Tadashi Inoue | Employee Interviews

A designer's challenge,

chosen to make a dream

real in earnest.

Product Designer

Tadashi Inoue

After working as a designer at an advertising production company, going independent, and serving as CDO at a startup, he led large-scale rebranding and built the systems behind the design organization as a BX designer at a fast-growing startup. He joined ABCD in June 2026. As a product designer he now covers everything from designing the work experience to delivering value.

Build overwhelming ability by the age of 40.Rethinking my dream and how I live, I moved to a place that would test me

Before I turn 50, I will create a national design agency in Japan. Back in my previous job, I had a chance to tell that dream to Shiono, our CEO. Shiono is the same generation as me, but even then he was already leading his own business. I still cannot forget how seriously he told me that unless I built overwhelming ability and a track record by 40, I would never reach that dream.

Seven years left until 40. If I was serious about making the dream real, was staying where I was good enough? As I asked myself that, I felt I needed ability equal to the task, and I chose to move to ABCD, the place where my abilities would be tested most, with a field and a business model I found compelling.

The birth of my child also had a large influence on my thinking. Staying in the same environment, would I be able to show my child what taking on a challenge looks like? Those thoughts came together and I decided to join.

The more you do not understand, the deeper it goes.Design that dives in from the structure of the work

In my previous job I designed brand experiences, but at ABCD my main role is as a product designer building the operational system for international trade. Design here demands a different kind of depth. Trade operations are complex, and tidying up a screen without understanding their structure produces something unusable in practice. So the first thing I do is dive deep into the work itself.

Not long after joining, I organized trade operations in my own way and took it to Shiono. What came back was that he wanted me to define it from the actual process of the work itself, not to organize a list of fields. That was the moment my viewpoint was lifted from tidying the surface to the structure of the work itself.

The way you get sharpened here is simple. Build it, show the team, take merciless feedback, and fix it. Then run that loop as fast as you possibly can. Nobody has the answer to this field from the start. Because everyone is feeling their way, whoever dives deepest gets to be the one who creates the answer. The further you go, the more things you do not understand, but that is proof your understanding is deepening. That depth is exactly what becomes the product's competitive advantage.

From an age of breadth to an age of trust.Changing the very structure of international trade

What ABCD's product faces is international trade, a world that is astonishingly vast and analog. The work is split apart by department, and no one can see the whole picture of a deal. It is a closed world that only a handful of large corporations can access. To change that world, our product ties every part of the work together under a single deal ID and builds a mechanism that accumulates the record as trust. The more deals you do, the more that trust compounds, until a single deal becomes trust that lasts a lifetime. That is the world we are aiming for.

We are not the first generation competing on the breadth of a catalog. We compete on the depth of trust and operations. That is the next-generation market we are taking on. Making it real requires an organization with a high intensity of execution. The more you can see your work as being for customers and for society rather than only for yourself, the more you will accomplish here.

Connect deals, accumulate trust. Boil it down and everything we are trying to do fits into that one line. Honestly, there is not a single easy day. Even so, I can feel myself getting steadily closer to the dream I believed in. Nothing would make me happier than joining forces with people who look at what we do and genuinely think it sounds seriously interesting.