Yuanyuan(Miya) Gao
About Me
Specializing in design thinking and data-driven strategies to optimize user experience, proficient in agile project management to ensure timely and high-quality project completion. Actively applying new technologies like AI to drive product innovation and efficiency improvement. Advocating for accessible design and green software, promoting the establishment of automated monitoring platforms to enhance accessibility and environmental effectiveness. Participated in multiple hackathon projects, designing innovative solutions to business problems, with several cases adopted and implemented.
In project management, mentoring newcomers, enhancing the team's business analysis and design capabilities, ensuring the smooth progress of complex projects. Optimizing team workflows, organizing quarterly business reviews, publishing internal communications, enhancing the team's ability to express commercial value, and promoting organizational operational efficiency and influence.
The NEO developer platform designed in recent years has improved development efficiency by 20-30%, winning the 2022 Global CIO100 Product Design Award. The hackathon Gen AI concept product Domini was nominated for the 2024 UX Design Award. Previously served as the head of UX community activities, delivering speeches and hosting workshops, and publishing industry-influential articles.
Work Experience
TechOps Organizational Strategic Operations
2023.05 - 2024.07
CXPD Lead(Principle)
Thoughtworks
Project BG: Participate in formulating and driving the strategic operations of organization to promote digital transformation, improve internal product quality, and enhance external influence.
Core Responsibilities:
Design & implement strategic development plans, enhance business value writing skills, and promote production of value articles and business manuals.
Organize business reviews, strengthen communication, and ensure consistent understanding of priorities within the organization.
Collaborate with marketing to prepare award application materials, enhancing organizational influence.
Provide business and design capability training based on the capability model.
Assist in exploring AI technology applications and promote related project implementation.
Optimize internal software products' user experience and establish accessibility standards.
Project Achievements: Drove business value delivery through articles, communications, and cross-country reviews. Compiled annual value manuals and supported design award applications. Established accessibility standards and a monitoring system, improving department products compliance and user experience.
Gen AI Innovation Programs
2023.05 - 2024.07
CXPD Lead(Principle)
Thoughtworks
Projects BG: The company launched AI initiatives to enhance productivity & efficiency through automation & intelligent platforms, driving innovation & business transformation.
Project & Responsibilities:
• Design AI Ticket Ops system, utilizing AI to intelligently process high-frequency L1 tickets, reducing manual intervention, optimizing ticket processing workflows, and improving automation levels.
• Participate in designing and building AI large model platform, promoting the application of AI technology within the enterprise and enhancing organizational innovation capabilities.
• Participate in designing Domini AI POC product, achieving business analysis automation through AI, significantly improving analyst work efficiency by 60%. This project was nominated for the 2024 UX Design Award.
• Design marketing automation platform POC product fors the marketing department, creating intelligent customer profiling, content generation and recommendation, customer behavior analysis and tracking functions, promoting the intelligent upgrade of marketing processes.
Compliance Platform
2022.03 - 2024.03
Product Designer(Lead)
Thoughtworks
Project BG: Thoughtworks' internal compliance platform, integrating IAM (Identity & Access Management), SOD (Segregation of Duties), and ITGC (IT General Controls) systems. Manages permissions, ensures duty segregation, and supports IT compliance controls, enhancing audit efficiency and accuracy.
Core Responsibilities:
Designed the IAM system, improving permission management efficiency & user experience while ensuring compliance with SOD & regulatory requirements.
Collaborate with business personnel to refine SOD workflows and design the SOD system, helping to implement segregation of duties in key business processes, avoiding concentration and conflicts of authority, reducing compliance risks, and ensuring all operations meet company and regulatory requirements.
Enhanced ITGC review automation by optimizing the system and integrating data from IAM & SOD systems, improving compliance reporting efficiency and accuracy, and ensuring effective control implementation.
Project Achievements: A comprehensive compliance platform built from the ground up that automates authority management, segregation of duties, and review processes. This platform enhances efficiency, accuracy, and traceability for organizations.
NEO Engineering Platform
2017.01 - 2022.12
Product Owner & Designer(Lead)
Thoughtworks
Project BG: Thoughtworks internal engineering platform(NEO Platform), assisting technical personnel in rapidly initiating projects, setting up infrastructure, and achieving cross-system secure data consumption and product management functionalities.
Core Responsibilities:
• Redesign and define development workflows for global teams. Overcome technical, process, and language differences, integrating developers' workflows in key stages such as infrastructure setup, development, data consumption, and product operations based on service design concepts to improve overall efficiency.
• Redefine data consumption processes and establish data governance rules. Design user journeys for data API and event publication and consumption, enhance self-service capabilities for API and event publication management, improving efficiency and data security for product owners.
• Create product dashboards providing multi-dimensional data on user usage, performance, security, development efficiency, and budget, helping product owners comprehensively grasp product operations, development, and return on investment.
Project Achievements:
Unified disparate systems into a developer self-service platform, overcoming multinational challenges and boosting development efficiency by 60%, earning the global CIO100 award in 2022.
Business Problem-Solving Initiatives
2016.01 - 2022.10
Business Analysis & Product Designer(Senior)
Thoughtworks
Projects & Responsibilities:
To address the management's lack of awareness about internal product performance, a product performance monitoring and incident management system was designed. This system monitors application performance in real-time, provides early warning mechanisms, promptly notifies the operations team in case of failures, and tracks repair progress, thereby ensuring service stability and operational efficiency.
Reimagining Staffing Management: To improve the efficiency of matching internal personnel with projects, an intelligent personnel-project matching system proof of concept (POC) was designed. This system demonstrated an efficient process for matching employee skills with project requirements and eventually developed into a formal product. This significantly improved the company's personnel allocation efficiency and project delivery quality.
To assist management in effectively tracking business goal progress, an Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system was designed. By clearly setting and tracking objectives and key results, this system ensures strategic alignment across departments and improves overall execution efficiency. It can monitor goal completion in real-time, aiding management in making more precise decisions.
Client Projects
2015.02-2015.12
Project manager & UX Designer(Senior)
Thoughtworks
Projects & Responsibilities:
Redesigned the Fishsource management system for an international marine fisheries NGO client, enabling editorial staff to input fish data and information more conveniently and efficiently, thereby improving work experience and productivity.
Developed a mobile credit card app for a bank's credit card center, allowing users to perform credit card repayments, manage membership points, operate merchant accounts, and access self-service customer support on their smartphones.
Designed an online currency marketplace for a rural commercial bank, enabling users to buy and sell commemorative coins, gold bars, and other items through self-service.
Designed a "Sports Venue Booking Platform" app for sports venue operators, allowing members to book venues, time slots, and coaches online.
Facilitated workshops for a domestic aquaculture association client, guiding the client team to explore business requirements in depth. Through this process, successfully aligned various perspectives, clarified business development directions and priorities, laying a solid foundation for subsequent development projects.
HiTV Project
2014.10-2014.12
Project Designer(Senior)
Chuancheng Media
Project BG: Developed a smart TV system for hotel to enhance guest experiences & digital services, integrating entertainment with the hotel’s membership system for customized convenience.
Responsibilities
Designed business functions for the smart TV system, including membership display, city travel, and food recommendations.
Created user interaction experiences for TV, remote control, and mobile devices, ensuring smooth operation.
Provided personalized travel & food recommendations based on the guest’s location.
Planned and managed the TV App store, offering a diverse range of applications.
Value Delivered: Business planning and interaction design enhanced guest experiences, boosted engagement through membership and personalization, and increased system usage and value with local recommendations and a rich App store.
Redesign of Web & Mobile Online Store
2013.04 - 2014.04
UX Designer(Senior)
lefeng.com
Project BG: As the largest cosmetics e-commerce platform, Lefeng needed a mobile app consistent with the web version and an optimized backend system to manage merchants and SKUs, enhancing operational efficiency and user experience.
Responsibilities
Created an UX design department to prepare for the company’s digital transformation.
Unified brand visuals by defining & standardizing Lefeng’s brand design style.
Redesigned and optimized the mobile app to ensure consistency with the web version.
Overhauled the entire website based on new brand visuals, enhancing user experience and visual consistency.
Improved user experience in merchant & SKU management systems, boosting usability and operational efficiency.
Project Achievements:
Through a year of comprehensive design and optimization, we improved the consistency of user experiences across different platforms, enhanced the brand image, increased operational efficiency, and ultimately improved the sales conversion rate by 9%.
Video Project
2011.08 - 2012.08
UX Designer
Shanda Network
Project BG: An internally incubated short video product, aimed at pioneering a new category in the then-undeveloped short video market.
Responsibilities
• Participated in business discussions, collaboratively defined short video business models and logic with business personnel; conducted user research to gain deep insights into target audience needs
• Created high-fidelity prototypes and wireframes based on business requirements; completed visual design drafts to ensure product aesthetics and user experience
• Collaborated with the development team to facilitate smooth product launch
Project Outcomes: Although the project did not launch, it validated the market demand for short video products, provided valuable user feedback, enhanced the team's design and research capabilities, and laid the foundation for similar future projects.
Bing Homepage Program
2008.12 - 2011.07
Editor & UX Designer
Microsoft
Project BG: Microsoft Bing homepage program aimed to create an innovative user experience. By updating different beautiful images daily, the project successfully differentiated itself from other search engines.
Responsibilities
Collaborated with the team to introduce the Bing homepage project from the US to China according to headquarters' strategic planning, and developed localized operational plans.
Responsible for image curation, selecting high-quality daily update images, and planning series of themed images for holidays and special events.
Created linked content and descriptive copy for hotspots in the images, completed content review, resolved issues, and uploaded content to the pre-release system.
Wrote promotional blog posts for themed homepage images.
Project Outcomes Successfully launched & localized Bing homepage in China, planned multiple well-received homepage themed activities. It improved Bing search engine's ranking in China market and attracted a large number of new users and fans in China.