Meet Yannie

Yannie Fu is an executive coach, tech leader and speaker on a mission to empower aspiring leaders to find more joy and meaning at work.

Yannie has 20+ years of experience leading and managing teams in tech (Google, Chime, Instagram, Airbnb, Netflix). She started her career in Hong Kong and Shanghai in brand strategy and innovation consulting. She travelled the world training executives to rediscover creativity in their work and leadership style, partnering with their R&D, brand, and marketing teams to come up with multi-year innovation pipelines, and global brand positioning.

While Yannie loved the variety and adventurous lifestyle of consulting, she wanted to see what it would take to execute on new ideas and make them a reality. She took a leap of faith starting fresh in the Bay Area to get into tech, and started a new career as a UX researcher. She landed her first job in-house at Netflix, where she led research for international growth, and global foundational research to launch the Downloads feature. She then spent 4 years at Airbnb spearheading consumer insights for marketing teams across the US, APAC, LATAM, and EMEA, before leading product research for Airbnb’s global regulations team.

She eventually transitioned from a high performing individual contributor to a people manager. Yannie led the research team at Instagram looking after creative flows for the Camera and Reels team, building for audiences from everyday teens to established Creators. Wanting to get a taste of the startup world, Yannie joined fintech startup Chime as Director of UX Research, where she led the teams for credit, managing money, and zero-to-one new products like MyPay, lending, and insurance.

Yannie is now a UX leader at Google for Enterprise Ads, leveraging AI to drive innovative ad tools that serve the world’s largest ad agencies and brand advertisers. She manages a research team ranging from early career to staff researchers and leads other managers. Yannie is also a G2G (Googler to Googler) career, manager, and parent coach. Yannie is a life-long learner. With every new role she’s taken on, her mantra is to learn something new and stretch outside her comfort zone.

Throughout her career, Yannie has interviewed many job candidates as a member of hiring committees for tech leadership roles in UX Research, Design, Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing. As a hiring manager, she see dozens of resumes and portfolios, and knows what makes candidates stand out in the competitive job market.

Wanting to take her research and leadership skills to empower people to land a career that brings more joy and meaning, Yannie took the leap to be trained as an executive coach through the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute’s first co-hort in Japan. As a coach, she listens holistically and asks thought-provoking questions to help you expand your imagination, and get clarity about what’s possible for you.

Yannie is married to her husband Howard. They live in Berkeley, California with their adorable son Toby, and their loyal but sometimes fiesty dog Foxy. Outside of work, she loves to travel, sing karaoke, play piano, eat delicious food, and spend time with her community of family and friends.

As a researcher by profession, Yannie is an empathetic listener and asks good questions for a living. As someone who has hugely benefited from taking risks in her life, Yannie will create a safe space for you to reflect, explore, learn about yourself, expand your options, and gather the courage to make your dreams closer to reality one step at a time.