Episode 8: Effective Design Ops & Management with Sunit Sharma, Senior Manager Product Design at SPH
51:16 Share

Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core.

Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year. Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest who is working in UX design.

Good evening everyone. Today I'm excited to have our guest Sunit who is based here in Singapore but was previously based in India. So Sunit is in design operations and I'll be getting him to share a little bit more about his work, how he got into product design and a little bit more about design operations as well. But let me please introduce him for a little. Sunit is

a product designer with an academic background in design, business and innovation. And he specializes in visual interaction, design, strategy and leading teams. So he has been a leadership role for the last five years and has been helping other designers to grow as better individuals and designers.

So currently at the Singapore Press Holdings, SPH, I believe he works with the media team, the one handling all the newspapers. He works with the senior leadership across the Origination to Drive Digital Transformation.

advocates for a user-centered design culture in various teams, and delivers UX strategy for various publications, publication products, and experiments. He also facilitates the UX practice through workshops, manages project timelines, and mentors his talented team.

So welcome to the show, Sunit. How has Singapore been treating you so far? Thanks for the warm welcome and introduction, Daryl. It's amazing to be here and I can see there's a lot of amazing folks here. I'm excited to answer all the questions about Singapore. Yeah, it's been an amazing journey, I would say.

A lot of things I got to learn from different cultural background and the design community as well. So yeah, I've been lucky to get into Singapore five years back and started working for amazing companies. And now I work with this media giant, which is SPH, and some amazing digital transformation work is going on. Lucky to be part of this.

And yeah, we have heard about the news, we have heard about the separation of the media entity from the original holding company. Seems like a lot of changes and a lot of exciting things are going on. Why don't let's start with you telling us a little bit about what's your main role at work and what are you usually busy with?

Sure thing. Yeah, I mean, and some of us know about Singapore Press Holdings, including Taron, but some of us don't know. So let me give you a little background about SPH. SPH is a public limited company at this point of time, and we have multiple products. So media is one of the oldest and primary business. And beside that, we have other business units as well, including telecom, real estate, and magazines and whatnot.

So currently, at this point of time, I take care of the media business unit where I help designers and I help the publications to design user experience and the entire Omni channel experience for the brands.

And when I say I, it's the entire team. We have a multicultural and multi-diverse team all the way from creative technologists, interaction designers, product designers, and user researchers. And then I come in as a product design manager.

So my day looks like this, you know, I generally start with design feedback in the morning, get into a couple of meetings where we see what's happening in the product and then get into some experimentations if there are any experimentations going on and then get into sprint meetings and get into other product meetings and I also

go on a lot of one-on-ones every week with every designer. So just to make sure I kind of help them in case if they are blocked on something, also make sure we discuss the vision and career path for them. That's what I generally do in SPH. And there's whole lot of things I do which we can quickly discuss afterwards.

But to give a little bit more background, which I think I haven't told, we have three different divisions in SPH Media, which is magazines, radio and newspapers, which is publications. Some of the publications are really, really old, like 175 years old, 80 years old. So there's a lot of heritage comes with the entire thing.

product and there's a lot of responsibility on us as designers, as the product owners, as a whole company, right?

So, I can get into a little bit more specifics about publications. We have Street Times and we have Business Times, we have Zaba for Chinese language, we have Tamil Murasu for Tamil, we have Parita Harian for Malay language and we have other publications like for children's. So, yeah, that's how wide the products are actually. And there are a couple of other products as well, but I can just go on and go on, you know.

So yeah. So you've been working there at SPH for several years right now and I was just wondering what kind of challenges

do you face working for a bigger organization like SPH versus like in the past where you were working in startups, right? As I understand you're working in India for various startups. What's the difference between working in a large organization versus like a startup? So I think one important difference is when we work in a bigger company, our business strategy is aligned with the corporate strategy, right? Because we have multiple business units.

And to make sure we achieve what company wants to achieve, we have to work on our roadmaps, either it is a design roadmap or a product roadmap. And most of the times we cannot go wrong because we

kind of plan for a couple of quarters down the line, right? Sometimes we talk about 2022 and 2023, right? Our strategies are sometimes that long. We have macro and macro both strategies. So just to make sure that we don't go wrong, we do a lot of research. We do a lot of investigation into it and before coming to any sort of a conclusion.

So, which doesn't mean that it doesn't give any kind of flexibility due to a lot of experiments. It's just we have to be really, really cautious because if anything goes wrong on our publication side or on our design side, it becomes a big news, right? So, that's one thing to be careful of, what we are, the way we have structured our entire strategy process. And with startups, you know, the good thing is you can revisit your...

business strategy, design strategy and product strategy on and off depending upon the market change and trend change because you would not have a heavy resource team sitting at the back doing a lot of market research and user research and coming up with a lot of data insights. So that doesn't happen in startups, right? And you can revisit if things go wrong or things tend to change, right? So that's one of the biggest difference I feel.

on a very high level. Well, thank you for sharing that earlier. I mean, it's really great that you highlighted to us that in a bigger company, you need to be a little bit more conscious and careful. So you actually do a bit more research and then start up your little bit more fluid to the market dynamics and changes. Not that you don't plan, it's just that you're more flexible in terms of what is going on. Maybe you don't have such an ultra long-term view, unlike in a much bigger business.

I think we discussed briefly like because of your nature, right? Of your role as a manager, but also because of your understanding of business, how important is it for designers to understand business so they can design better? Yeah, this is an amazing question. To be frank, there's been a quote in the industry from some years, right? I'm sure a lot of us in this meeting have heard that

Designers don't have a seat on the table, right? So designers, when you want to have a seat on the table, you need to know a lot of things. The pixels and the wireframes and UX process doesn't work sometimes. It can go beyond and how do you connect your dots with other business units, right?

So in business, what you should exactly know, it's a very broad question. And I would like to give a couple of hints today. If you can know as much as a business, how does it work, that would be great. But when it comes to very complex business units and very complex business structures, it's very difficult, right?

But what I can do today is I can give you a couple of hints what you can actually go through, some key KPIs, some key metrics, you know, if you can ask your stakeholders, it might help you, you know. So the first thing is what you should know is what is a business model canvas and if there is a business model canvas in your company, can you actually read that and understand and I'm sure it is very easy to read if you have it in front of you.

If you don't have that's fine because the business model canvas is so easy you can actually fill it up with couple of your stakeholders. That's one of the important I would say tool to know. And second tool is business model or DC 3.14 basically it's a business model innovation

what is important there is a value proposition value architecture and profit equation so these are three things you would like to know I know I'm talking like a businessman now talking like an MBA grad but yeah as soon as you google these terms and you find those frameworks it's going to be really easy I'm telling you

Then a couple of other things like if you can know what is your customer's willingness to pay is also a very important thing to understand that can give you a lot of insights while you're designing it.

One important thing is if you can actually learn or read your company's annual reports, that would give a whole lot of insights. That's more than enough. But if I have to go with some more points, it could be corporate strategy, which is again very important tools. Every company doesn't have a corporate strategy, they have a business strategy.

So if you know business strategy, corporate strategy, that's great. If you know business case studies, if you can go to HBR, Harvard Business Review, you can actually buy some business case studies and it's going to help a lot. And you will understand what is the competitive advantage of various companies. Like why Starbucks is successful and what is their competitive advantage? How did they win?

Right. And I'm sure there's a lot of other strategies available in HPR. Even HPR strategies are also available there.

Could you perhaps give us an example that you have used previously? Because you mentioned quite a few frameworks that as designers, we are encouraged not to master, but to understand a little bit better and to use as part of our work as a designer or as a design leader. So how have you personally applied any one of these things that you mentioned? Sure. So I would like to say that a couple of months back, we have been working

talking to one of the companies, I cannot name the company, but we were supposed to present some innovation business ideas where we can possibly collaborate together and start giving publications to them. But the idea is they don't want a physical paper, they don't want a digital paper, okay, what kind of solutions can come up with? So this was for our business stakeholders, this was a very difficult situation to answer, right, sometimes because

You don't have any product like this. And how can we give them a solution now? So when we go with them as designers, when we tag along with our business stakeholders and we go into meetings, we kind of understand what is the main reason why they would like to have a unique product like this.

So after asking a lot of questions, we came to a conclusion that Business Model Canvas would be one of the best tools to use and we have used it. And after using Business Model Canvas, we invented two things. What would be the business model for the entire product and how we're going to make money and what will be the key channels and who will be the key competition and what the product would look like eventually.

So business model canvases sometimes we use quite often, I would say. So it sounds like you use a tool called business model canvas to help clarify some of the things that were in the heads of your stakeholders. And with that clarity, your design team could actually pursue that idea with more confidence. Am I hearing it correctly? Exactly.

Yeah. Okay, that's great. So let's talk a little bit about strategy. We're talking about business strategy versus corporate strategy. In your definition, how are they different? So some companies are very complex in nature because they have various products under their umbrella, right? And a complicated company like SPH or even Google, they have a lot of businesses, right? And every business has their own business strategy to succeed.

And all these business strategies of different business units have to merge to a corporate strategy. It should align with the corporate strategy and it should align with it. So, for example, my corporate strategy is for, I'm just hypothetically saying that, you know, company XYZ wants to make money.

$1 billion in next three years, that's my corporate strategy. And there are a couple of more. I'm just giving an example. And other business unions could actually contribute to reach that $1 billion goal, right? All the business unions cannot have different business strategies and it doesn't align with corporate strategy. It doesn't make sense, right? To make sure the entire company as a group succeeds,

So all the business units should work together as individual units and achieve that one billion goal. So in this case where most of our audience members over here are product managers or UX designers, I was just wondering what kind of role should we play in helping achieve the strategic goals of the company? Okay. The reason why I've been talking about

business model canvas or willingness to pay or all these business models which I just spoke a couple of minutes back. I'm not asking everyone to know what is it exactly and how does it work. Sometimes it gets a little complex but as soon as you scan through it, you know what is there in the framework and

and what is the value we have to bring onto the table. For example, just coming back to ABC example or XYZ example, just now I gave $1 billion, right? And that's an entire high-level corporate strategy and every business unit has some goals to achieve. Some business unit might say that, hey, I can actually target for $250 million in sales. Let me try that at least. So the product designers and product managers can actually work together to make

make the feature roadmap or product roadmap which actually can generate a lot of revenue, a lot of conversion to the business and actually aligns to your corporate strategy or business strategy, right?

So that's how you as a designer and a product manager can help to the entire group and the entire company. I know as a designer, a lot of times we talk about experience, we talk about usability issues, accessibility issues, those things will remain. I think we should definitely focus on that. We should not deviate from there, but our core product roadmap should also align with the entire strategy.

So what I hear is corporate strategy being sort of like this big umbrella with business strategy for each of the business units.

and having the appropriate product strategy that supports the business strategy. And of course, being the designer or being the product manager, our goal is to help either to optimize the experience so that we hit certain numbers to meet the goal of the company. So yeah, I think that is very clear to me. And I think it's also good that you're speaking about business because one of the things I often hear from

our guest instructors from the school that we run is that designers could definitely learn a little bit about talking about the business impact of their work, right? Would you agree? How do you train your juniors to talk about business impact or do you even encourage them to talk about business impact? Yes, of course. I think one of the important things a lot of times what we forget as designers, including me, when I was a junior designer, I used to talk about experience, how can we give

value to the user and whatnot, which is a great thing, but you cannot on the same side, you cannot forget what is business value, right? And that's how you get paid as a salary, as bonuses and whatnot, right? And how can you make sure that the user's need, user's experience doesn't hamper even the business experience doesn't hamper? And there's a very sweet spot actually, you can come there through this.

And to do so, there are some KPIs we should know as a designer. Like if my goal is to achieve $1 billion after end of this year, let's say zero for a second, and to reach there, what kind of key metrics is important for my product manager actually?

And you don't have to make a KPI, it's just your product managers and business owners are already making a KPI. It's just you make sure you go and talk to them. What is the current KPI? How the KPI is affecting after my design got released? Is there any effect or not?

So I hope I answered the question. You did. And I think what you simply did was to say, maybe I don't know everything as a designer about the KPI, but then I'm going to tell you what I know about the KPI and how my work

affects the KPI from my perspective. You know right there are thousands of KPIs and as a designer I'm sure you don't want to get into all those details and know what is it exactly. But what is your current KPI of the product or the business? At least if you know those four or five numbers and how does it work, what kind of impact it gives, that's more than enough. And to teach that, product managers, business unit owners can actually help you.

So we have a question from the audience and the audience member mentioned, what are your views on founded by a designer or being design centered or being a design first company to what now seems to be a bit unpopular and has evolved to be a more business driven company? Because perhaps startups are all about passion. You've worked in startups yourself, right? And sometimes they start with that passion and the design, you know, like, oh, it's users first.

But as the startup kind of grows up, they need to be a little bit more business driven. You know, what was your experience going through that? And do you have any thoughts or comments? So I was working for a company called Exploride back in India. It was a very futuristic product, which we were actually making a heads up display for cars. And it was sold in the US and other parts of the Western world. And then we started talking with our investors.

My founder was not there in India. He flew to US for other meetings and he stayed there for six months. And now I was a single point of contact with investors and I kind of learned a lot from them because whenever I used to go to investors, whenever I used to talk about the design strategy and how we're going to save lives and how we're going to

help the user to try better and things like that. Those are secondary questions. It is important, definitely. But how can I get my money back? What is the return out of it, right? So for investors, that's one of the important things. And unfortunately, that's going to remain like that.

And luckily, there are a lot of investment companies which focus on design, the design led investment companies where they invest in design as well. I'll give you a classic example. So Tinder's competitive advantage is not matchmaking. Tinder's competitive advantage is design. The swipe left and right. That is a competitive advantage. That is design. Airbnb's competitive advantage initially was design. Even till now, it is design, right?

You can be actually both at the same time. It can be a design-led company plus a business-led company as well. And that's what I was talking about to come at a sweet spot where you solve business problems and user problems together. Yeah, and how do you do that without losing your soul?

Yeah, I mean, okay, when I work on very crucial products or features, when I hear from product managers and owners that, you know, we have to cut down a lot of features because of business need, because of technical needs and all that, I don't have to get emotional on that because it's business, right? But the kind of questions what I ask them is important. Like, if not today, when next? Is it going to release in second release?

or is it in third release or fourth release right when the day is going to come right and what are we tracking actually what are the numbers we're tracking

Yeah, I mean just ask right questions and just keep following up on the designs for example if I release my design today and keep tracking the numbers if the numbers are going high that's great and then go and push your stakeholders tell it hey the numbers are going high which means there is a lot of demand of this product of this feature let me improve it now.

I like your approach of not taking it too personally and the fact that you have this sense of optimism whereby, "Hey, actually, if everyone's doing well, it's also good for the design team," right? Because that means more resources being channeled to the design team. Right. I really like that approach. So you mentioned something about design operations. That's a big part of what you do currently at your work.

So can you maybe share a little bit what is your definition of design operation and how do you know when you have done it well? Yeah, sure. So here I would like to be really frank. See, design operations is...

not very prevalent in the Asian market. I mean, I'm not saying there's none of the companies which are using design operations. There are a lot of amazing companies which are using design operations. It's just design operations has to be used at the right time and for the right problem. And when your team grows from more than 10 to 15 designers, I think personally, I feel

If your team is more than 15 designers, then you should kick in your design operations team and you kick in start hiring design operations people who can actually solve things.

The other way is you can actually hire design operations from the beginning if you have enough budgets, if you have enough money to spend and grow the team from the beginning. But, you know, LNG has an amazing definition, amazing diagram of design operations where they do amazing work. Like for me, I would not say I touch all the aspects of

design operations but let me give you a little brief background about how NNG does. NNG has three different parts like how we work together, how we get the work done and how to create work impact and under that, under these three things there are a lot of different functions and a lot of different components which can be used.

Like for example, design system is one of the examples, creating principles, defining metrics, training, softwares, acquisition of new tools, icons, illustrations, estimation, asset management, and like career growth, onboarding, hiring, it can go long.

So what I personally as a design manager at SPH, the operations part, what I take care of is definitely hiring. And we are hiring for a couple of more roles in future. Like we're hiring for researcher, designer and elite designer with some sort of an experience in management as well. So hiring is one of the important roles what I take care of in SPH. And I've been hiring like since two years now in SPH.

and I have to make sure what is the growth path and I cannot just hire them and keep them and ask them to work. I have to create a roadmap of their growth before even they join, right? And what is their 60 day plan? What is their 90 day plan as soon as they come and join the company?

These are a few areas what I work on and design system is something we are working on as you know our products are very complex and We are doing little experiments on design system for various products and it's going pretty well So on a nutshell, I would say in design system. We're doing hiring on boarding properly and we are creating a clear roadmap of growth for designers and we are doing design systems and

Yeah. So it sounds like based on what you just described, design operations involve thinking about how the people, the assets, the system, or you could call the process, how it can actually scale well as the team is growing or as the business is growing. So let me, I think one of the, what is design operations according to me, what I personally feel is if you can free up your designer's time, if you can free up your researcher's time, not doing the admin work like

Finding icons, signing up for some software, going into five hours long meetings, getting the feedback from stakeholders. And if you can make their workflow process really simple for researchers and designers, that's the best thing. That's what design operations is all about.

I like what you just explained and I do believe it answered a question we have in the audience where someone was asking about whether design is a function versus like design as a team and all that. So I'm going to take it that we answered that question. And if needed, please let us know if you need clarity on that.

So you mentioned in our brief chat that there were three things to consider to be effective at DesignOps. I'm not sure if you actually covered that. Was there something you wanted to mention, the three things you consider to be effective at DesignOps? Well, it all depends upon the context and the company and the size and the culture and how UX mature the company is, right?

But for me, if I have to pick three things, I would pick first is design systems because I want designers to work on problem solving skills, then pushing the pixels and then recreating the same designs every now and then.

Second is I want to make the hiring, onboarding and growth path of the designers really smooth because that's your core pillar, right? And third is design advocacy. How can this design operations team can create a space where the design team can actually share the success stories to the entire head of departments and the entire company? These are three things I would say is very important.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, system, people and advocacy. That's super important. Out of these three things, what do you think people pay the least attention to when it comes to digital transformation? That's going to be a risky question to answer, to be frank.

Yeah, I'm sure it varies for each company, but then that's... What do you feel like people could do better, based on your own experience? I think if the hiring process is being smoothened, that'd be great.

See, the problem is at this point in time when we hire designers, we want the best, right? We want designers to know everything. We want them to know research. We want them to be a storyteller. We want to have some sort of a business experience as well to share some KPIs and to be part of it.

And that is a big challenge here, right? You cannot get a journalist who can do everything with two years of experience or one year of experience. When designers come to me and then when they ask these questions, I need to go for this interview, what should I do? And they've been asking me these questions. So what I've learned from them is it's very difficult to crack interviews these days.

But one core thing what is important is you need to hire people who have the right attitude, who are coachable, who have the intention to spend extra time and effort to learn something new and put it in company's design and value. So that's what I feel, you know.

And that is missing. People are more transactional these days. They want designers to know everything. Fit for one year or two years experience. Which is really tough because we are in a market where there's actually not enough supply of good talent, which is a problem we are solving as a school as well, where we try and train people up as much as possible so that responsibility doesn't completely fall on the manager who is going to hire the person.

I want to add one thing here, sorry. I was talking to one of the recruiter friend in the Europe and what he said is, I think he was hiring for some top three companies in Europe. He said the demand is really high, okay? Really, really high at this point of time. But the supply is high as well, but the gap is not filling. The positions are empty and people are not hiring. And that's a very sad part to be in.

Did he actually mention why it's not kind of like matching together even though there seems to be a lot of talent around? So this is one of the reasons, you know, as companies want them to do a lot of things, mostly a startup or a mid-level companies, they want them to do a lot of things.

mostly in interviews, they kind of assess the designers on all kind of skill sets. And it's just hard. You cannot get all the skill sets in just one person. It's very difficult. And we have to create a balance in the team, right? There are some extroverts, there are some introverts, there are some thinkers, there are some doers, there are some researchers who can be a good designer as well. So if it is a mix of good

like-minded people of various interests, it would be a solid team. But if you have 10 different designers with all the same thinking, they all are good at thinking, but no one is good at visual design, then the company is or the product is going to nowhere, right? So that balance is very important.

Yeah, I really like the fact that you mentioned about diversity, which is also something we believe a lot. When we train our students, they all come from very diverse backgrounds and we get them to work together on real projects. And that also imitates what it's like in real life where hiring managers actually hire very diverse people who are different people.

We do have a question from the audience who is asking you what's your typical week like? Because you mentioned earlier on your typical day, which sounds like you have a lot of meetings to attend. So what's your typical week like?

Okay, so first thing, let me try to share as much details as possible. So first thing what I do is I have at least five to six one-on-one sessions with my designers. And in these one-on-one sessions, I discuss all about their personal and professional life and their career growth path as well.

And second is I have rare occasions of one on ones with my product managers as well to just understand what's happening in their product. Is there something new which is coming in? I need to help you with any resource. And third is how is your product roadmap going on? Why it is delayed? If it is delayed, how can I help you?

The fourth part is there's a lot of meetings going on right so we have more than 12 products and at any given upon at the time there's 30 to 35 different projects running so I might have to jump into multiple important meetings at the same point of time so half an hour of a legend this waiting half an hour of legend another meeting and

I also talk to researchers. We have a very small research team. We have one lead researcher and we have one researcher. And I do catch up with them and to understand how can I help them and how can we grow our research process. And beside that, I also meet quite often with my stakeholders from various departments just to make sure everything is going smooth and I hope they don't have any complaints with the design team or product team.

I have this title of design manager, but I still like to be hands-on. So I have my own product. When I say own product, it's product for sure. It's one of the most strategic projects I'm working on. Whenever I get some time, I jump onto Figma and try to design something and present it to my CPO and other product managers and get a buy-in from there and move on.

And a lot of times I also help my designers to create buy-in decks. What is a buy-in deck? Buy-in deck is basically when you design something, you have designed with a lot of passion, a lot of insights, but it isn't Figma, right? And the deck is not that great, okay?

So how do you structure your deck? So I help designers there as well. So this is what I do on a weekly basis. And I'm sure I miss a lot of things. Yeah, I think that sounds like a pretty productive kind of like week. I was just wondering, are there any like distinctions or anything special? For example, you know, what's it like working with a newsroom or journalists, for example, which I'm sure they are also working.

stakeholders and influences of your product. Do you sense anything different from working with journalists? Apparently, you know, they have a very good eye for design actually. Their content is really good, you know, because they're writers eventually, right? They write stories, they write articles, they write news journalism, right?

And we're going to get a lot of help from them when we create our UX writing or when we are stuck at copywriting sometimes. They are not copywriters though, but we get a lot of help from them.

So most of the times they are one of our allies actually who actually helps us do a lot of buy-ins. For example, just a year back when we were doing redesign for straight times and our focus was on content. How can we make sure the content comes out really well through design, right? And content team journalists and designers have worked together and achieved it really well, I would like to say. Yeah.

And when it comes to designing products that are editorial in nature, is there anything we need to pay special attention to as designers? Especially products that are very content heavy. Yes, being a content company, the focus should be on content, right? And while we are designing, we have to make sure that the product, the content is coming out well and people are able to read as much content as they want.

So, for example, we cannot create a TikTok kind of a design where there's only one story in the homepage. We want to give an immersive experience for user. They can see a lot of content on a single page. When I say a lot, I mean definitely there's a sweet spot here. There cannot be 50 articles in one page. So, yeah, that kind of strategy we have to work with editorial team.

Right, so it sounds like there needs to be sort of like a balance between the complexity of the content as well as how it appears, right? Because you want...

People to immediately be able to glance through everything but not to the extent whereby it overwhelms them as well. Exactly. Yeah, so that sounds fair. Earlier you mentioned something about presenting better as designers and you're helping a lot of your designers present their work better to stakeholders and someone asked a similar question. So how can designers especially junior designers improve the way they present their work day-to-day meetings?

So there are multiple school of thoughts here. My school of thought is be structured and create a deck. Okay, I love decks. And it's not like I've learned this 10 years back. I've learned it recently, a couple of years back, three years back to be precise. And the reason why decks is because you don't know who's your stakeholder.

Sometimes this tech can go to the CEO, sometimes this tech can go to the designer, product manager, marketing department, strategy department. So think like an audience, right? Your users are entire company, right? How do you create a tech which can be understood for a customer service executive to the CEO? So that's first. Keep that in mind and then design your tech.

so make sure you have basic things like a little context about the project most of times earlier i used to not include the context why i have designed this you know so first this context is important

and what is the problem in the context and what were the ways you solve that problem through design. That is important and also give some options. Hey, this is the proposed design, but I actually worked on these designs as well. Then the reason why these designs are not good because it's not scalable, it's not tech friendly or whatever the reasons you want to mention. And then when you show a proposed design, also write reasons why it is a proposed design.

because it is more scalable, because it is mobile friendly and whatever the reasons are.

and sometimes we think that design would talk itself you know by looking at the design people would like it but no when you see the design and you need to have some points where I can just skim through and understand what would work for me maybe you can add some numbers metrics I love to add some numbers and metrics for example this kind of a design pattern is also used by

New York Times, okay, and what was their growth? Okay, why they are doing it like this? Why I have chosen this design model sometimes, okay? And also teach them the principles. My design principle for this product is, you know, flexibility, accessibility, color friendliness, whatever, okay? And then when you present those four or five principles, and then you show your design, then it makes sense.

As I hear you say, it's about having a clear structure with the right context, but as well as presenting the necessary evidence to back whatever you're proposing, right? If that means showing a rationale, you show the rationale. But if that means...

plucking an example from your competitor and saying, "Hey, your competitor also does this and this is their growth." You use that to persuade your stakeholders. Yeah, that sounds like a very effective strategy. Have you actually met any difficult stakeholders and how do you then sort of like work with them or work through them in this case? Well, a lot of times I meet this with a lot of difficult stakeholders.

I feel most of my learning has been really nice from last couple of years because of these stakeholders. So whenever I get stuck in this kind of situation what I do is I kind of either agree to their points and I

buy some time from them that hey let me let me actually go back and think about it okay because I don't want to jump my solutions immediately and I want to think first you know because this guy is talking really in detail and I cannot just give him random ideas which are not thought well yeah as the designers you know we all love to come with ideas on spot we share ideas on spot and

And that's not wrong, you know, if you're really confident, if you are confident on it, okay? But I like to buy some time on that. And sometimes I also do one-on-one meetings with them to go back and understand deeply what was the problem. Because sometimes, you know, when I'm in a big setup of meeting with like 25, 30 people in a meeting room, you don't want to share what is the exact problem and you want to poke them, right, what went wrong. So the discussion might get heat-upped.

And that's what my strategy is. I go on, I leave the meeting, I say thank you, let me buy some more time. And then I sit at one-on-one, I understand the problem and then try to solve and then come up with solutions in the next meeting. That's what I do.

Yeah, and that's great because I think that's an important part of working with business as well and being effective, as you said, in the table, right? Where all your stakeholders are all business owners. And most importantly, building relationships is one of the key things here.

As soon as you build relationships, you know, things will get sorted, you know, and these things will be easily solved in a one-on-one discussion with your stakeholders. That's great. Well, we're almost at the end of our interview. And I think I just wanted to ask you, you know, what's your sense of the technology

the talent over here in Singapore versus back in India. And I know things might have changed because you haven't been in India for five years. But what's your sense between the two countries? Is there anything we can learn from each other? Okay, it's been five years. I don't know what's happening in India at this point in time because I haven't hired anyone in India because we don't have a team in India. But back then, Indian designers are pretty strong at their craft.

They focus a lot on their craft. No storytelling. I mean, I'm not saying all designers are like that. It's just most of the designers, they love to work on their craft and make sure their portfolio is amazing. And like five years back, even like when I was back in India, looking at your design, people hire you, right? You need to have a really good portfolio, at least for the junior designers I'm talking about. But what I see currently, what the trend is in Singapore is...

How was your design thinking has evolved from your design one to design X? If you're going to a school, a nice design school, like Curious Core is amazing. And I've interviewed some candidates from there. So I feel the thinking part is really, really strong here.

that's what is important that's what the core is of design right if you have the thinking and how do you understand a problem and how do you follow a process and how do you come to a conclusion and a solution that is what is important that is the primary rest are secondary because craft can be polished later and what I was as a designer in terms of visual 10 years back was different and now I'm different right so yeah

So I think this leads to a follow-up question from one of the audience members. If you have to bring any designer in your team, what are the skill sets you will be looking for? Well, it depends upon designer, right? Let's assume I'm talking to a product designer. For me, as I said, most important thing is how is your product thinking, right? How do you think and how do you approach to a problem? How do you approach to a solution? Even if you're not good at visuals,

that's fine. If you're not polished enough, that's fine. You know, these are things you can learn on job and there are people around you who can actually help you to grow.

This is first and second is how was your storytelling style right and how do you tell your story, how do you present your work that is most important thing because in SPH most of the designers are hands-on and including me and they are very they're very independent when it comes to a product they handle like we handle two three products one designer right and how do they handle stakeholders that is very important.

So three things to summarize. First is obviously product and design thinking.

And how was your storytelling for your product or for your design? How do you want to present it? Third is how would you handle a stakeholder? Yeah, that's really excellent. And for the roles that you specifically say that are currently open in your company, these three things are things people should bear in mind when they are submitting an application to your team. Am I correct? Yeah. And for the lead designer, it will be little, the dynamics are different and then requirements will change and it will add a lot of points.

So I understand you are also a mentor in several organizations like Design Labs, RookieUp and ADP List, which is a pretty popular platform. What are some of the common mistakes that you spot while you're helping out or when you're mentoring on some of these platforms? So all these three platforms serve different purposes, right? Like the Design Labs, they teach design,

They make generalist designers and they are pretty good in the US and they have students globally including Singapore as well. There's one new student who has submitted their work today. RookieUp is again totally US and Asia focused and ADP is global again. We all know about it. It's an amazing platform.

So, if I talk about these design schools where I mentor designers, I feel most of the designers want to learn design.

But what they don't specifically tell is what is their vision? What do they want to achieve out of it? Because that would actually define where they would like to focus and how they would like to focus. I mean, I understand being a journalist is great because you can do everything you have. You can trial and error a lot of things. You can do a lot of things. But you need to have focus from day one. You need to have a vision for yourself.

right that is missing most of the times I feel getting a job and getting into design is easy if not today we'll get it tomorrow for sure but making a vision in the beginning is important because that will take you really long you will traverse really long with that vision

Well, I think that's excellent advice. I mean, almost like beginning with sort of like how you want to grow and having that growth mindset of continuously developing it, whether it's investing in yourself through courses or whether it's kind of like self-studying or reading books or networking with people. I think those things do matter a lot. I was just wondering, since we're nearly at the end of the conversation,

conversation I was wondering if you have any parting advice for the people over here who are practicing designers or who are aspiring designers right do you have any general advice for them or

Well, I can give a couple of them. The first thing is, I've seen in design portfolios, especially for the designers who are new to the industry or who have just one year of experience or very little experience. In their portfolio, they kind of focus too much on the process. Well, process is important. I'm not saying it's not important. But what, when they design the entire process, when they show the entire process, what they miss is the hypothesis, the problem and solutions. And what they also miss is,

How did they arrive? When you come up with a design solution, you don't pick up the first design solution. You have like four or five designs which are scrapped in the archive folder and then you came with a solution. So what was there in the archive? Why did you archive it? That is very important. And if you can actually show that, that is very important. Because I want sometimes people who showcases their efforts, that's most important.

Well, I think that's great. I mean, it's not just about the process, but it's also about the decisions that have been made and all about this. Do you have any examples of good portfolios that you might want to point people to or good resources where people can then sort of like reference in order to build a good portfolio? If I'm not wrong, there's a website called Bestfolios that is a good place to go and learn and seek some... I mean, you can see a lot of resumes, a lot of portfolios of...

designers across the globe and then you learn a lot from there. I just wanted to give an example. The reason why I said this is because focus on problem and solution also and then archives also. The reason is because in real life you don't get to work on this full big process sometimes. There is a problem given to you, you have to solve it in a day or two. Then you cannot go with the entire process. You might go with the user flows, quick wireframes, then hi-fi prototypes and designs, right? And then

There's no research, there's no prototype, there's no testing sometimes. So just make sure this problem, your hypothesis is important and your solution and what did you deleted in or you put in the archive. That's very important.

I think that's excellent. And with that, I think this has been a really wonderful interview where we covered a lot of ground. First, starting by talking about the importance of business in design, moving on to design operations, and then talking about the hiring process and how things are, what do you look out for specifically, and some of the common mistakes that people make when preparing their portfolios, case studies.

So really glad to have Sunit with us tonight. And if you like this type of content, please share and tell your friends about it. And you're welcome back to join us again next month with another guest who is working in UX design. So Sunit, thank you for your time with us tonight. Really glad to have you. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you. Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.