Mia Gao
About Me
A design leader bridging business strategy, product design, and technical delivery, specializing in transforming complex requirements into scalable digital solutions. Experienced across the full product lifecycle, from business analysis and UX design to agile implementation with a track record spanning B2B, B2C, web, and mobile platforms.
Builds sustainable digital products through structured design and engineering enablement. Led an enterprise digital developer platform that introduced standardized services and automated workflows, driving gains in R&D velocity, cross-team alignment, and operational efficiency — foundational to business scaling and recognized with the 2022 Global CIO100 Award. Effectively translates emerging tech into business impact; contributed to several generative AI concept initiatives, with outcomes nominated for the 2024 Global UX Design Awards. Advocates inclusive design, continuously evolving product standards and accessibility frameworks to ensure consistent, high-quality experiences for diverse users.
Excels in cross-functional collaboration by establishing clear goals, syncing pace with stakeholders, and partnering closely with product and engineering teams to streamline workflows and navigate challenges — ensuring smooth, high-quality delivery.
Actively contributes to the design community, having organized regional events and delivered talks to share insights and strengthen professional networks.
Work Experience
Beijing YuyiFeihong Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Consulting
Aug 2024 - Present
Core Responsibilities
Client Problem Diagnosis & Solution Design. Applied design thinking to diagnose clients' strategic, organizational, and collaboration challenges, identifying root causes and designing executable solutions.
User Research & Strategy Definition. Conducted user and stakeholder research to uncover key pain points and opportunities, directly informing business strategy and product roadmap adjustments.
AI Solution Integration & Planning. Integrated AI capabilities into client solutions based on specific business scenarios, designing innovative implementation paths and defining product experience strategies.
Key Project Achievements
Holistic Product Strategy for a US Reputation Platform
Defined product strategy and roadmap through in-depth competitive and market analysis. Restructured information architecture and core workflows, identifying key AI integration opportunities to establish a scalable foundation.
Designed a data dashboard for merchants that provided high-level analytics on business health and growth trends, enabling data-driven decision-making and closing the product value loop.
Led end-to-end design of the “AI-Assisted User Feedback” MVP, from business analysis to high-fidelity, accessible prototypes. Delivered user stories and priorities that directly restarted development and enabled rapid iteration.
Analyzed & Designed the Mobile Procurement Platform for a Cross-border Luxury E-commerce Client. Addressed core inefficiencies and transparency gaps in collaboration among Chinese consumers, overseas buyers, and logistics teams by developing a service blueprint that mapped all workflows and order-routing paths. This blueprint informed the complete product architecture and interface, centered on a unified order-status engine that provided real-time visibility and clear task guidance for all roles. The solution transformed a manual, offline, error-prone process into a fully digital, visual, and accountable operational platform, significantly enhancing the efficiency and reliability of cross-border procurement and order management.
Analyzed & Developed a Digital Transformation Plan for a State-owned Enterprise in Urban Renewal. After a reorganization, the client faced challenges with misaligned goals and broken processes across departments (asset management, merchant operations, and member systems). Through in-depth interviews, the project identified core needs and collaboration gaps in complex situations, and summarized these into a “Cross-Department Problem Map” to clearly show how issues were connected and their root causes. Finally, the plan designed a first-phase workshop series to train business teams in using design thinking methods. This would help teams analyze problems from a user's point of view and create ongoing plans to improve cross-department teamwork.
Thoughtworks
TechOps
CXPD Lead
(Principle)
2022.08 - 2024.08
Core Responsibilities
Involved in Departmental Strategic Planning & Execution: Contributed to strategic planning by transforming strategy into execution through design tools like User Experience Journey Maps and Service Blueprints, resulting in actionable plans, precise resource allocation, and effective implementation.
Led Innovative Product Experience Design & Value Delivery: Led product design for multiple internal AI innovation projects (both product & operations), leveraging AI technology to reshape traditional workflows, optimize processes, reduce operational costs, and enhance overall work efficiency & output quality. This enabled team members to focus more on high-value decision-making & innovation.
Established a Strategy-driven Design Standard System. To support the company's product excellence strategy, unified the experience language by creating a new product design system. Consolidated design documentation & templates, and integrated key quality requirements such as accessibility into the standards. This provided the team with a shared, strategy-aligned working language & framework.
Established a Cross-border Team Capability Building System: Introduced key design approaches & tools across teams. Through structured training, collaborative workshops, and regular communication, enhanced the team's ability to deliver effective solutions & drive outcomes in challenging business contexts.
Key Project Achievements
AI-Powered Ticket System Optimization: Leveraged AI to intelligently prioritize & automate ticket routing and resolution. Designed intuitive human-in-the-loop workflows that enabled full automation for about 70% of routine tickets, improving overall efficiency & automation.
Domini AI Business Analytics System: Made traditional business analysis tools easier & faster to use by adding AI-powered chat and interactive features. Automated steps like creating personas & creating user journeys. Helped business analysts get their main work done over 60% faster, which led to a 2024 Global UX Design Award nomination.
AI-Driven Marketing Automation System (POC): Used AI to create enterprise customer profiles & journey-stage models, enabling automated content creation & personalized multi-channel campaigns. Demonstrated the potential to significantly improve efficiency in lead nurturing & conversion, providing the marketing team with clear steps & tools to scale targeted customer acquisition.
Product Portfolio Dashboard: Built a visual product portfolio analysis platform by integrating product lines with core business & operation metrics. Enabled management to monitor return on product investment and operational effectiveness, supporting data-driven product governance & dynamic allocation of strategic resources.
OKR System: Provided employees at all levels with a tool to visualize & align goals, automatically breaking down strategic priorities & synchronizing progress by transparently linking company, departmental, and individual objectives. After launch, the platform transformed a manual, meeting-dependent alignment process into automated online tracking, effectively ensuring clarity and consistency in strategy execution.
Segregation of Duties (SOD) Compliance Platform: Built a compliance control system for risk & audit departments by translating complex conflict-of-duty rules into clear visual configurations & approval workflows. This ensured regulatory adherence while improving the efficiency of access requests & conflict detection by 70%, and enabled full traceability of audit trails.
Established Product Experience & Design Standards to unify quality and collaboration. Resulted in standardized components covering 80% of UI needs across core products, and cut new project design setup time by 60%.
Capability Building: Led long-term growth of China region designers & analysts. Enabled rapid advancement in business analysis &product design, cultivating key contributors who independently solve complex problems & support talent development & expansion.
Reputation & Influence Building: Organized project showcases, authored case studies, and coached teams in business‑value articulation, leading to international award submissions and industry recognitions. Strengthened influence through articles and public speaking.
Thoughtworks
Digital Platform Team
Product Designer
Product Owner
(Lead)
2017.01 - 2022.07
Core Responsibilities
Business Requirement Discovery & Value Alignment: Engaged in deep communication with key stakeholders including business units, technical teams, and senior leadership to identify, analyze, and prioritize requirements. Ensured product direction was closely aligned with company strategy and core business value.
Solution Design & Consensus Building: Developed insightful product proposals and roadmaps based on thorough business analysis and user research. Drove understanding and buy-in from key stakeholders through prototypes and rapid validation, building consensus and finalizing execution plans.
Team Leadership & Outcome Validation: Led cross-functional teams (Product, Design, Engineering) through end-to-end delivery from design and development to launch. Validated product outcomes through data analysis, reported progress to stakeholders, and ensured the achievement of defined business objectives to close the value loop.
Key Project Achievements
Built Internal Product Monitoring & Operations System: Designed and delivered the company's first internal system for product performance monitoring and event tracing. Ended the era of operational “blindness” for leadership, reduced fault diagnosis and resolution to minutes, and laid the groundwork for subsequent product data dashboards.
Led API & Events Governance to Platform Delivery. Through stakeholder interviews and DDD modeling, designed a unified API gateway and events platform. Guided teams in adopting standardized interfaces and established online workflows for publishing, subscribing, and management. This resolved cross-team coordination overhead, streamlined data integration into a self-service model, and strengthened system-to-system security & efficiency.
Designed & Launched an Enterprise Authorization Platform. Built to address security and compliance risks from decentralized permissions in global organizations, it provides fine‑grained, dynamic access control based on region, department, and seniority. The platform now serves as the unified authorization layer for all internal products, enhancing security while enabling flexible global operations.
Led a Master Data Management System (MDM) Delivery to unify and govern the company's key business information, such as customer, product, and partner records—across all systems. This provided all teams with on‑demand access to reliable, consistent data, reducing errors and accelerating project delivery across the organization.
Designed a Data-Driven Product Governance Dashboard: Consolidated product data into a flexible reporting system, enabling horizontal (product line) & vertical (functional) views. Gave management portfolio‑level oversight, product teams full‑product insights, and experience/security leads focused performance metrics, all from a single source of truth, improving decision‑making across levels.
Platform Integration & Developer Experience Transformation: Consolidated separate platforms — monitoring, API, Events, master data, and AuthZ — into a unified, self-service developer portal. By integrating the complete workflow from ideation to operations, we transformed scattered capabilities into standardized, reusable components. This boosted overall R&D efficiency and innovation speed, cutting launch and validation time for new projects by over 60% and earning the 2022 Global CIO100 Award.
Enabled Innovation & Accelerated Business Impact: Powered by the unified developer platform & its built‑in capabilities, over 30 internal hackathons were run to validate new ideas. Nearly one‑third of the winning projects—about 10 in total—used the platform to rapidly prototype, secure funding, and launch as official products, proving its role as a true innovation accelerator.
Innovation Experiments
Smart Staff-to-Project Matching System (Productized) : Led the design of an intelligent staff‑matching system based on multi‑dimensional tags (skills, seniority, language, mobility, etc.) to address the inefficiency of manual resource allocation. Prototyping validated the matching logic & workflow, and the clearly demonstrated value led to formal project approval & entry into product development.
Employee Digital Competency Profile: Conceptualized and designed an internal “Digital Workplace Profile” system aimed at aggregating each employee’s skill matrix, project experience, internal achievements, peer feedback, and career progression path.
Enterprise Permission Multi‑Factor Self‑Service: Designed a self‑service workflow that lets employees quickly unlock their accounts and reset expired passwords, solving access problems without IT’s help.
Precision Marketing Platform: Enables marketing teams to quickly assemble personalized messages and reach prospects. Each delivered message includes a unique tracking link that reveals recipient engagement—opens, reading depth, and content preferences—turning every outreach into a measurable learning opportunity to continuously refine targeting and communication strategy.
Thoughtworks
China XD Team
UX Designer
Design PM
(Senior)
2015.02 - 2016.12
Core Responsibilities
Pre‑Sales Business Expansion & Solution Development: Engaged in the customer acquisition process, providing market insights, competitive analysis, and strategic design proposals. Translated design value into business outcomes to support sales conversion and new‑client acquisition.
End‑to‑End Design Consulting & Delivery: Led the full project lifecycle from requirements to implementation. Applied design thinking &user research to define problems, delivering solutions through workshops & prototypes to ensure client success.
Post‑Sales Customer Success & Relationship Management: Provided post‑delivery support and iteration guidance, maintained client relationships, and identified opportunities for continued collaboration to drive mutual growth.
Knowledge Sharing & Influence Building: Built and shared design‑methodology insights and client‑case studies for the internal team. Organized design events to strengthen internal and external community influence.
Key Project Achievements
International Marine Fisheries Data Platform Redesign: Redesigned the global fish species database system, streamlining complex data‑entry workflows to improve efficiency for data editors and marine scientists. Refined and unified the platform’s visual design language.
Mobile Banking Credit Card App: Designed and delivered an integrated mobile app for payments, points management, merchant offers, and AI customer support. Self‑service adoption for key transactions increased over 60%, reducing contact‑center load while raising user engagement and loyalty.
E‑Commerce Platform for a Commercial Bank: Delivered a unified online marketplace supporting multi‑category goods, hybrid cash/points payments, and multi‑address delivery. Solved the integration of shopping and one‑stop retail‑finance experience.
Sports Venue Digital Service Platform: Planned and designed the full online experience for sports facility reservation, coach matching, partner search, and membership management. Digitized operations to improve efficiency and member satisfaction.
Design Workshop for China Aquaculture Association: Conducted workshops and needs analysis for a seafood supply‑chain startup, mapping industry pain points and information gaps. Delivered a phased implementation plan to guide the project's launch and roadmap.
Local Experience Design Community Lead: Organized local UX community events, curating topics, inviting speakers, and publishing event content to strengthen the company’s design influence and talent appeal.
Chuancheng Culture Co., Ltd.
Smart TV R&D Team
Product designer
(Senior)
2014.10 - 2014.12
Core Responsibilities
Led 0‑1 Product & Interaction Design for a Hotel Smart‑TV System: In the early stage without mature references, defined the overall information architecture and content planning, and completed multi‑device interaction design for the TV, remote, and mobile app.
Designed Personalized Travel‑service Recommendations on TV: Developed a “smart travel‑itinerary planning” feature on the TV interface, using hotel‑guest preference data to upgrade in‑room service from information display to intelligent recommendation.
Planned the Module Design for the TV App Store: Designed the Android‑based application store structure and user interface, establishing the foundation for the hotel‑service ecosystem.
Key Project Achievement
As a core design member, fully participated in the 0 ‑ MVP design phase of a hotel smart‑TV system. Contributed to business analysis and experience design for the system architecture, multi‑device interaction, and key modules including travel planning and the app store, supporting early‑stage exploration and direction setting for the project.
Lefeng.com
Network Business Department
UX Designer
(Senior)
2013.04 - 2014.04
Core Responsibilities
Team Building & Capability Development: Built the company's user experience design team from the ground up, including recruitment and training, enabling the team to execute core user research and interaction design work.
Cross‑Platform Product Experience Design: Oversaw experience design for Lefeng.com's App, website, and backend systems. Led the team in conducting user interviews and research, redesigned information architecture and workflows, and delivered design updates and optimizations across all platforms.
Digital Application of Brand Visuals: Applied the company's brand visual style consistently across the website and App, aligning digital products with the company's overall brand identity.
Key Project Achievements
Established the Company's First In‑house Design Team, ending the previous reliance on outsourcing and product‑image designers for website work, laying the foundation for sustained product‑experience improvement.
Unified the Brand Design Style Across Online Platforms, aligning the visual design of website and App with the company's brand identity for the first time, resolving a history of frequent and inconsistent color‑scheme changes.
Helped Clarify the Business Positioning & Strategic Direction for Management Team, facilitating internal alignment to develop a functionally clear e‑commerce platform and resolve long‑standing strategic disagreements.
Optimized Multiple Core User‑flow Experiences: Redesigned the mobile‑first interface previously dominated by promotional activities; simplified the overloaded marketing content and complex calculations on the product pages of the website; unified shopping‑cart, membership, and other data between the web and mobile platforms to ensure a consistent experience; and improved processes such as returns and exchanges as well as the logic of the member‑points system. These collective efforts contributed to a 9% increase in sales conversion and improved internal operational efficiency within one year.
Shanda Network
Innovation Research Team
UX Designer
(Junior)
2011.08 - 2012.08
Core Responsibilities
Participated in the Early Exploration & Definition of a Short‑video Social Product: Analyzed industry trends and product models, helped shape the product concept, and contributed to the design of core features and user interactions.
Led Design & Front‑end Collaboration: Created the overall UI and core interaction flows for a short‑video social product using a visual‑wall layout, and worked closely with developers through implementation.
Supported Team Design Reviews: Participated in cross‑product design discussions, providing feedback on interaction and visual execution to help improve the team's overall design quality.
Key Project Achievement
Participated in the 0‑to‑1 Design of a New Short‑video Social Platform. At an early stage when the industry had no clear blueprint, I independently designed the product’s interface and interactions around a “collect and share interests” concept. The working prototype I delivered gave the team a visual foundation to validate the concept and align on direction.
Microsoft
Bing Homepage Team
Editor
UX Designer
2008.12 - 2011.07
Core Responsibilities
Localization & Operations for Bing Homepage Imagery: Launched the Bing homepage image project in China by building a full workflow from image curation and theme planning to review and publishing.
Content Strategy & Production: Owned the end‑to‑end creative process, selecting images, planning around holidays/cultural moments, writing copy, and designing interactive hotspots, ensuring daily high‑quality content delivery.
Marketing Support & Product Promotion: Wrote in‑depth promotional articles based on visual themes, helping marketing turn product features into brand stories and elevate brand influence.
Key Project Achievements
Bing Homepage Imagery Project – Launch & Operations. Successfully launched and scaled the Bing homepage image project in China, driving its 0‑to‑1 implementation and ongoing operation. The project established clear brand differentiation, increased user growth and interaction rates, and inspired fan‑led sites dedicated to archiving daily images—cultivating a distinctive brand community.
Real‑Time & Localization Projects. Contributed to the design and development of timely campaigns such as the Chinese New Year homepage and the Wenchuan Earthquake Map. Supported project kick‑off, localization strategy for real‑world events, design, and launch.
China Intellectual Property News
Trademark Weekly
Reporter, Editor
2007.03 - 2008.11
Core Responsibilities
News Content Production & Multimedia Editing. Led end‑to‑end production for the Trademark column—conducting field interviews, photography, writing, and layout—delivering weekly print and digital-ready content.
Newsroom Digital Transition: Supported the design and development of the newspaper's website and e‑weekly edition, helping move print content online and contributing to early multimedia initiatives—experience that later informed a shift into product design.
Industry Engagement & Business Outreach. Represented the publication at trade exhibitions, promoting brand visibility and exploring partnership opportunities.