Jangbae Lee has worked at SOK already for 2 years. Jangbae is a designer for S-kaupat.fi, S-groups food eCommerce. Jangbae is from South-Korea. Before SOK, Jangbae worked at Eficode as a designer, and he has graduated from Aalto University as a Master of Collaborate and Industrial Design. Before SOK, Jangbae worked in the B-to-B sector, and he was quite happy with his job until his friend shared a job posting that SOK was searching for a designer for the food eCommerce sector.

“That grabbed my attention immediately. I would have the chance to affect on people’s everyday life. That sounded extremely interesting, and I really wanted to give it a try and decided to apply for the position”, Jangbae explains.

Jangbae tells that the thing that motivates him in his work is that he has the chance to work with food, which can have a huge impact in people’s overall wellbeing. He feels motivated also since the scale of S Group, which makes him feel that he can truly make an impact with his design. This also brings a bit of concern, as he understands that it also leads to a big responsibility.

“Luckily we have a design community where we can share thoughts together and I am not the only designer in the team. Our S-kaupat team is very international and we have a nice talkative culture, and our team is full of talent. I work closely with developers, other designers, and business developers”, he tells.

Conversations with father lead to understanding the importance of emotions

Jangbae sees that he has many opportunities to grow as a designer at SOK. In the next five years, Jangbae wants to focus more on the experience level design. He has studied graphic design, UX-design, and service design. All of those affect the experience level. He wants to focus on the experience more holistically.

“I am very interested in the emotional layers and want to bring that to design. I started caring about emotions a lot because of my relationship with my father. My father never really expressed his emotions. I thought often, why he can’t say anything nice or express nice emotions naturally. Once I started to have conversations with him about it, I began to understand that he had many fears. I started then understanding his point of view and learned that understanding emotions is extremely important. Understanding emotions is the key to solve problems or enhance the positive experience”, Jangbae explains.

The working culture is a mix of big corporate and agency culture

“Even though our team has grown bigger, I feel that the culture is a mix of big corporate and agency culture”, Jangbae says and smiles.

“Even though the team is big, there is a sense of closeness. Retrospectives are a natural part of the culture and the team members are happy to give feedback if you ask, and in general people are very chilled and nice,” he continues.

Jangbae really wants to emphasize that the working culture is nice.

“Finns in our team also have international experience. So even the Finns feel very international. I feel that every culture is welcomed in the team,“ Jangbae says.

Jangbae describes that SOK and S-kaupat team’s way of working is very pleasant:

“Expertise is appreciated. Top management is really supporting the agile ways of working and this shows in our daily working.”