Recently we sat down with Enwoven’s new Head of Product to gain insights into his career, approach to product, what’s on Enwoven’s product roadmap, and a fun wildcard question.

Interviewer: Toshi, welcome, tell us a little about yourself, your career, and your thoughts since joining the team.

Hi fellow weavers,

First off, I want to say how fortunate it feels that the stars aligned and I was able to take on Product here at Enwoven. Throughout my career, I’ve been lucky enough to run teams and companies where we’ve launched beautiful, novel, and groundbreaking products. While these all ranged from products that were as rigid as steel or as soft as fabric, the old adage still remains true: Hardware is Hard. I have the utmost respect (and sympathy) for anyone trying to bring physical goods into the world (99.99% = 0% IYKYK).

I joined Enwoven a few months ago because I loved how they were supporting brands who were trying to keep their arms around their product creation process. Soon after starting, all my experiences and feelings around building products came rushing back!

Where are the sketches from our design meeting? Why did they tweak the surface curvature like that? Is this the latest model in the rendering? I can’t view this file on my f**king computer, re-export this ASAP!

While I’ll admit it was a tiny bit triggering, it also reminded me why I was here running product at a software company in the first place – it’s because I share many of the same shop stories as our users.

Interviewer: Tell us a little about your approach to product.

As I’ve had to learn over and over, the best thing you can do as a product manager is to talk to your customers and users. If you listen to Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast (former product at AirBnB–an absolute must IMO), you’ll hear this repeatedly from him and his guests:

Luckily, our team is packed with users who have all tried to solve the problem of information efficiency in the creative process from a bunch of different angles and for much of their careers. In addition to having a deep network of users to talk to every week, internally we also discuss things like the seasonal “hair-on-fire” problems at brands or even just the daily micro-interactions of designers in their workflows. Listening and thinking deeply about your users is always the best path to make sure you’re building something of value.

Interviewer: Love that idea of listening and thinking deeply about users. What can you share about Enwoven’s product roadmap?

As for our roadmap, we like to build around mental models like:

Get users to contextualize and contribute 100 assets in 100 seconds or less
(think: smart-tagging, Share to Enwoven)
Right asset, right time, right place
(think: metadata over file structure)
Interoperability
(think: 2D/3D native file collaboration tools)

And in the background, we also just want the platform to look and feel like something you want to work in every day. There are a lot of fun updates we’re excited to share soon.

Interviewer: Finally for a fun final wildcard question, Who is a fashion brand you love and why?

Another reason I was so excited to work on our product is because fashion is a special part of my life. My wife (a stylist and former retail lifer) and I went on our first group date to the YSL retrospective at the de Young back in 2009, where I wore gold-speckled, patent egg-shell derbies (see image below) by Lanvin from Lucas Ossendrijver’s S/S 2008 collection. While that house has endured a lot of unfortunate turnovers lately, I can safely say that the seasons of beautiful tonal looks, mixing of striking metals with luxurious silks, and slouchy silhouettes with a high/low attitude kicked off my enduring relationship with the world of fashion. I still look back at those collections for inspiration even today.