I’m Thomas (San Zhi) Yap, a professional with a background in product management and user experience.
I recently joined Arup as a UI/UX designer. Previously, I was a product manager at Avvoka, a leading B2B SaaS legal technology startup from London.
Having graduated from HEC Montréal with an MSc in UX in 2025, I’m hoping to establish myself in the city and build a network. Feel free to reach out to me, even for a chat!
What can I do for you?
I work alongside growth and customer success teams to plan the roadmap by reconciling user, business, and technical needs. I have experience with ClickUp, Trello, and Jira, and typically use Agile methodologies such as Kanban to manage the product backlog.
I also conduct interviews with the customer success team to gather feedback and opinions on client pain points and expectations to help identify business opportunities and achieve product-market fit.
Part of my product work includes working with the development team to bring features to life, from conception to launch, while considering business and user needs. While doing so, I also consider input from the CS and growth teams on how a feature should be developed.
I create user stories and flows, design prototypes and mockups, define the acceptance criteria, and engage in QA testing to ensure that a feature is fully viable for launch. I am also able to make quick CSS/HTML edits to a page via the console to drastically reduce turnaround times for mockups.
I use Figma to create wireframes, hi-fi mockups, and interactive prototypes. Their uses include serving as references for developers, being part of an iterative design process, and for conducting A/B testing with users. View some of my work here!
My process typically includes creating a persona, figuring out a user journey or flow, figuring out information architecture if relevant, creating a lo-fi prototype, then finally a hi-fi prototype.
I conduct user tests for interface evaluations, conceptualise experiments and tasks, and analyse both qualitative and quantitative data. From these, I can glean actionable insights and synthesise recommendations for clients.
To date, I have carried out site evaluations for an elementary and middle school and a leading regional business association (click here for case studies), both based in Montréal.