What is this document?

We hosted a deepdive on user research with Karthi S (Sr. design director, Salesforce) & Abhinav Chikara (Founder, 10Kdesigners), hosted by Abhiav Krishna (Head of design, RazorpayX & Razorpay capital) , where we covered the nuances of the role of design in PLDC, how can PMs and designers collaborate better.

This was a super actionable and interesting conversation, and this document is a summary of the conversation.

Before we begin, a little about our guests:

Karthi S

Karthi comes with 25+ years of experience in the industry across various fields like design, research and tech. She’s currently a Senior Design Director at Salesforce, where she leads the Sales Cloud User Experience.
Before this, she worked as a principal group design manager at Microsoft where she was leading Customer Success and Storytelling Collective at Microsoft IDC.
Apart from this, she loves sharing her idea of design from a practitioner's point of view at MIT, Pune and NID Ahmedabad as a Visity faculty. She taught Semiotics, Cognition, Human Behaviors, Human Machine Interface and Strategic Design at these schools.

Abhinav Chikara

Abhinav is the founder of 10Kdesigners where he’s building a platform aimed at nurturing and advancing the careers of the next generation of UI/UX designers. Before launching 10kdesigners, Chhikara held a pivotal role as the Head of Design at Unacademy, an ed-tech unicorn, where he went from solo designer leading the design team as unacademy scaled.
Apart from this, Abhinav is a best-selling author! He has co-authored the book Pyjama Profit, which provides guidance for freelancers looking to build sustainable careers in the gig economy.

Abhinav Krishna (Moderator)

Abhinav is an OG GrowthX member and an OIR. He has 11+ years of experience of working in design & product teams at ClearTax, AgriFi and Microsoft. He’s currently the head of design at RazorpayX and Razorpay Capital.

We covered 2 main topics in the session:

1. How do you go about conducting effective user research?
2. How do you convert your findings into insights?

In this document, we're going the cover the questions asked, and a summary of answers given by panelists.

What is the role of design?

What is design?

Everything is design, either incidentally or accidentally.

Whenever we do something to make lives better. If something is designed, that means that there is an intention to make lives better.

Design at it's very core is going from a idea to a reality. There is some outcome that you want to create in the world, be it a image, video, graphic etc. The medium of the outcome might change, but outcome is constant.

While going from an idea to reality, you'll go through the process of diverging and converging. While looking for ways to make that idea a reality, you'll diverge and explore all the possibilities of how to make that happen. Once you have decided what needs to be done, you converge back, execute and make it happen.

This entire process, is design.

Where does design fit in the product development lifecycle and what value does it add?

There are 4 distinct places where it adds value:

1. Value thinking - strategic design
2. Value creation - collaborative design
3. Value delivery - the execution phase
4. Value communication - working with PMMs, marketing, sales teams

A lot of it is 0-1 thinking. For eg. this quarter we need to get our referral rates up. Now in this case, PMs might have a perspective, designers might have another but exploring the full scope of possibility of how a problem might be solved without narrowing it down to the first possibility is what design is.

When does great design translate into great business, and how?

If design doesn't translate into great business, then it's not great business

Every design that you do, should ideally translate into great business.

Here we need to understand the difference between art and design.

A very tangible way to look at it is the AARRR framework. As a feature does your design help:

acquire, activate, retain (constantly deliver value), revenue (first time or recurring), referrals (are you able to design features that people love and would invite others to experience)

What are the dimensions in which you can measure design?

If design is playing a good role, then it should have solved a problem. The ability to think about it from an unmet and unarticulated needs perspective is the demarkation of a good design

2x2 for good design

If we have crossed and really understood the human needs and wants, we call them as desirability. If we able to meet the human desirability and constantly exceed it, that's good design.

A lot of of it is understanding complexity.

Tesler's law states that in every system there is some level of complexity that can't be removed.

Now in design, Tesler's laws apply. In design, there is a certain level of complexity in the system that a designer must account for.

As a designer, you need to able to account for these complexities and solve for them. Otherwise, later in the flow user goes "Oh what is happening", "Oh I can't move backwards or forwards".

How do you push designers to be better at their craft?

TO understand this better, we take help of architecture

These 3 types of design come together to make interface design, as we call it.

So it's not like "oh this is italian marble, I love it". It's not just the Italian marble, but a lot more that makes a house beautiful. Similarly, not a single type of design makes design better, it's a combination of all.

Next comes the experience. You can have the most beautifully designed house, but you need to pour in love to make it a home.

Similarly, there are a lot of intangible, incomprehensible, invisible things called as experience. From a cognitive science perspective, it's called perception. There are 3 types of percpetions:

1. Viceral perception
2. Visual perception
3. Reflective perception

When you impact a human, you have cracked the reflective perception, which is were good design lies.

It's not just how it looks, but also how it works

What should the ideal model of collaboration look like between PMs and designers?

How strong is the engg team, then I'll design accordingly

A very simple design means that all the complexity and heavy-lifting needs to be done by the engineering team. Hence, to have a great design team, you need to have a great engineering team.

This is a highly collaborative effort, the the entire triad (product, engg, design) needs to be super solid.

Design teams are sandwiched between the product and engineering teams - If product teams are not able to bring in the voice of customer in terms of the strategy, roadmap etc - then design team won't be able to support?

While the virtual setting is the default one after covid, but there's nothing like having good energy in the room. What takes about 8 hours in a virtual setting can easily be done in less in an in-person setting.

The triad should be a safe space

Anyone should be able to go and say "Hey, this is a crazy idea I had, what do you think about it?". If it's a safe space, the response is "Hey, this is not a crazy idea, let me build on top of it.".

In an unsafe place, you'll always think about survival and not collaboration.

If it's not collaboration, it becomes coordination.

Be tuned to different working styles. When it comes to designers, there are different kinds of designers, like mentioned above.

When it comes to product managers, there are PM data-driven highly analytical product managers. And at the same time, there are PMs that focus more on the process than the outcome.

You need to be extremely mindful of the matching styles, what is going to work in the given situation, who do you pair with who so that the system works and you achieve an outcome.

How do you inculcate product-thinking in teams?

In the agentic world, there will be no PMs and UX.

A lot of times we speak about data-driven decision making, but while creating a greenfield solution you don't have enough data with you. That's when intuition and first principle thinking comes into picture.

As human being, we collect dots only by going forward and be connect dots only by going backwards.

Maintaining a balance between collecting and connecting the dots will help teams collaborate and get quicker answers.

When the time is not right, instead of spending time reviewing a screen if you take the first principles approach - that will help everyone develop product thinking skillset.

The single most important thing is understanding the human being. Humans have not changed in the past 100 years, won't change for the next 100 years. All the systems are created in service of the humans, and hence understanding human behaviours is of the utmost importance.

There are 2 parts to it:

Solving the right problem

A lot of this is discovery - what's the problem, who is facing this problem, how are other companies solving this problem etc

A lot of this is negation as well, it's about knowing what don't you want to solve.

Solving the problem right

Once you have a problem statement defined, you converge on certain specific solutions. This has a lot to do with threading the needle. How can you go about executing in way that you cover everything and nothing falls apart.

Recommend 3 things that PMs and designers should do better

1. Visual thinking: If you're good at visuals but not good at visual thinking - then you'll end up writing one pagers
2. Language: language shapes the occurring. Having a shared language helps in collaboration
3. Have some diffuse time with your colleagues: Spending more time with each other helps develops the relationship. If your chill time is not good with someone, your focus time is going to suffer
4. Know when to go broad and narrow, and communicate accordingly: If a PM wants something specific, say you want something specific. Designers love going broad - but if that was not the assignment, both sides end up not feeling happy about it. PMs who haven't worked with good designers often take a conservative approach, but those have have take the broad approach.
5. Wireframing: Instead of sending screenshots from all apps, PMs should learn how to wireframe to be able to better explain the solution in their heads