Employee Spotlight: Executive Officer Shinsuke Sakamoto | Leveraging Multi-Dimensional Perspectives from Rich Experience to Commit to Growth

We sat down with Sakamoto, our Executive Officer, to hear about his career background, how he came to join StoreHero, and his vision for the future.

— First, please tell us about your career background.

I joined a recruitment and PR-related company as a new graduate in 2002, and my career began as a web designer and director. It was a small team of about eight people, but about six months after I joined, all of my senior colleagues resigned at the same time, and I suddenly found myself stepping into the role of field leader (laughs).

After about two and a half years at that company, I felt a strong desire to get into programming and made a career change. However, I quickly realized how tough it was to build a career as an engineer and returned to the web industry fairly soon. It was at my next company that I first met Kurose. He joined as a new graduate in sales, while I headed the production division of a department offering LPO (Landing Page Optimization) services, primarily handling service implementation and website creation.

After that, I was invited to serve as an officer at a production company based in Osaka for about six and a half years, where I led large-scale projects for major telecommunications firms, manufacturers, and cosmetics companies, handling a wide variety of projects both large and small. I managed global sites and mega corporate sites as a project manager, producer, and director, while also getting hands-on as a UI/UX designer.

I then felt the need for hands-on experience at an in-house business, so I joined Recruit Technologies, where I spent about two and a half years working on UI/UX for HR-related sites. I then moved to Cookpad, where I led the full redesign of the iOS app as PM and directed service development. When Cookpad relocated its headquarters to Yokohama, personal circumstances made it necessary for me to change jobs again, and that's when Kurose reached out to me and I ended up joining StoreHero.

— Looking at your career, it seems you took on director and officer roles quite early on. Can you share any key factors that helped you advance?

Even at my very first company out of school, I always wanted to move into a management position early on. I consistently told my managers that I wanted a role where I could both produce work and handle business operations.

I genuinely felt that having a title made it easier to get things done, and those early experiences became stepping stones toward officer-level roles later on.

— What do you think are the key points of good management?

My management experience predates my time at large organizations like Recruit and Cookpad, so it carries a somewhat different nuance from managing within huge organizations. But speaking from experience: even in a small organization, the most important thing is the simple, everyday practice of consistently communicating what needs to be communicated from leadership, while genuinely listening to what team members are thinking. And this shouldn't happen only in dedicated meeting time — it's something that needs to be woven into daily actions and routines.

In meetings, I often bring up how the agenda item relates to company direction and what future it connects to. When I'm hearing from team members, I try to weave in questions about the future and what each person hopes to achieve going forward. I suspect members feel like, "There he goes again with the same topic" — but I deliberately repeat it on purpose.

In particular, when discussing the company's direction, StoreHero's Mission, Vision, and Values can sometimes be expressed in abstract language, so I make a point of bringing in concrete examples of what they mean. The goal is to help the company and its members move toward shared objectives together — it's simple, but I've always been mindful of building that kind of level, equal relationship.

— What has motivated your career changes over the years?

I think most of my moves were driven by identifying a personal challenge at that point in time and using a career change as the means to address it. For example, I chose a venture company with a high degree of autonomy specifically to gain management experience early. I also accepted an invitation from a production company that handled large-scale projects because I wanted to broaden my production skills and develop project management capabilities.

In particular, moving from a production agency — where I had worked almost consistently for about 14 years since graduating — to an in-house business company was an enormous turning point. Throughout my years in contract production work, I always felt a lingering sense of inadequacy: I was missing the firsthand perspective of the client side, of the business company itself. I believed I had been solving customer challenges through many production projects, but in reality, no business exists for the sole purpose of building a website. What matters far more is what happens after launch — what role websites and web services should play in generating revenue, and what is truly needed to lead a business to success. I felt that without experiencing this firsthand, I couldn't create genuine value or truly engage with the people who were running the business themselves. That realization was the driving force behind the move.

So yes, I've always had a clear sense of what challenge I needed to solve at any given time, and I've used career changes as a deliberate tool to address those challenges.

— Why did you ultimately choose StoreHero?

As I mentioned, the relocation of my previous company's headquarters made another job change necessary. While I was still considering staying in the service development space, some personal circumstances coincided at that time, and I began to think that going back to client-facing work — leveraging the experience I had built at an in-house business — might allow me to create more value by applying the strengths I had developed over my career. It was during that period that I had the chance to reconnect with Kurose, and that led to him reaching out to me.

From my side, I had known Kurose since we met at my first company, and I'd watched him take on important roles — sales leadership positions and country manager at a foreign firm — before going on to start his own company. I was genuinely curious about what drove him to do that: was he content with moderate success, or was he trying to build something truly significant? I wanted to hear it directly from him.

When we actually sat down and talked, he spoke with extraordinary confidence about an EC site growth methodology that might seem to lack reproducibility at first glance — and the fact that he had actually delivered those results for numerous clients was genuinely astonishing. Watching him speak so unapologetically about his ability to generate revenue from scratch and scale it — across a wide range of products and with a certain degree of systematized predictability — was deeply inspiring.

After several more conversations, I shared my own work experience, and he extended an invitation to join him. The organization itself was still in its early stages, so there was enormous room to contribute based on my past experience — in building the foundations for scaling up, and in systematizing operations to deliver growth outcomes with higher consistency and reproducibility. I also felt that this could be the culminating stage where I could put everything I had accumulated to work to its fullest. That's what led me to decide to join.

— What does your work at StoreHero look like day to day?

Right now my time is divided roughly as follows: store builds 30%, internal organization building 30%, growth success 30%, and executive duties 10%. On the store build side, I drew on a lot of know-how from my production agency days to consolidate workflows — documenting end-to-end procedures — so that we can launch efficiently with limited resources while maintaining both schedule and quality. That said, when it comes to the growth side, which is StoreHero's most critical service, there is still an enormous amount I want to do and need to do. I want to continue working backwards from what we're aiming for and staying focused on what needs to be done — committing to the outcome of actually driving revenue.

— Are there challenges you see for the company?

It really comes down to delivering growth results more consistently and reliably. Our team members are extremely talented and producing excellent outputs, but when I look at whether each individual action is directly translating into growth, there's still more of a gap than I expected. To generate even more decisive results, and to make sure growth outcomes don't depend on any one person's skills or experience — so that anyone can deliver high-quality results — we need to build a structure where our Growth Workflow system reliably connects to outcomes.

— What kind of people would you like to see join StoreHero going forward?

There is no limit to the growth initiatives that can drive revenue. Every single one of them matters, and ideally you'd want to execute all of them. But realistically, doing everything is nearly impossible, and even if it were possible, it would require enormous resources and capital. In that context, we have developed a methodology called the "Growth Workflow" — which defines clearly what should be done and when, even with limited resources, so that revenue can be generated steadily. This approach is now beginning to deliver real results at the stores of a variety of merchant partners.

We would love to have people join who want to master this "Growth Workflow" and take on the challenge of growing a wide range of EC sites. We also warmly welcome people who are interested in making the Growth Workflow itself even better — by developing new flows or getting involved in systematizing how it's operated.

We're Hiring People Who Want to Make Commerce Entrepreneurs into Heroes

At StoreHero, we are working on growth support services, product development, and store builds with the mission of turning commerce entrepreneurs around the world into heroes. If you're interested in working with us, please feel free to get in touch.
Current open positions are listed on this page.
>> Careers Page