Meet Tom White, Director of Design and Research at Zencargo

Hi, I’m Tom White, the Director of Design and Research at Zencargo. 

My role is to lead our design team to deliver great user experience on our platform to our customers.

I’ve been with the company for about two years now, and from my first interview, I knew this was the place for me. 

When I initially joined, there were only a handful of designers in the team. This gave me the opportunity to build a team and establish principles, working practices, and more generally, develop a design culture in the company. Today, we have a brilliant team of designers and a truly formidable group of researchers and it has been great to be part of the journey and watch the team grow. 

Furthermore, I wanted to be part of a company that looks to solve problems. The supply chain underpins everything we touch in our day-to-day lives, yet there’s so much scope to improve its efficiency. For somebody interested in challenges and making a difference, it doesn’t get much better than trying to solve supply chain problems.

Finally, the values and priorities at Zencargo were apparent in my first conversation with the CEO, Alex Hersham. He made it clear that delivering for our customers, and understanding their problems and needs, were of utmost importance. And this value continues to drive everything we do. 

Designers and Researchers Needed

At Zencargo, product designers typically work as generalists. Our experience team is assigned a theme (read more about that in Tim Ball’s post), through discovery research, ideation and prototyping, all the way to working with engineers to deliver the experience we launch.

When we hire new designers, we not only look at their skillset, but also at what other qualities they’ll bring to the team. Collaboration is a key part of the job, both with your design peers and the other disciplines in your experience team. We believe that collaboration is key in solving knotty UX challenges and visualising your solutions as high quality and delightful UI. 

And you don’t have to know anything about the supply chain. I didn’t when I first started – it’s a big space and I’m still learning all the time, but one of the great things about Zencargo is that the entire team is so supportive; there are no silly questions and everyone will offer their time to help you understand any challenges and problems you may face. 

From a research perspective, one of the things that makes Zencargo a little different is that everybody is involved with it.

We’re designing for many different types of end-users, all with different needs, motivations, and problems, and it’s important that experience teams (particularly designers and project managers in the teams) understand them first hand or else nuance and context is lost in a research report!

Our research teams pair with experience teams to help facilitate the highest quality research, and provide the tools and training for teams to feel empowered to conduct their own independent research when they need to.

That’s how we’ve gotten as far as we have in solving the supply chain crisis for our customers.

People Deserve a Better User Experience in Shipping

Disruptions over the past 24 months, such as the pandemic, have uncovered the inefficiencies of supply chains. The lack of visibility businesses have over their supply chain has meant that supply chain operations have been impacted, creating added costs and delays on the arrival of goods to their distribution centres. 

At Zencargo, we want to help businesses navigate these supply chain disruptions. Our priority is to construct an unparalleled user experience from top to bottom. The smoother things run from order to delivery, the easier it is for everybody. Our customers can plan and budget accordingly as they are given accurate delivery dates. This can help them run their supply chain operations more effectively. 

The more varied our customers are, the broader our solutions have to range. That’s why our platform and services constantly evolves at Zencargo.  

Finding Enjoyment in Solving Supply Chain Problems

Joining Zencargo will give you many opportunities to solve challenging problems in an innovative and impactful company. With so many moving parts, researching and designing unprecedented solutions makes every day a little different. And that’s part of the fun! 

Disrupting the trillion-dollar shipping industry is interesting enough by itself. But our vision is even bigger; it’s to make the supply chain more transparent, more efficient, and agile for our customers. 

The Future of Zencargo

There has never been a better time to join Zencargo than now.

We’ve established the overall structure of our goals and our strategies. And although we all work autonomously, we come together to share our progress and challenges and to review each other’s work. Collectively, we’ve developed great working practises and rituals we call our own, but we regularly review and iterate on them to make sure they deliver the value we need. 

Now, we’re in a really exciting stage of growth. We’d like to accomplish many big goals in the next couple of years, and we need more brilliant people to achieve them. 

Although we work well together, there’s still space for new people to make an impact and influence how we move forward.

Who Should Join Zencargo?

Our values and culture are essential aspects of Zencargo, and everybody shares them. Taking initiative, actively looking to collaborate, and a desire to create change are vital qualities we look for in new team members. 

Autonomy is a core principle at Zencargo, and it is one of the things I value most about working here. I’m a firm believer that when you hire smart people, you shouldn’t clip their wings through micromanagement.  

Together, we’re a team. But progress, achievement, and ownership are recognised individually. We ensure everybody has the tools they need to solve problems independently, whilst simultaneously supporting each other as a team. 

The world of global trade isn’t well known to many, but it’s packed full of intriguing challenges that solve problems for people globally. And the potential a designer can have in solving these problems and transforming this industry is huge.  

If you’re interested in joining Zencargo on our mission to disrupt the trillion-dollar shipping industry, take a look at our opportunities here.