Kenji Tanaka

Independent product designer — I ship the thing, not the deck

I design software for teams that already have engineers and do not want another agency. That usually means I am embedded for eight to twelve weeks, in your repository, shipping behind your flags — not producing a file to hand over. I came out of a design-systems team and it shows: I would rather spend the first week reading your code and naming things correctly than making twelve homepage directions. Most of my work is the unglamorous middle of a product — settings, permissions, onboarding, the empty states nobody budgets for and every user meets first. I take one client at a time. I write CSS and TypeScript well enough to open the pull request myself, which removes the handover entirely and is the reason people re-book.