought I couldn’t just sit there and waste away my time for Covid to go away and for me to return to America. I started applying to jobs in China My first full time job ever was with this one of the biggest SaaS companies in China that was founded in the late 80s. I was the first designer hire at the Hong Kong office. On my first day of work, my manager shared with me that I was hired simply because the salary I asked for was the lowest even though I had the least amount of experience (I was a new grad fresh out of college). I thought it was pretty funny that he communicated this “secret” to me, but I didn’t feel discouraged or humiliated. I just felt lucky that I “outbidded” other people to get this job. I stayed at the company for a year and half as the only designer. I handled 8 clients total and worked on all sorts of enterprise softwares (i.e. ERP, CRM, HRM, etc.)There were times when I had to deliver to 3 or 4 clients at once, and this job really honed in my time and stress management skills, especially as a junior designer. I also felt grateful at this job because my company just trusted me in working with the clients. All of my clients were major banks and telecommunication companies that came to use to upgrade their ERP systems. I know I did a pretty good job at my job because I was hired when the clients weren’t happy with our engineer’s implementation of their requirements and delayed project payments. Once I delivered my designs, clients were satisfied enough and approved the payment processes again.
Then in April 2021, I decided to move to Beijing for my second job to explore living alone away from home. At this company, I was brought onto the team as the most junior designer. Everyone else had at least 5 years of experience already. But one month into my job, I was transitioned to another team to work on company’s new CRM product from the ground up. I was the only designer for that product team again responsible for literally everything design-related besides just UI/UX design, but also marketing materials, branding and visual design, animation and motion graphics. I was also responsible for interviewing and hiring new designers for my team as well as a 24 year old two years out of college designer. The first three months pushed my stress level to the max – I was working 70+ hours/week on average and handled requirements from 3 teams of 8 PMs total and 4 different developers. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the product site went live because the design and development process took less than 3 months where we built a full product from the ground up. My proudest moment with this product was when I saw our competitor copied my design pixel by pixel literally, even to this day when my company sunsetted this product, my designs still lived on in our competitor’s product.
From there on, I left the second company in May 2022 to take a break from work before I started grad school in August 2022 at my alma mater to purse a masters in design.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I would say yes but with steep climbs. Looking for every job was hard. It involved a lot of portfolio revision, interview prep, and countless hours of mass apply. To paint you a more specific image, for my Summer 2023 internship, I applied to 1000+ positions, went through total of 25 rounds of interviews with 15 companies to land 4 offer (I had a spreadsheet that tracked the stats). Finding a job just became a numbers game with a success rate of 4/1000 = 0.4%, meaning on average I would have to apply to 250 jobs to get one offer. And this struggle was real on for someone that went a prestigious college pursing a design masters with relevant full time experience.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
What should we know?
Quick company bio: iTradeNetwork is a software company that helps food and beverage businesses manage their supply chains. It was founded in late 1990s and has been in the industry for 26 years. A lot of the major food manufacturing, distribution, and retail and grocery and restaurant chain companies are our clients.
What do you do?
I just started in Februrary and am still in the onboarding phase, but I know I will be working as the only designer for our spend and trade spend product where suppliers, buyers, distributors will get to use for rebate claim and negotiation.
what do you specialize in / what are you known for?
My design specialty has primarily been in product and UI/UX design for B2B SaaS products. I have designed many enterprise softwares or internal tools across many different industries. But this is my first time in food supply chain management specifically.
What sets you apart from others?
I feel like as a mid-to-junior-level designer, because I have had a lot of opportunities to work very closely with PMs where I even took on some of their responsibilities in problem discovery and definition and feature planning, I am more proactive when it comes to handling requirements. I can break apart ambiguous business or user needs and reorganize them into more specific asks and can be the advocate to push progress forward when PMs are missing. I am also more proactive in organizing resources and connections to streamline the project development process and don’t silo myself in an assembly line where a requirement passes through me and gets done then passed down to the next person.
What are you most proud brand wise?
For our company, I am just proud to see the impact that our products can bring to our customers since we work with all the big names in the industry, it’s like everywhere I go, I see our customer’s track, store, location, ad and think to myself “hey they use stuff that I design”.
What do you want our readers to know about your brand, offerings, services, etc?
I know I mention our company works with a lot of the top brands in food supply chain, but a lot of small, local, stand-alone farms, grocery shops, and restaurants use our system too to streamline their process. Would like to welcome more small and independent business owners to reach out if they think their current procurement, logistics, or order management system can be optimzed.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Can refer to my story on switching major from math/stats and econ to art and design
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yani.mai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanyi-mai/
