Yuna Left Sales for Product Design—Then Used Canada and PEO to Keep Building

Yuna graduated university in Japan and started in sales at a staffing firm for about a year and a half—despite loving design enough to volunteer on soccer-tournament pamphlets and tickets. Graphic design as a full career felt unreachable until clients introduced service and UX designers on the business side of products. Overseas still called, but sales lived or died on language. She quit for design school, including Digital Hollywood after about six months of study.

A graduate’s company hired her for WordPress data-entry that slowly became wireframes and lower-page design across roughly eight months—top pages stayed out of reach. She wanted products that lived and iterated, not short campaigns, and landed at Money Forward on a B2B team shipping accounting and payroll tools for SMEs—her first real product-designer UI/UX role, a little over four years before the interview. Vietnam-related work inside the company sharpened the abroad urge. UK/U.S. graduate school research collided with Frog: cheaper than another degree, seemingly closer to Canadian work. Two to three months later she had resigned. Canada won on English and light intuition more than deep country love—she was still paying down tuition.

She entered CICCC from January, kept light Japan contract work, and found school curricula overlapping what she already knew; failure on real projects taught more. Portfolio work felt agonizing, so she hosted Friday–Saturday morning café “mokumoku” silent work sessions with other designers—one later interned in Calgary—and ran portfolio presentation nights because a portfolio never finishes until someone sees it. She treats the portfolio as a product with branding and answerable “why this design?” stories.

She now works for a U.S.-headquartered healthcare company that is remote-first across Europe, Australia, and North America. Their tech counts coughs with AI to power a behavioral-therapy app for chronic cough without medication; she focuses on the Japan-facing product under a Japanese pharma partnership—English internally, localized output. Work-from-anywhere is real enough for a two-to-three-week Mexico workation, though Asia timezones sting. She contrasts production-agency versus product-company design more than Japan versus U.S. product companies, and uses PEO because she strongly preferred not returning to Japan soon. Mid-career she leans toward upstream concept and product thinking as AI eases raw UI production, while still enjoying startup gap-filling. Go when the want is loudest, she says; money-only motives buckle in a tough market.