About Me

I’m Heejung Kim, and I work at the intersection of business systems, automation, and data. I believe insights are only meaningful when they help solve real-world problems.

My interest in people and their behavior started long before I began working with data. As a museum docent, I met people with different backgrounds, interests, and ways of understanding the same information. Later, during a product planning internship at Samsung Electronics, I learned how qualitative research could uncover needs that people might not recognize themselves or say directly. At a tech startup, I began looking at those same questions from a quantitative side, analyzing tens of thousands of records of how people used a product.

That experience eventually led me into data analytics. I wanted to understand businesses through something more objective than impressions or assumptions. But I quickly ran into a practical problem: sometimes the data I needed did not exist. Sometimes it was scattered across spreadsheets and systems, and sometimes numbers that should have matched did not.

So I started organizing and connecting the data myself. Over time, I realized there was a bigger opportunity than simply making better reports. The workflows that created the data, the systems people used, and the decisions that followed were all connected. What started with spreadsheets and simple automation gradually expanded into centralized data structures, workflow automation, and eventually an internal ERP platform.

That experience also changed the way I think about systems. Removing inefficient steps is useful, but efficiency alone is not the goal. A good system should reflect how people actually work. The right information and tools should be available when they are needed, without creating unnecessary friction. For me, system design is ultimately about connecting people, processes, and data in a way that helps people work more naturally and make better decisions.

Much of my career has involved learning new technology when a problem required it. That has included design and video tools, website development, data visualization platforms, scripting, databases, cloud services, and more recently, AI-assisted development. AI has made it much easier to turn an idea into something that can be tested and improved quickly. But as execution becomes faster, I believe the questions that come before execution become even more important: What problem are we actually trying to solve? Why does it matter? And what is the simplest system that can solve it well?

I do not see business, data, technology, and human behavior as separate disciplines. The most interesting problems usually sit somewhere between them. That is where I enjoy working—understanding how the pieces influence one another and turning that understanding into systems that people can actually use.

Beyond work, I find joy in traveling and immersing myself in new experiences. Each new perspective broadens the way I see the world, reminding me that curiosity has no boundaries. My fascination with human nature also remains strong; I often turn to films and novels, especially romance, for inspiration. And someday, I hope to write a romance novel—a different kind of journey into human connection.