What One Likes, One Will Do Well: How Personal Passions Fuel Professional Growth

Overview

This is a summary of a presentation I gave at the Product Design Tales hosted by alliz and Tokyo Design on March 28th, 2025.

Some content and images have been modified. Also You can see youtube:

Intro

Hi, I’m Masaki HARUTA, a product design lead at GMO Flatt Security, where I design and codes security platform and AI Agent for security. before I joined, I spent eight years at freee, where I led product design for their accounting platform and I was a manager of the global design team. In this talk I'm going to share how following my passions can expand career possibilities.

Before Diving into the topic, let me show my recent work at Flatt.

I don’t talk to much our product here, but just want to share what I can do. For this project, a senior software engineer and I made this feature within two weeks, and I did - Product Management, Design, Code and Video Editing. I wears multiple hats in product development, in order to make the beloved product for engineers. Doing Product Management, User Research, IA, UI, Code, That is how I as a design generalist work today

but it might not be ideal way of working as a junior designer. When I was a junior, A senior designer Said me, Hi Hal, you should find focus areas in 3 years otherwise your design skills will stuck. Yes that’s true. Without any strength at that moment, I should have to focus on something. But I wouldn’t, actually I couldn’t do so. However, the belief I followed was slightly different—I believed in words I had once received long ago.When I was in elementary school, my baseball coach gave me a bat.

On that bat was a message: 好きこそものの上手なれ, which means What one likes, One will do well. Not sure this translation is to convey the meanings but 上手なれ has meaning of hope, even if we are not good at right now, we can be good at in the future if we like it.

Looking back to when I wanted to be a designer, I awake overnight as I cannot stop designing, it was really really fun. My passion was motivate me, my passion made me grow. But passion is not necessarily relating main work. I’m gonna share three passions outside of work that fuels my career growth.

Passion1. BEER

My first passion that I want to share is beer.

Recently, I am coding, I love coding. As I shared the project, I implemented frontend and I developed my own portfolio site. But I didn’t like coding before. Before I became a designer, I went to programming school for a month, and I gave up coding.

When I joined my previous company I took engineering bootcamp for new grads engineers. I was a only new grads and the first new grad designer in the company history. There was no designer onboarding program. I was angry. Why I have to take engineering onboarding. I didn’t like coding and whay I have to take cyber security corses…, which ended up helping me work in a cyber security startup tho.

But on my second thought, I couldn’t run away from the onboarding and coding, try to focus on what I likes. I was really into beer, especially pilsner urquel from czech republic.

but there was less restaurants that serves it in Tokyo, so I decided to make an application that we can create restaurant lists serving the beer. That worked well. I could focus on what I build instead of learning coding, I wanted to add feature instead of I should learn this logic, which ended up I enjoyed engineering bootcamp.

Before the training ends, I successfully release the application.

Key lesson from this episode, what one likes will help you overcome challenges.

Passion2. COFFEE

The next passion is Coffee. I am working with LIGHT UP COFFEE, a coffee roastery located in Kichijoji, Shimokitazawa and Mitaka. The owner brewed delicious coffee whenever we have meeting. His delicious coffee and his passion about coffee made me coffee geek.

So I build coffee recipe app and participated in Spectrum Tokyo and Design Matters Tokyo, both are well known design conference in japan, as a coffee stuff. Brewed my coffee at the conference.

I am now speaking in front of a lot of people in english, but I was not good at speaking english. However, Coffee made me connect a lot of coffee geek in the world.

These are photos we took in Design Matters Tokyo 2023, Both of two are coffee geek. Coffee connected me such a nice mans, and the previous shy guy(me), was able to communicate with them in English.

From this experience, I learned Passion spreads and it strengthens the bonds between people. This lesson helped me when I became a design manager in freee.

Passion3. WEDDING

Lastly I will share about our wedding. Just a month ago, My wife, she is also a designer and I had a wedding ceremony, and both designer cannot stop particular about the details. we did so many things but let me share a bit.

Video Creation

We did everything on our own, so planned it and took videos and edited movies. so let me show the video that I made for our wedding ceremony, let me play the video

This is a baseball battle game, people watched it and answered quiz, we wanted attendees to enjoy our wedding. It worked well.

Before our wedding, I’ve never edited movie. but thanks to that experience and I learnt video editing. In my main work, I utilize this skill set to create show casing movies that I shared. a secret story, my wife supposed to edit one of movies but she got flu right before 2 weeks of our wedding. so I had to learn video edition as soon as possible.

Through this experience, I learnet, What one likes will help you learn new things and that’s incredibly effective.

Summary

So here’s three key lessons from my personal projects.

• What one likes will help you overcome challenges.
• Passion spreads and it strengthens the bonds between people
• What one likes will help you learn new things and that’s incredibly effective

Thank you so much for reading.