Aiming to achieve both business and social goals by building systems. Goki Omata, a PdM of ExaWizards

Aiming to achieve both business and social goals by building systems. Goki Omata, a PdM of ExaWizards

“I want to create a system that allows more members to take steps that may be off the mark but would lead to big ideas. I would like to create many socially and commercially viable projects.”

This is a story that introduces the Wizards who work at ExaWizards.

This time, we proudly introduce Mr. Goki Omata, a PdM at ExaWizards.?

During the interview, the word "sociality" was repeatedly mentioned by Omata. We asked him why he continues to be conscious of "sociality" as well as "commerciality" in the creation of his products.


Profile

Goki Omata

Leader of the incubation group that creates new products at ExaWizards.

Worked at Fuller, Lifenet Insurance, Inclusion Japan, and Pivotal Labs before assuming his current position. His interests are marketing and product management.

Graduated from Keio University's Faculty of Commerce and is the translation supervisor of a book “This is Lean.”


Shocked to see my boss trying to find a balance between commerciality and sociality.

“My father is a little strange...” Omata laughed.

Omata has always chosen to work in a place that uses technology to make society better. When we asked the question, "How did you become interested in technology?, he first told the story of his father.

“My father is a very bold man. One day, he met a guy from abroad on the street. The guy was having trouble finding a place to stay. So my father took him home and stayed for the night. He was very knowledgeable about technology and taught me how to use the Internet and Photoshop during his stay.”

The world of the Internet, of which he only had a vague image, suddenly expanded, and a young boy Omata enthusiastically studied programming and design.

When he was a university student, he began to think that he wanted to work with technology as his main tool, and he encountered the concept of "sociality," which would become another axis in his life. It was his boss, Makoto Ishizaka, whom he met while working at Microsoft as a university student.

“Ishizaka-san is a person who keeps thinking about how to make the world a better place using the big instrument called Microsoft. At the time, AWS and other cloud products were being launched one after another. He was always thinking about whether this business would really make the world a better place and pushed forward with it. I realized that it is possible to work while balancing the social aspects and a business, rather than just making it a success from an economic perspective.”

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This is the mindset I want to work with.?

It was hard to choose but Omata decided to turn down a job offer to join a social game IT venture and joined a start-up founded by his friend. He wanted to start a business with high social value in his own way from scratch.

However, the company just began. It was difficult to create a business that would generate sales. In the process of repeated scrap-and-build, they came up with a tool to extend battery life by managing Android applications. At the time, Android was wasting a lot of battery power, so people needed something to make the battery last longer.

They thought that considering the use of the behavioral history on smartphones obtained from the tool as marketing data, this tool could be commercialized.

The plan was successful. The product grew to 100,000 downloads soon after its release, and eventually to over 1 million downloads in the series. The successful release made it possible to send a large amount of data on the usage history of applications on smartphones at once in a short period of time. It was also well received by social game companies, which were the main customers of the company. Although the company was going well, Omata suddenly went back to his original thought.

“I thought, what the heck. I had a lot of fun with the momentum, but in a corner of my mind, I started thinking, 'Is this really going to benefit society?’ I decided to change careers because I wanted to do a job where I could feel a balance between commerciality and sociality.”


The difficulty of changing the structure of a traditional industry?

He moved to Lifenet Insurance. The insurance industry has a market size of trillions of dollars. Lifenet Insurance has created a stir as an internet-based insurance company. He was strongly attracted to the company's stance of using the power of technology to tackle inefficient systems and people that the conventional insurance system cannot help. The decisive factor for him was the idea of a “subsystem of the global management plan” that Mr. Deguchi, the chairman of the company, emphasizes.

“The idea is that a business should be a subsystem for the betterment of human society. In Japan, as the population ages and the birth rate declines, it will become more difficult to raise salaries, while social security costs will increase. Therefore, Lifenet Insurance has created a plan with low premiums to reduce the burden on the working-age population. These means can reduce their financial burden with inexpensive and comprehensive insurance, and some people will not have to give up on raising children.? Lifenet Insurance had already started working toward one of SDGs.”

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Omata is enthusiastic that businesses can improve the world. He was in charge of UI maintenance for the Lifenet Insurance website and applications, as well as creating web advertisements to increase the number of users. After that, he moved to ICJ, a venture capital fund launched by a colleague, where he worked as a VC and did consulting and public relations.

He came back to Lifenet Insurance to work on a project that would make a big difference in the insurance industry. The project was a life insurance business for homosexuals.

Omata worked on life insurance for sexual minorities with same-sex partners.


The life insurance project for sexual minorities taught him what makes a big difference.

“Japanese national laws do not allow sexual minorities to marry. Therefore, their partners are not legally family and cannot get life insurance. The death of partners could be a financial risk for the other partner. We started to offer life insurance for those people under certain conditions, such as the length of time they have lived together.”

After the announcement, we received a lot of responses. On the other hand, the number of insurance contracts did not grow as expected, because they had a strong image that they were not eligible for life insurance, and it took time for them to become aware of the existence of the insurance.

In addition, Omata received not only supportive voices, but also protests such as, “The former insurance is better”.

“The life insurance for sexual minorities required me to involve many stakeholders and to feel the reality and change of the people involved. Conversely, I learned that people who were satisfied with the existing framework sometimes oppose changes, and I also learned deeply about what it means to make a change.”

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They spent a year creating and penetrating the insurance system for sexual minorities, but they had to wait for the growth of the sexual minority-related market for further growth of the business.

So what's next? It was then that Omata thought of becoming a product manager (PdM).


As a PdM, Build a system where products are creatively born.

While he had been working without defining his role too much since his startup days, Omata had two thoughts in common: "I want to be a creator" and "I want to promote the business”. In addition, he was looking for a role that would allow him to be involved in technology. It was PdM.

“A friend told me about the PdM role, and I was like, 'This is it!’”

His friend invited him to join Pivotal, a company that provides a PaaS platform and consulting for lean and agile teams.

“I saw a culture of engineers who could focus on their work without miscommunication. For example, if I threw a request or question to the internal e-mail, it would be dispatched to a person in charge and the request would get responded to immediately. If I needed something for work, I could just type an email and it would be delivered the next day, without the need for approval or reimbursement. The system shocked me because the system allowed us to focus on the work producing the most essential value.

In addition to the operation, I also liked the fact that all employees working together were able to work in a synchronized manner. Because PdMs and engineers work in pairs, feedback is quick and can be discussed immediately, so blockers are less likely to occur. I was amazed at how much creativity can be unleashed by setting up a communication system.”

At Pivotal, as a member of the Pivotal Lab, which facilitates organizational transformation for clients, he was in a position to approach enterprise companies from the outside, introducing agile development and other approaches.

Although he found his work at Pivotal rewarding, he unexpectedly had to make a career change. Management decided to sell the business to another company. ExaWizards was the place he jumped into with the desire to work at a faster pace.


“I can make a contribution now”. The thought made him knock on the door of ExaWizards, which he had once declined.

“I had actually met Ishiyama-san, the president of ExaWizards, once when I was at ICJ. I had been invited to work with him before, but I felt that I had little to contribute, so I declined the invitation.”

Mr. Yukawa, the editor-in-chief of "AI Newspaper," who delivers original news about AI, was the one who got him to join ExaWizards. He and Omata had known each other since college, and they had even traveled together to a university in the U.S. to interview advisors for the Recruit Institute of Technology.

“When I thought about it again, it's hard to find an environment where I can create products surrounded by professional members like Ishiyama-san and Yukawa-san.”

“Also, I thought I could use the experience I gained at Lifenet Insurance and Pivotal to my advantage at ExaWizards. More than anything, I liked the fact that ExaWizards itself was doing business having a positive impact on society.”

Of course, there was also the option of working for a large company doing business to make the world a better place. However, I was attracted to the feeling of being involved in the launch of a business.

He joined the product management team at ExaWizards. While working on product planning for each team, he also plans projects across the company. One of such projects is the "1→100 Project.”

The 1→100 Project is a project conducted by a mixture of departments to find the seeds of innovation based on the question of how to make existing products grow 100 times more than they are now. The goal is to increase the opportunities for innovation even in a remote environment.

“Divergent conversations often make us hit on innovative ideas. I found it challenging to see how we could recreate the ideas coming from the dialogues because COVID-19 took them away from us. We actually came up with some ideas that we could present to the management team.”


Taking the first step toward a product with both business and social aspects

Omata has faced the challenge of balancing great profitability and social impact by rethinking the existing structure. When I asked Omata about the most interesting structure in ExaWizards, he replied, “Ishiyama-san and Haruta-san.”

“Ishiyama-san and Haruta-san are great barriers to overcome and are powerful supporters at the same time when starting a new business in ExaWizards. A business proposal with a low perspective will be bounced back. That's why we try to incorporate the insights we gain from our daily lives into our projects, keeping in mind the general framework of social issues as seen by Ishiyama-san and Haruta-san. The process of convincing them and creating a business is tough, but it's great training.”

In recent years, companies strongly tend to do their businesses having a positive impact on society, such as SDGs and ESG, to receive a social and investment evaluation. ExaWizards is also naturally required to be more business and socially responsible. In other words, creating a business as a PdM at ExaWizards is a valuable experience that will be useful outside the company.

So what is the most important thing in creating a business? Omata answered the question and said “the vision.” “As long as the vision is clear, the first step can be off the mark," he continued.

“Products changing society require you to speak out about your ‘vision’ to involve many stakeholders. In this respect, ExaWizards has members with various skills, so as long as we have a vision, they will work with us. That's why ExaWizards needs a system to generate big ideas now.”

“The process of generating big ideas includes unexpected jumps. Even for a large company like Apple, the first step in creating a product may not have much to do with the original purpose.”

“The mechanisms for turning ideas into businesses are being put in place. I would like to create a system where more members can take the first step that may be off the mark and lead to the big idea that will become the seed. I would also like to create many projects that are both socially and commercially viable.”

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