51: Design-led Innovation in Emerging Markets (ft. Gaurav Mathur)

Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: Welcome to the Next Phase. On today’s show, we’re joined by Gaurav Mathur, VP of Design for Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart. He’ll share with us his perspective on the big issues facing design leaders in India today, including hiring and training for junior designers, as well as design leaders making the case for the business impact of design, and the opportunities for design-led startups in the Indian market.

Peter: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Gaurav: Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jesse, for having me here. I’ve been a follower since Adaptive Path, and it’s wonderful to be speaking with both of you.

Peter: Oh, awesome. 

Jesse: Thank you so much.

Peter: It would be good to get a sense of who you are and what you do. So, how do you introduce yourself and how do you talk about your career?

Gaurav: Sure. So currently, I’m the VP of Design at Flipkart. So Flipkart is a e-commerce company in India. Before Flipkart, I headed design for Myntra. Myntra is also an e-commerce company, but focuses on fashion and lifestyle. And it also happens to be a Flipkart Group company. So I have been in the e-commerce domain for probably, like, nine years or so now, and before that I worked with the SaaS division of Citrix.

The SaaS division used to make products like GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, et cetera. I also had a brief entrepreneurial journey where I was the co-founder of a design company and we were providing design services, to get our bread and butter essentially, but also building some educational products on the site.

I studied design and architecture a long time ago. So I have been a designer at heart.

Peter: Excellent. Let’s focus on your more recent experience, both Myntra and Flipkart. One of the reasons we were interested in speaking with you is, you know, our viewpoint is very North American. So, I sometimes work with companies that have design teams in India, cause they’ve got some development teams in India, but they’re usually still like doing design for a North American or European audience.

And I know with Myntra and Flipkart, you’re really focused on working within the Indian market. So , tell us a little bit more about these businesses and what your role is, specifically let’s say with Flipkart, leading design there.

Gaurav: Sure. So Flipkart is a horizontal e-commerce platform, and it’s a marketplace that allows sellers to come on board and sell all kinds of products. We categorize these products under categories like fashion, beauty, electronics, mobiles, large air conditioners, refrigerators, et cetera. And Flipkart also manages the supply chain, warehouses, logistics, and the last mile delivery of products so that we can deliver a better customer experience overall.

So the design team at Flipkart has the product designers, or UX designers essentially, that work across all kinds of products. We also have a visual design team that works on visual merchandising for various category stores. This team also manages the design of sale events. We have a UX research team, and we’ve recently integrated the market research function, so that we are able to create a unified research and insights op for the company. 

Peter: And that’s within your team? 

Gaurav: Yeah, that’s all within the design team. We call it the One Design Team at Flipkart. Besides this, we also have a small content team, because Flipkart is available in 11 other languages, 11 Indian languages besides English. So there’s a bunch of content work that we do, and I feel that my primary role is essentially to act as an orchestrator for this multidisciplinary org.

And I also engage with product and business leaders in the company to achieve org goals.

Peter: How many people are in your org?

Gaurav: We are about 100… 110 people across UX, visual design, research and content.

Peter: So you have a little over a hundred folks in your org. It sounds like you’re designing for all the audiences in this marketplace, the merchant side, the seller side, internal. 

You mentioned this one design team. Has that always been the case or, has it kind of evolved to this single unified design organization over time?

Gaurav: Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think it has evolved over time. So when I joined, for example, the team that works on the seller platforms was not part of this team, and we eventually integrated it. And that’s been a process, I think, it’s been a journey of integrating different parts into a single One design org.

So we think of users in three broad buckets. The first is shoppers that come on Flipkart to buy products. And the experience that we give to our shoppers is primarily on mobile devices because that’s where most Indians shop. They shop on mobile devices, not so much on the desktop website. So that’s a large, large base that we cater to. 

The second set of products that we build are for sellers. And this is essentially our seller platform where sellers come and manage their listings, their catalog. They’re able to place ads, configure offers, et cetera. 

The third set of users are essentially the partners that work in warehouses, in the logistic space, and the delivery partners that manage the last mile delivery. So we create a lot of products that get used in the warehouses also apps for the delivery agents. So these are products that get used across the supply chain.

And in terms of the teams we have a part of the product design team that focuses on the B2C experience. So it builds all the features and products in our mobile apps and on the mobile website as well as on the desktop website. And then we have a team that works on the B2B or the enterprise product. So these are products that the sellers use and our partners use. 

So my time is split across these teams. I just love to get into the details of what we are building. And the design details, so I’m really passionate about solving navigation, interaction design, and visual design. So I have time set up in my calendar review all the key projects that are happening across all these products.

Jesse: In such a complex environment, what do you think is important for design to advocate for?

Gaurav: Yeah, I think both these areas have slightly different kinds of goals. So when we think of shoppers, I think we want to deliver a very, very delightful experience to them. We want to ease their shopping journey. We want them to find the products fairly quickly, and get to the right set of products with ease, and people come with very specific requirements. Sometimes a person may have a very specific requirements and sometimes they may just be window shopping. So we need to cater to all these kinds of users. 

When we think of enterprise products, I think the primary goal is to just make them really, really efficient. So think of someone whose product’s at the warehouse, and putting the label and then just getting them ready to be shipped. Now, this is a very repetitive task, and if you’re able to shave off even those few seconds for this person, we just make the whole process very efficient.

Jesse: What do you see is your role as design leader in creating the environment where these kinds of experiences can be delivered?

Gaurav: Yeah, I think, building a really competent design team, I think is the first goal that I have. And also growing this team. It’s not just enough to build a team, but then to grow this team and grow the people in this team as well. Also, to facilitate or to kind of bring together people from different domains together.

So, for example, if you’re solving for grocery, we may have a product designer looking at grocery. We may also have a visual designer looking at grocery we’ll also have a researcher looking at grocery. So getting this pod created and facilitating this journey with the product managers and with the engineers so that we are able to build and deliver a really high quality product.

I think my job comes into play in different kinds of forms. I also want the design team to do a lot of innovation, and I call it design-led innovation. So I believe designers are at the right intersection because they are able to understand user needs fairly well and then they’re also able to visualize what the product could be.

And so therefore, they could be these facilitators, or the catalyst for driving innovation in the org. And therefore, as one of the north stars that I’ve set for the design team, design-led innovation is also one of them. We also want to build our reputation within the org through the work that we do and through the impact that we create.

So I think, just like I said, like just orchestrating and facilitating some of these becomes a very critical area for me to focus on. Besides this, obviously, like engaging with the product and business leaders is the other area that I kind of spend a lot of time. So we have product leaders that work across these products and just within the app we have multiple product managers looking at, for example, how do we acquire new users, retain them? How do we facilitate journeys across categories? How do we optimize our core shopping funnel, et cetera? so just working with them, understanding their strategic areas of investment and aligning the design team’s work with these strategic areas becomes a goal.

Jesse: So it sounds like you’ve been able to build up this really operationally robust design function, this really fairly mature design function. You’ve got a range of different design capabilities from visual design through to research. Those capabilities are being integrated in meaningful ways that are kind of driving this broader impact.

It feels like what you’re describing is a fairly mature state for a design team. I wonder about what it took to get to that place to bring the business along with, or maybe just to capitalize on, the opportunities that presented themselves to demonstrate the value to make the case for a robust mature design function like this.

Gaurav: Yeah, I think I have to give credit to a lot of consumer apps that kind of exist out there. And they’ve set a really high bar for design in the industry. Specifically, if you look at the consumer Internet industry, the design bar is fairly high. And so design is today a very well recognized function in these orgs.

So the role of evangelizing is kind of come down for me. I don’t have to really sell design. We get requests from product managers, from business teams to go and dig deeper into specific areas and solve for them in a better way. 

But I think why that part has been easier, I think, influencing some of the decisions from a very customer centric view has been the focus area. And I think within the tech function, if I look at, for example, product management and engineering they are very familiar with how design operates and they collaborate with us day in and day out in building and shipping products. 

But as I move away from the tech team, I feel that the awareness of design kind of slightly goes down. And specifically, when I talked to some of the business leaders they may not be as aware as, for example, a product manager about the role of design. And for awareness building, in the past I’ve just put the work out there and we’ve done it in different ways. We’ve done it in a format of a road show, for example, we’ve also done it in the form of just a UX open house where we would transparently share the work that we are doing as the design team and let people come in view this work, comment on it, critique it, give their feedback and in the process we are able to build partners across the org, and once they see what design can bring to the table, and how design could impact their objectives, how it could enable their functions, they’re fairly eager to cooperate and collaborate, and also invest in both design and research.

Peter: Where are you located within the organization, within the org chart? To whom are you reporting and who are your partners?

Gaurav: So I’m part of the larger tech team at Flipkart. I report to the chief product and technology officer at Flipkart, and my peers are some of the other product and engineering leaders in the org. So there are different views that look at different kinds of products that we’re building, like for shoppers or sellers for partners.

And my stakeholders would primarily be the product managers and engineers, but also the business leaders. And these business leaders primarily drive category functions. So they could be leaders leading one or more categories. For example, fashion or mobiles and electronics. 

Peter: You mentioned how you’re wanting to show impact, build a reputation and showing impact, but a challenge that design teams often have is demonstrating impact of their own accord, right? Because typically design’s value is realized through partnership and collaboration.

So I’m wondering how you navigated that. If your boss, the CPTO has specific expectations of you and design that you are held accountable for, like, you know, this is something we hear from a lot of design leaders, which is around, how do I demonstrate value? How do I show my impact?

Like what has that journey been like for you and clarifying design’s distinct impact?

Gaurav: Yeah. So I’m accountable for certain common company level metrics, for example. And these metrics are around customer and engagement. And also some new growth areas. The second area that I’m accountable for are a number of product metrics. And I kind of co-shared metrics with the product team members who are running some of these strategic initiatives and experiments.

And then third are like the people goals that include just the team health, how are we growing and retaining people, things like that. I also have some like more inward looking goals as part of the design team. And these tend to be around like driving more efficiency within the design team with the design system that we’re building, getting the design system adopted across different parts of the product.

And since it’s a fairly large product, the adoption is not a very straightforward activity. So we look for opportunities, you know, whenever we are updating a part of the product, we also adopt the new design system. There are also responsibilities around enabling research. And getting research to influence some of the key decisions in the org.

So there are different kinds of activities that the research team does and kind of leads ahead. We evaluate our products, but we also do some formative work, and influence the product roadmaps.

Jesse: Influencing the product roadmaps is one of these things that we hear from design leaders over and over again, that they are desperate to try to find some way to create in their organizations. And I’m curious about your thoughts about how to create that influence over the product roadmap, where is it appropriate for design to be leaning in and contributing toward these strategic decisions that, in a lot of people’s minds, technically sit outside the domain of design.

Gaurav: Interesting question. So, I don’t think there is one way to look at it. I think different products are at different points in their journey. And there are different kinds of opportunities to influence them. So, for example, if you are making incremental changes on a product, I think a lot of influencing happens in the way the designers and product managers collaborate and shape it together. 

If you’re looking at something that’s fairly new, a new initiative, something we’ve not done before, I think a lot of influencing can be done through research work and through some of the early prototyping work that we do and validate with our customers. So I think there are just different kinds of models that work in different situations.

But broadly having this thought of influencing and representing the customers in every discussion. Having that thought at the back of your minds, as a designer in these discussions, really. 

Another area that I’ve often found where designers play a key role is kind of safeguarding the customer interests and also safeguarding the design to some extent. We, we often get into discussions about where all can we highlight the offers that we have on different products? What’s the right space? What’s the right kind of tonality for it? How large should it be, et cetera. And that’s another area where I feel designers play a key role, in safeguarding the experience

Jesse: I think one of the challenges in that is engaging with audiences who don’t necessarily have design as a language, and helping them see, honestly, sometimes just see the difference between two different design directions and to be able to help them see the potential impact of that. How do you support and elevate your teams in their ability to build those bridges with people who don’t necessarily share the same language, so to speak, of design?

Gaurav: I don’t think we’ve done anything special here. I think a lot of the design awareness gets created through the discussions that we are part of, and how we present the designs, how we present the customer viewpoints. But we’ve not looked at special workshops, training programs or design thinking workshops, anything of that sort, in the organization. It’s just the collaborative style of working that kind of leads to this.

Jesse: So you keep, kind of, keeping it alive day to day, rather than kind of making these big bold statements with these big training programs or initiatives and so forth.

Peter: But kind of to that point, something I’ve been wondering is the purview of design. You know, you mentioned it’s a unified design team, one design team, product design, visual design, both UX research and market research, which to me suggests there’s a potential for design to be even broader than your boss’s organization.

Like, there could be touchpoints outside of product and technology. Maybe I’m mistaken, but, given the complexity of the ecosystem that Flipkart is operating in, there’s a lot of potential for design as a practice to influence all kinds of things, to influence… you mentioned last mile, it could be even potentially real world customer facing interactions or something, which might not be part of, you know, a product and technology group.

And I’m just wondering how you see the scope of all the things that design could touch. Are you fairly circumscribed within technology, or are you, you know, working on things outside of what would be considered typical product and technology?

Gaurav: Yeah. Well, I think if you look at purely from a product perspective and the kind of products we are building, then they tend to remain in the tech space largely. But if you look at some of the interactions that we have with our customers, so, for example, researchers and designers together often run researches with our CX teams, and we reach out to customers through them.

We go and look at how the warehouse operations work, how the delivery partners are delivering, the kind of challenges that they have, when they are operating in different kinds of environments. Tier Two cities are very different from metros in India. And what kind of challenges do these people have in navigating through the day?

So designers do go out and interact with a varied set of users. All the three sets that I mentioned earlier. But when it comes to building products, I think it still remains in the purview of what the larger tech team does at Flipkart. We do interact heavily with our business teams. We understand how they work with some of our suppliers, sellers as well.

And, what are their goals? How are they meeting their P&L goals? And we figured out innovative ways of kind of working together in this journey.

Peter: Earlier, you mentioned design-led innovation, which was a goal for you, an objective that you’ve set for the team. And I’m wondering, like, literally how that works in terms of what is necessary to make a space for your team to propose, new opportunities, new solutions, right, that might not be on anyone’s roadmap yet, right? Are you able to peel away a group of people for two or three months to have them work on something? 

Like, there’s an investment there that has to be made, right? If people are working on design-led innovation, they’re not working on the next iteration of the product experience. So like, how do you make the space to enable that and, get whatever approvals you need from your boss or whomever in recognizing that, that is a worthwhile effort?

Gaurav: Sure. So I actually feel that a lot of innovation comes when designers actually spend a lot of time with the problem at hand. So for example, if I’m a designer working on a specific project at Flipkart. And if I’m able to wrap my head around that problem together with the researcher, then I may have unique insights that will help me innovate much faster than what the rest of the org is kind of thinking about at this time.

We do create some special time as well for designers. We do what we internally call as a design jam. So this is just, it’s like a hackathon, but for designers. We give time and space to designers to come up with new ideas. We ran this one year and then we also realized that there is also like a tech hackathon that happens at Flipkart.

And so the next year, we ran this before the tech hackathon so that some of these design ideas could then feed into the tech hackathon. With that kind of a process, we are able to see something end to end. We are able to see something that got started in the design hackathon, but also got carried forward in the tech hackathon, and we were able to build a POC out for people to play with.

And once it’s tangible, people are able to react to it a little better and it also has a higher potential to to see the light of the day in the hands of the customers. So that’s an activity that we’ve been doing every year now. And it’s been quite successful so far.

Jesse: So, you know, it’s interesting what we’ve been hearing for the last couple of years from design leaders especially in North America and Europe, but I would say also to some extent in South America and in Asia as well, we’ve been hearing a lot about kind of a shift in the way the design is valued, a shift in the way the design is perceived in these organizations, and a shift in the way the design is approached in these organizations.

And it’s interesting to hear you talk about innovation, reflecting a point of view that, honestly, I think has been a mainstream point of view within the user experience community at least for a long time, which is the idea that the people who are really deeply immersed in the use cases, the people who are really in there, sleeves rolled up, crafting the interfaces are going to be your best source for insight for new opportunities to serve those audiences, because that immersion gives them a view on the problem that an external, you know, innovation lab jumping in for the first time is never going to have. 

However I feel like what I’m hearing from a lot of people is a shift away from that as a value proposition, and toward a scope of the design role that stays much more focused on delivery.

And I’m curious about what you’re seeing in the landscape in India right now, in terms of approaches to design, ways that other organizations are managing design, and where are things going these days in how design is being framed among Indian companies.

Gaurav: Great question. So when I look at the landscape in India, I, I see designers working in three kinds of companies 

The first would be companies that are building products for India from India. These are essentially product-led organizations, building core products. The second would be what are called as GCCs or Global Capability Centers. And these are essentially multinational orgs, large companies that have setups in India to tap into the rich talent pool in India. And the third would be tech and design service orgs. So these traditionally provide services to other companies. And they also employ a large set of. Designers. 

I think the work kind of differs in each of these buckets. I think the first two that I spoke about, like companies that are building products out of India and GCCs, have a very similar kind of a profile, I would say. They’re essentially focused on scaling and building product. And very similar kinds of roles exist in these organizations. you would typically have product designers, researchers, UX content writers, et cetera. I feel that the, scope of innovation also kind of varies, with the kinds of responsibilities that each of these orgs have in India.

I feel that the largest opportunity for innovation lies with the startups in India, startups that are trying to build new products, grounds up. So these are zero-to-one initiatives. And I think here the designers have the opportunities to work with the founders and the key stakeholders in that organization, and help shape the experience for the end customers. In the process also learn a lot about the business that these companies are operating in, what kind of problems are they trying to solve, figure out MVPs for products and also get into the details of actually building it. Like really, really working deeply with engineering teams because these kinds of setups tend to be small. And so designers end up wearing like multiple kinds of hats in these setups as well. 

That’s largely how I see the Indian landscape today. I think historically probably the first companies to hire design talent in India would have been the tech and design services orgs, because they’ve existed for about three decades in India. While the first set of consumer internet companies building products out of India… When we started in about 2008, 2009. And some of those entrepreneurs laid the foundation for building and designing products out of India. The designers that we have today in India also come from varied backgrounds and that’s probably very similar to how things operate in the US as well.

We have designers who have a formal education in design, some that are kind of like self taught, and some that kind of migrate from other domains of design into UX. So it could be architecture, industrial design, graphic design, etc.

There is a vibrant design community now in India, and, and these platforms and these events are a great opportunity for designers to kind of connect, share experiences, share the work that they’re doing.

Peter: What you just mentioned is, one of the values of events, right? The shared experiences, people talking with peers and sharing kind of the challenges they’re facing. And I’m wondering what you see, let’s focus it on a design leadership level, right? 

You’re a design executive, a VP of design, leading a decent sized team. I’m guessing that, you know, other people in similar roles whether in Bangalore or other parts of India, what do you all talk about when you gather, or you get on a call, or you’re messaging each other, like what are those topics among the Indian design leadership community, at least that you’re part of?

Gaurav: I think there are some things that always kind of remain the center of discussions. Some of these are around hiring and challenges around hiring. While it’s fairly easy to hire at junior levels, I think it becomes extremely challenging when it comes to senior roles and especially leadership roles in India.

I think the talent pool that exists at senior roles in India is fairly small. And with all kinds of companies operating out of India, this is a talent pool that gets a lot of attention as well. So hiring and discussing hiring challenges always is a topic of interest for people. 

The other one I would say is, it’s just about kind of sharing challenges of influencing stakeholders in different kinds of forms and the kind of challenges that people have around, sometimes, frustrations around what would enable them to do better work at their organizations and what could be the learnings out of different scenarios, different organizations.

So that’s another, topic. I recently been involved in a lot of discussions at Flipkart and also elsewhere, where I’ve seen when designers at a certain level of seniority start thinking about how they should grow further. And a typical path that they pursue tends to be the people management role and growing as a people manager. Senior IC roles are kind of missing in India at this moment. And these opportunities also kind of missing. Flipkart, we’ve laid down career paths for senior ICs and build that track as well. But I think many young start ups are not yet aware of them.

There are GCCs that have fairly well documented paths for senior ICs. They also have a lot of senior ICs in the org. So that’s another topic of interest that has recently cropped up in conversation.

Jesse: I meet a lot of design leaders who say, I’d love to elevate ICs. I just don’t know what I would do with a bunch of principal ICs now. I don’t have a place for them in my processes or in my organization. And then I end up meeting a lot senior level ICs who haven’t been set up for success because the role hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their influence hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their measures of success haven’t been defined clearly enough. And I’m curious your thoughts on how you set up a senior IC for success.

Gaurav: This was a very passionate debate that happened within the organization while we were defining this path and laying down the competencies for the senior IC track. We leveraged a lot of work and a lot of documentation that exists for senior IC engineers, actually, and architects, as part of laying down the competency for engineers.

Engineering being a slightly more mature or… across the world actually has spent a lot of time defining these roles and defining how they differ from the people management roles. So we leveraged a lot of that work. 

I see it as a technical mentorship role as opposed to people management role. And that’s the key difference in my head, at least where these people will then lead a lot of technical mentorship and large scale design operations roles as well. 

So they would, for example, anchor the design systems. They would make sure that we build coherence across very different parts of the products that we’re building, which otherwise the two designers working on them may not even think about. So helping connect the dots across different parts of design and research is how we frame the role.

Peter: Something you mentioned at the outset when you were talking about your vision for the design team was growing the people on the team. And I think that connects with what we’re discussing now. And, I’m just wondering, what are the approaches you are taking to grow people?

Is it formal, you know, classes and training? Is it quasi-formal, kind of, like mentorship, that senior ICs could do? But yeah, just how are you operationalizing growing people in your team? 

Gaurav: It’s a mix of both. So we do have some formal trainings that are led by the Learnings and Development team at Flipkart. And then we do some informal trainings from within the team. Actually last year, we spent a lot of time figuring out people from within the team who could then train a lot of other people across the team. So, for example we could have a person who’s really good with motion design. And now we want to take this skill set across a large set of designers so that we just raise our bar on motion design overall in the product. And so we’ve identified such people and enabled them to train others and kind of mentor them in this process.

Peter: You mentioned earlier the hiring challenge. And I’m wondering if that’s related to your incentive to focus on growth. Are you putting these growth plans in place? Because it’s easy to hire people with less experience, but now you need to train them up. Is this a strategy for kind of addressing this gap in the market of senior design talent that is really hard to hire. And so you’re growing them from within, or is there a different motivation?

Gaurav: No, I think we look at both areas. We look at growing people from within, as well as we constantly look at the market as well, whenever there are opportunities to hire from outside. So it’s not one versus the other, I would say, but a combination of both. We do have a large base of designers at junior levels, and a lot of training and mentorship while the senior leaders kind of run on their own, they do need training at different levels. 

For example, new people managers need training around managing people, having difficult conversations, giving feedback. Some of the more administrative work that people managers end up doing. You know, performance conversation, stuff like that. So there are different kinds of trainings based on the role and the skill sets of designers that we look at.

Peter: One thing I hear all the time, from design leaders I’m working with or design orgs I’m supporting, is they have trouble making space for junior designers, right?

They can’t hire junior designers because of the environment that they’d be bringing them in. They wouldn’t be able to support junior designers as needed, right? ‘Cause designers are expected to be embedded in teams, possibly on their own, they might not have a management structure that can bring them up.

And so, at least in North America, a lot of companies just have kind of forsaken the junior designer and start, sometimes they start at senior designer, right? You know, five to eight years experience, because they know they can just throw them at problems and not worry about them. 

It sounds like you’re taking a different approach, right? You mentioned a decent, you know population of junior designers within your organization. How intentional was that? Like some companies, that’s an intentional strategy to hire juniors and grow them up. So is that part of it? 

And, what have you put in place to make sure that you’re setting up these junior designers to succeed, that they’re not flailing and sinking, right, in the sink or swim metaphor, being given too much responsibility too soon, and then they’re struggling. 

Gaurav: Yeah, I think it’s also one of the differences between US and India. I think it’s also got to do with the kind of market dynamics and the supply of designers that exist in the market. 

So there is definitely a shortage of senior designers in India at this moment, while there is an abundance of junior designers, I would say. There are a lot of design schools now in India with… that has courses in interaction design and UX design. So, I think we are producing designers in great quantities at the moment. So it’s just easier to hire at junior levels.

In terms of you know, not letting them sink, we do pair them up with senior designers. So as they learn about the organization, learn about the business. they are able to work with senior designers, with the managers, and kind of learn the ropes, and mature in the organization. But I would say it’s just a factor of the Indian market at this moment.

Peter: In the North American market, the complaint that you hear from junior designers is like, there’s a lot of us, but no one is willing to hire us, right? So there’s something different about how many North American companies are approaching hiring because I think the conditions are not all that dissimilar where you’ve got a sizable population of potential talent. 

But whereas in North America, they’ve just kind of chosen to neglect them in hopes of hiring that senior designer, it sounds like, at least in the Indian market, there’s a recognition like we’ve got to make this work. So…

Gaurav: Yeah. And about the challenges in the US, where the junior designers complain about not having enough opportunities, I was also thinking about the organizations and how the organizations are kind of set up. 

So the designers in each of these organizations, who are they kind of collaborating with? What kind of seniority of product people are they collaborating with? For example, in my organization, if I have to collaborate with the senior product leader, then it would be really hard for a junior designer to kind of voice a design stand. And therefore, I think it’s also critical to look at the kind of setups, and the kind of stakeholders that are building this product. 

Maybe in some of these companies, there aren’t enough junior product managers as well, and therefore, the designers end up collaborating with fairly senior product leaders. So if that happens at Flipkart, for example, I’ll have a senior person, a senior designer or a lead designer or even a manager in those conversations. 

Jesse: In so many organizations, design faces a fundamental cultural gap with the people who are in control of the business. The business has its way it likes to do things. It has its way it likes to communicate. In a lot of cases, these are practices that are inherited from legacy businesses, pre-internet businesses that are now entering digital spaces.

And I didn’t hear you talk much about kind of legacy businesses and, where they fit into that landscape. But I’m really more interested in how design culture runs up against business culture in the context of your experience. And what you notice about the challenge of bridging that gap. 

Gaurav: I think designers are traditionally not great with business, and it’s also got to do with how designers are trained in design schools. For example, business schools have adopted design thinking as part of their curriculum. 

There’s very little business exposure that designers get when they get trained. And often this seems to be at odds, business thinking, and the way kind of designers approach a problem. But actually in large companies, I think both need to work together fairly closely. And it’s important for designers to build that business acumen as well, to understand this company in the space that it operates in.

What makes a business successful? How’s the company generating revenue? What are the levers for the company to make profit, etc. And I think that background helps designers actually design better and helps designers collaborate better with business folks. If designers only take the user perspective and don’t look at the business, I think that’s where kind of conflicts arise.

But if they are able to effectively wear both these hats, the hat with which they are able to think user first and also think about the business, I think that’s where really powerful products emerge. 

Jesse: Couldn’t agree more.

Peter: Towards the beginning, you mentioned how you like to keep your hand in for lack of a better word, the craft, the details, right? You mentioned the visual design, the interaction design, the research, understanding what’s going on in those details, but given, the conversation we’ve had since and just now, talking about business, business culture, relating to the business, right, you only have so much time in your days and so many days in a week, and you have to figure out where it is most valuable for you to spend your time. 

And I’m wondering, particularly you’ve been in this role now for three or four years, right? Almost four years, how spending your time has evolved over these past four years, and kind of what that trajectory has been like, have there been themes or stages of your leadership since starting at Flipkart and, where are you now in that evolution?

Gaurav: Yeah, there have definitely been very distinct stages. I joined Flipkart in the midst of the COVID lockdown. And when I joined, it was a very inward-looking journey that I initially took. Inward-looking as in inward-looking towards the design team Fixing issues and gaps within the design team.

I also felt that there were certain parts of the product that needed attention. So for example, the core navigation of the product and how we laid out the core navigation for our users, it was kind of in different parts of the screen. And I thought that we were not enabling users to build habit on our product, and not letting them use Flipkart with ease. So these were some of the areas that I focused on heavily. 

Also some parts of visual design. So we ended up changing the typeface that we used on Flipkart. We ended up uplifting our visual design language through the design system that we were building.

And these were immediate changes that everyone in the org and hopefully our customers could also look at, and reflect that. Just looking at the team, I think they were just areas of, for example, building our competencies, figuring out a track for senior ICs, defining that career ladder, defining how we wanted to use competencies, not just for reviewing and for performance, but also for hiring.

So these were some of the initiatives that I took early on. And I think once some of these elementary things, I would say, kind of settled, that’s when I started engaging more deeply with, especially, with the business stakeholders. I don’t think in a product org, you can live without engaging with the tech stakeholders, but definitely with business stakeholders, the engagement kind of increased also, the ending of COVID lockdown had a big role as well because then it was easier to meet people face to face, bump into them and have these conversations.

Peter: And so what stage are you at now in your leadership journey at Flipkart? You mentioned starting with, like, managing down, getting the best out of the team. Once that’s settled, you kind of look up and out a bit more and partner with those business stakeholders. Are you still in that phase, or is there almost like a lean forward now, almost four years in, like, are you at a different point in your journey here?

Gaurav: Yeah, no, I think there’s definitely a lean forward. We are looking at creating more strategic impact. We are also looking significantly redesigning certain parts of the experience. We’re in a space that’s constantly evolving. So we are also creating new products for our customers.

We’re getting into quick commerce and how do we look at these kinds of experiences. Satisfying customer needs in a very short time. So there are different kinds of areas now that we are looking into and playing an active role in building these in a, in a fairly delightful manner, I would say.

Jesse: Gaurav, what are you looking forward to in this next phase for design?

Gaurav: I think I would like to see the Indian startup ecosystem kind of mature and grow and also design create a larger impact in this journey. Flipkart is a large player in this space, but I think there are also a lot of other companies doing some really good work in India.

And I think there is a huge opportunity for designers to design for Indian needs. India is a very, very diverse country. We have a population of about 1.45 billion, but it’s actually made up of many different Indias. We have 22 recognized languages in India, and we have diversity in terms of the affluence, in terms of technical savviness.

We still have people in India who are just experiencing the Internet for the first time on their mobile devices, and so their trust levels with the platform are quite different from someone who’s been using lot of digital products for a fairly long time. 

For example, there is a small population in India, which is primarily in the urban centers of India, okay, that behaves very similar to Californians, in terms of how they use digital products and the ease with which they use digital products and the frequency at which they use digital products. And at the same time, there is a population in Tier Two, Tier Three, and rural parts of India that is very different in terms of their taste preferences, rootedness in the Indian culture, and trust on the platforms. So it’s a very diverse space. There are lots of problems for designers to really solve for. And I would love to see more digital products built out of India and addressing these needs.

Jesse: Love it. Thank you so much.

Gaurav: Thank you. Jesse. Peter, for having me on the podcast.

Jesse: Where can people find you if they want to know more about you?

Gaurav: LinkedIn would be the best place. I do have a website that I don’t update very frequently, but that would be the other word other way to reach out to.

Jesse: All right. Thank you so much.

Peter: Thank you,

Gaurav: Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter.

Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.