Introduction

My name is Okamoto and I work in the Project Promotion Group on the IT＆Creative Development Headquarters at KINTO Technologies. I am the Group manager. Thank you for your time reading this article.

I joined KINTO Corporation in December 2020 as a project manager. Following the establishment of KINTO Technologies Corporation, I transferred there and have since been mainly in charge of group management.

Here is a summary of my career:

• 24 years at a major system integrator as a systems engineer and project manager
• Project management at a Salesforce-focused system integrator
• Architect responsible for system integration following a corporate merger at a foreign-owned non-life insurance company

I'm an old-timer and I've been around since the days of Assembler programming.

With broad experience as both an engineer and a project manager, I take pride in having a wide range of "small tools" at my disposal. (Though in other words, I'm a generalist with breadth more than depth...)

At KINTO Technologies, I aim to lead organizations and projects by building a broad understanding of the company and its systems.

Group Mission

Let me introduce my team, the Project Promotion Group. We focus on three main missions:

• Managing Cross-Organizational Projects for KINTO's Domestic Business
  • This includes system development project for services launched by KINTO.
  • Also enhancement projects like adding new products to existing services.
• Product operation and maintenance
  • This involves operations and maintenance (enhancements) for systems already in production.
  • I also often jump in the above projects and develop them.
• Development Support
  • This covers managing integrated test environments, setting up support for DevOps environments, UI/UX support in the B2B domain.
  • Also includes working with group companies (Toyota Financial Services Corporation and Toyota Finance Corporation) on payment-related service development and support.

KINTO Technologies is a young company, so our organizational structure is pretty flexible and continues to evolve as the company grows. The Project Promotion Group is right in the middle of that ongoing transformation. That's why, even though the name suggests we only handle projects, we're also in charge of product operations and maintenance. What you see now isn’t our final form. We expect more group splits and integrations as we keep evolving.

Projects

We have several missions as mentioned above, but I would like to talk about our main projects too.

It includes system development for KINTO's new services, as well as updates such as adding products to existing services.

Most recently, we've worked on adding exclusive bZ4X products to KINTO ONE, and took on project management for the KINTO ONE Used Vehicles project.

Other projects are ongoing too. Some are already in motion, others still in the early stages. And it's not just the planning department coming up with ideas; sometimes it’s the development team that kicks off projects, like large-scale architecture overhauls.

Projects vary widely in type and nature, so project managers need to come up with plans that best fit each one.

In most cases, projects bring together various systems, products, teams, and operations to create entirely new services. That means managing them often involves navigating a lot of "unknowns" and "things you’ve never dealt with before."

That's often because we're building a brand-new kind of service or working in an unfamiliar business area. With many newer members on the team, it's also common for people to meet each other for the first time on the project.

Therefore, project managers are expected to take the lead in things like:

• Turning unknowns into knowns
• Spotting what we don't know yet
• Translating uncertainty or ambiguity into clear requirements and specifications

In addition, when carrying out these activities, it is necessary to understand the company, business, and systems, and to put together solutions that meet the goals, rather than waiting for detailed requirements to be presented and finalized.

To achieve this, strong communication skills are key to building shared understanding across all the teams and people involved.

If you look at it positively (and in an exaggerated way), you can realize that it is possible to materialize something that has no form, and this can include not only systems and services, but also human relationships.

If that resonates with you, and you find purpose in launching services that make a real impact, we'd love for you to check out the Project Manager role and consider applying.

Product

Next up, here's a look at how we handle product operations and maintenance.

The Project Promotion Group takes care of the operation and maintenance of the following products:

• Business Systems
  • Application screening and contract management for KINTO ONE
  • Dealer support operations for vehicle ordering, registration, and customer delivery for KINTO ONE
  • Customer support system for handling inquiries via the customer center operations
• KINTO ONE Used Vehicles
  • KINTO ONE Used Vehicle e-commerce site
  • Application screening and contract management for KINTO ONE Used Vehicles
  • Lease fee calculation system
  • System for supporting vehicle returns, appraisals, and registration of used vehicles after KINTO ONE contract completion
  • Asset management system for vehicles owned by KINTO
• Application Integration for KINTO ONE via External E-commerce Sites
  • Lease fee calculation system
  • Application screening and contract management for KINTO ONE used vehicles
  • Data integration system with third-party sales platforms like Car Sensor

While the KINTO ONE new vehicle website you often see is actually run and maintained by a different team, many of the behind-the-scenes systems that support it are owned and maintained by our group.

We're involved with these products from the ground up, from the initial project phase all the way through to post-launch operations and maintenance.

Generally, product managers and lead engineers are KINTO Technologies employees. As for engineers, we don't have enough in-house staff at the moment, so we're working with several partner companies while also actively hiring in-house engineers.

Most of our KINTO systems and products are first released with a minimum features needed to go live as a public release.

From there, we roll out additional features incrementally. The product manager keeps track of requests from related business divisions and system improvement items in a backlog, and works with stakeholders in regular meetings to set priorities. Leading the development team and delivering regular releases allows us to steadily improve and strengthen the services.

When a new project is added to an existing system, we'll join the project as the team responsible for product updates. We coordinate with the business side, related systems, and products to ensure a smooth launch.

We basically aim to keep things in-house. That's why we work closely with the teams making new requests, and our in-house lead engineers show agility in driving development. For the product team, it's rewarding to stay close to what the company really wants to deliver and to quickly hear feedback on features after release.

As the number of products and systems we support continues to grow, so does the need for more hands on deck. That’s why we’re actively looking for product managers and engineers to join the Project Promotion Group.

Conclusion

As of December 2022, the Project Promotion Group has 37 members.

Besides handling the projects and products mentioned above, some of us also support development tasks and help out other Toyota group companies. There's a wide range of opportunities, but our core mission is to keep KINTO services growing and improving. What sets us apart is the unique blend we bring: a startup mindset backed with the experience, culture, and stability of the Toyota group.

Since everyone joined mid-career, our company culture is still a work in progress. We see shaping that culture together as one of the unique perks of working at our company now, in the early stages of its founding.

This ended up being more of a job introduction than a team overview, but if any of this caught your interest, feel free to check out our careers page.

https://www.kinto-technologies.com/recruit/projectpromotion/