Hello.

My name is Helena Seo.


I am a design leader, team builder and product strategist. Currently I am leading the Product Design team at DoorDash. I play the roles such as:




Orchestrater
Overseeing and strategizing the direction of the e2e product experience, working closely with cross-functional leaders.



Igniter
Representing the design team’s vision to the company. I love igniting new ideas through engaging storytelling.



Champion for Customers
Evangelizing the best UX practice. I facilitate design thinking workshops for cross-functional teams to help build customer empathy.



Team Builder
Developing an extremely high-performing and collaborative team. I enjoy designing an org. 








My Stories @ Medium


Jan 6, 2020  |  6 min read
Becoming a leader as a first-generation immigrant
Although we’re living in an era in which many companies advocate for diversity and inclusion, I am often still the only female director in the room in the tech industry. Even more often, I find myself to be the only first-generation immigrant who learned English as a second language.
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Sep 3, 2019  |  7 min read
“Designing” a career ladder for Product Design
Since I joined DoorDash back in January of this year, my utmost priority has been to build up the design team. Hiring is one critical part of the effort to support the company’s exponential growth, but equally important is the team’s career development.
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Nov 12, 2018  |  9 min read
10 tips for interviewing designers
About a year ago, I published an article, “10 interview tips I share with my designer candidates.” Spurred by the overwhelmingly positive feedback, I decided to share more interviewing tips. This time it’s for the people on the other side of the table — the people conducting the interviews.
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Jun 28, 2018  |  8 min read
How to design a well-designed offsite
UX Design at Groupon is an organizationally-centralized but geographically-distributed team. There’s one time of year when everyone in the team — designers, researchers and content strategists — come together for our annual spring offsite.
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Feb 21, 2018  |  7 min read
Three ways to empower design team
Having been in a few different organizations in my career, one common issue that I constantly hear is “Design team doesn’t have a seat at the table. We don’t feel empowered in the org.”
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Oct 6, 2017  |  5 min read
10 interview tips I share with my designer candidates
As a design leader at Groupon, the important part of my job is bringing in the best candidates for UX design, research and content strategy. I have seen a couple hundreds of candidate presentations, and hired 30+ people in my team over the last 5 years in Groupon.
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