Employee interview with Toshihiko Kubo What did I learn as project manager?

Before joining Asian Tech

I was fascinated with one thing since I was little. For ten years from junior high school to university, I was passionate about badminton. In the prefectural tournament, I obtained all titles of No 1 in singles, doubles, and team competitions, and became top16th in the national form. After graduating from university and quitting badminton, I was troubled every day without knowing what I really wanted to do.

As a result of suffering, my passion was in fashion. I was very attracted to the power of fashion that can affect people’s emotions and change their mood. I went to London alone and enrolled in the art university to study them systematically.

Besides studying at university, I also started activities at freelance. I did everything related to fashion such as directing photo shooting for fashion lookbook, participating as an interpreter and sales adviser in a large exhibition, and involving with more than 20 shows as editors.

In the fashion world, it is important to catch trends that change daily, and to communicate them quickly and attractively. So I was always deliberating over the future. In addition, I noticed that my object of interest gradually changed from “fashion itself” to “making mechanisms to promote products and people in fashion “. In my experience, a young, money-less designer can not put his work on a large exhibition due to cost issues. From such a background, I began to want to make the fashion industry a world where works can be more freely distributed and want to be the platform. After thinking so, I began to feel limitless possibilities in IT, especially in software. After learning programming for two months, I joined Asian Tech, hoping to gain experience at a real development site.

Now

Currently I am a project manager for mobile and web application development team with about 50 people. I manage the project from various points of view in order to deliver high-quality products, taking full responsibility of the project.

Having a hard time

It was a challenge because it was a challenge to never experience of project management and software development so far. I made a lot of mistakes and improve them as fast as possible iteratively and accumulated experiences. In addition to practical experience, I strived to understand the project management logically by reading the reference book.

What importance for software development

I think defining is  important for everything and to install it in the team properly. Because a good team has a strong sense that “common sense” and “assumption” must not exist. For example, even with the word “end of implementation”, the definition of “end” varies from person to person. If you proceed with development while making it vague, there is a high possibility that the big problem caused by the difference in recognition will occur later. 

Endeavour

I would like to grow involved development team into the thorough team which doesn’t only handle given tasks, but also continue to value customers. I always want to surprise the world by providing ideas and products beyond the imagination of our customers and users. The team repeats trial and error every day to improve for it. I hope that the project I’m involved with will become the best practice project within the company and Ithe experience and knowledge gained from this project will lead to the growth of other projects and the growth of Asian Tech. That is my goal now.