Mei Tanaka

Product design · Class of 2027

I make things that get shipped

Design student in Singapore. Three internships, two side projects, and a stubborn belief that a portfolio should load in under a second.

SingaporeEN · 中文 · 日本語Open to 2027 roles
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The short version

I would rather ship something small than plan something large.

Most of what I have built started as a weekend annoyance. That is not a coincidence — it is the only reliable way I have found to tell whether a problem is real before spending three months on it.

The rest is unglamorous: talk to the eight people who have the problem, build the smallest thing that could fail, and watch what they do instead of what they say.

01

Find the annoyance

Something I keep working around by hand. If nobody else works around it, it was a preference, not a problem.

02

Build the smallest version

One screen, real data, no account system. Fast enough that I am testing the idea and not the code.

03

Watch, then decide

Two weeks of use answers the question that two months of discussion does not.

By the numbers

Three years, counted honestly

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61% of what I start never ships

Which is the number I am actually proud of — killing an idea early is the cheapest decision available.

3

Internships

Product and growth

12k

People used something I made

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42

User interviews

Across four projects

Experience

Where I have been useful

Jul 2026 — Present

Product management intern

Northwind Digital · Singapore

Six client website projects in parallel. I turn a business brief into a proposal, a site map and the actual page copy, then keep client, design and engineering pointed at the same version of it at every review.

6 projects in parallel
Aug 2025 — Nov 2025

Customer experience intern

Sideline FC · Singapore

Ran community football nights end to end — scheduling before, coordinating on the pitch, collecting feedback after. Then took the boring half seriously: slot scheduling, pitch utilisation, revenue per session.

Attendance up 31%
Jan 2024 — Dec 2024

Founding team, mutual-help platform

Campus Venture Lab · Singapore

Led a student venture matching people who needed help with people who could give it. Won a creativity award, ran out of runway, learned more from the second half than the first.

Best creativity award

Selected work

Three things I finished

Placeholder case studies. On a real site each of these is a page of its own.

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Product · 2026

Ledger for student clubs

Committee handovers lost every receipt each May. One shared ledger, no accounts, a link that expires with the term.

FigmaNext.jsSupabase
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Design · 2025

Pitch booking that admits it is full

The old flow showed every slot and failed at checkout. This one shows four, and they are all real.

User researchPrototyping
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Side project · 2025

A reading habit, made visible

I read about companies more than I trade. This turns a year of that into one page I can actually re-read.

Weekend buildCharts

Playground

Six sports, one stock market, and a habit of arguing

Also me. Most of what I have built came out of one of these.

FigmaPrototypingDesign systemsTypeNext.jsTypeScriptSupabaseSQLBasketballFootballBoulderingMarketsDebate

Process

What it looks like before it looks like anything

She shipped the version nobody asked for, and it was the one that got used.

Placeholder testimonial · former manager

Education

Where the theory came from

Aug 2023 — Jan 2027

National University of Singapore

BA, Industrial Design · Minor in Computer Science

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Jan 2025 — Jun 2025

Kyoto Design Exchange

Exchange semester · Interaction design

What's next

Let's build something interesting.

Graduating January 2027, in Singapore, looking for product roles where the brief is still vague. If you read this far you probably already know what you would have me do.