Most design leaders right now are treating AI the way they treated mobile in 2008: delegating it, outsourcing judgment, waiting for patterns to settle. That worked then because the breakthroughs were spatial. It will not work now because the breakthroughs are behavioral. And behavioral systems re...
Most senior designers follow the same playbook that worked for the last two decades: prove you can design, then prove you can manage designers, then climb the ladder. It’s predictable and feels safe.
In most companies, the quality of work comes down to a few people. People who have taste, who can make decisions, and who have the energy to keep showing up and holding the bar.
Is most of your time every day at work spent solving people problems or craft problems? The article provides an in-depth analysis of key concepts, backed by real-world examples and expert perspectives.
A few weeks back, I came across a Harvard study from 2010 on X that made me stop scrolling. Researchers pinged thousands of people randomly throughout their days, asking: “How are you feeling right now?” and “What are you thinking about?”
There’s something I’ve been noticing about how the most innovative places in the world actually develop. It’s not what you’d expect.
Table of Contents The uneven AI takeover in software development The axis: left and right of code AI delivers deep value right of code AI stutters on the left side What separates valuable AI from impressive AI How humans and AI work togeth...
In my previous company, I observed how recruiters worked very closely. The story they told to potential hires, the promises they made, the way outreach was done, the emails they wrote to candidates in the days leading up to them joining, and so on.
Apple has always designed from first principles. Its most iconic shifts in interface design were never purely aesthetic. They were grounded in physics, material logic, and a careful reading of how users think, feel, and behave when interacting with a device.
MCPs are everywhere now. The concept is compelling: expose data and tools from one app to an LLM so you can interact with the app via natural language.
There are two types of prompting styles mainly: A thought dump where you blurt out whatever it is that you want, and a more refined structured prompt where you almost codify what you want.
Silicon Valley has always been special. Those who got a taste of it firsthand, or those who have heard stories of the life on offer there, it leaves a certain allure. I’ve met many who visited once and just couldn’t get it out of their head. There’s a charm to the place. The people. The air. The ...
Building a soulful product and building a company that wins in the public market are not the same thing. One is about making something people deeply care about. The other is about hitting numbers quarter after quarter. The market would not remember your product philosophy for a long time, but it ...
A lot of companies have great designers. And most of those companies still ship poorly designed and poorly executed products.
Everyone today is talking about AI skills. Companies want to hire people who know how to use AI. They expect it in interviews. They hope it will show up in the work. From recruitment conversations to measuring employee performance, output and org productivity, AI is quite the topic of debate at t...
If you’re early in your career, start paying attention to your judgment quality now. Good judgment means making smart decisions when you don’t have all the information. This skill separates high performers from everyone else.
The best products, the most thoughtful design, and the most livable cities don’t come from chaotic places. They come from places like Japan, parts of Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, South Korea and California. Places that have built a legacy of timeless design, craft, and an elevated sense of ...
Most companies hire the same way. They look for people who’ve already proven themselves elsewhere. They compete for the same small pool of established talent. This seems logical, but there’s a better approach.
Large companies are well staffed with designers. They have generous budgets to hire the best talent and give them the best tools to do their work. And yet the products that come out of these companies often remain stagnant, feel uninspired, and appear to actively deteriorate over time. The dispar...
5 national parks ・ 14 days・ 5085 photos ・ Leica Q2 The article provides an in-depth analysis of key concepts, backed by real-world examples and expert perspectives.
Most communication is ignored because it’s tedious. Poor choice of words, no coherent narrative, lack of understanding of the audience’s interests and context – these are all important factors leading to the tedium.
I’ve spent a lot of time hiring designers. Especially the last 7 years. The process is quite intense for both parties going into it, which is not helped by the fact that often there’s a lack of clarity in the role and the fitment of the candidate.
I think a lot about the invisible value of posting your thoughts online more freely. Invisible, because you don’t really know what will happen after you post.
I never understood taking a sabbatical. It always seemed an unnecessary break from work which I deeply enjoyed every second of. So I had never taken one before. Until now. After 13 years of working non-stop, the last 7 years of which were way more intense than I imagined, I decided to finally tak...
Have you ever noticed how you never find a Michelin-starred restaurant next to a dentist’s office? There’s a reason for that, and it’s what I call the Front Door Effect – that crucial first impression that determines whether someone will give your product or service a chance or simply walk away.
Late last year, Aakash Kumar (Head of Design, MakeMyTrip & Goibibo) and I spoke about bringing more leadership perspectives to the fore through the design conference. I’ve grown to become quite fond of how organically UxNow is organized every year, and it’s become my excuse to visit friends i...
You’re likely underestimating the importance of hype in product marketing. Look at how inundated our feeds are with announcements. There’s a new product launch almost every day, a new tool or a new big thing. So much of the attention of the masses has shifted to algorithmic feeds that it’s become...
The greatest trick Duolingo has pulled is convincing the world that it’s a language learning app. But behind the gamified lessons and friendly notifications lies a more fascinating revaltion: a carefully engineered social experiment that has little to do with a comprehensive acquisition of a new ...
The success of digital products directly relies on how strong of a recall they can build in users’ minds. It’s also one of the most difficult parts to get right – ‘How can we be the app that the user opens whenever this specific need arises?’ This critical decision happens at the phone’s operatin...
Managing designers is a logical career path people choose when they’ve grown into their careers a fair bit. While in larger companies there are established programs to coach people into management responsibilities, you don’t always have this luxury in startups.
So I’ve been spending time Claude-ing a lot lately. One thing I always wanted to understand better is the salient features of my writing, the style of narrative and the unique aspects that make it relatable.
Retention is the user doing a valuable activity in the app, and then doing another valuable activity again after a time period. The time period could be 1 day, 1 week or 1 month depending on the context of your product. This definition emphasizes the importance of repeated, meaningful engagement ...
Product teams are wired to keep building. Product managers, designers, and engineers are constantly on the lookout for the next feature to add or the next problem to solve. This constant urge to build often turns out to be more harmful and most often leads to bad products over time.
So this one is more an observation. This detailed exploration covers essential aspects of the topic, making it accessible and valuable for all readers.
It aches my heart every time we hire, seeing the lack of thinking designers put in building their portfolios. All I have spotted across hundreds of portfolios is a consistent set of errors repeated time and again, and similar issues with signal-to-noise in the information presented. The end resul...
When a leader is described as ‘aggressive’, it usually stems from people that find the leader brash and pushy; in that they always have their way and run the show with autocratic measures.
If you’re a designer, unless you lived under a rock, you surely have heard some version of the notion that the famed ‘seat at the table’ somehow keeps eluding the designers who so dearly want one. Almost as if the industry colluded to malefically shove the Design function aside to never invite th...
When I took over the responsibility to lead the talented team (my first real test of being the leader of the team in my career), I thought I was prepared. At least I had checked a few boxes to get ready.
A career is not built or planned in isolation of the work itself. Talking about a career without talking about the actual work is meaningless. There’s no career without the work.
There is plenty of material on the input metrics a leader should focus on – Working hard, showing up, taking decisions, setting priorities for the team and so on. But there’s not much written about the indicators that show when (and whether) a leader has done a good job.
Building new products from zero-to-one is hard. The odds are stacked unreasonably against you and your team. You need an incredibly strong self-belief, and a set of people who believe in that thing with the same amount of vigour, if you are to have any chance of succeeding at building something new.
These are not for everyone, but very useful if you want to build better habits that compound over time and give you an edge in your career.
If you’ve been a designer for a few years, you’ve definitely heard of bad design managers. With any reasonable (bad) luck, you’d have had your own share of run-ins with such managers yourself.
Improving your sense of judgment is critical to becoming better at designing products. Good design principles can help improve your judgment. When you’re faced with conflicting choices in the design process, good principles help you break the tie.
We see every company approaching design differently. Some are able to pull off very polished design consistently, and most other companies seem to linger in the doldrums with their subpar products.
Managers help. Leaders inspire. This detailed exploration covers essential aspects of the topic, making it accessible and valuable for all readers.
Most founders start to build out their Design teams late - the most common timeframe I have seen is post-PMF. There are no catastrophic consequences to getting serious about Design late in your startup journey, but if you want Design to be a key differentiator in your startup, there definitely is...
On being a great designer This detailed exploration covers essential aspects of the topic, making it accessible and valuable for all readers.
I want to share a quick framework to check whether you’re at a net-career-positive workplace or not. This comprehensive piece delves deeper into the subject matter, offering practical insights and actionable takeaways for readers.
As a Leader, you need to ensure equity of opportunities for everyone in the team. Being good at distribution of opportunities makes sure everyone on your team is motivated, challenged and has plenty of room to grow.
I’ll speak of building an A Team in context of Design. Good design talent is scarce. The industry is bustling with up and coming talent that have all sorts of opinions and varied perception of what a career in design looks like.
Simplicity is usually the goal of good design. Simplicity is also one of the hardest virtues to inculcate in large product organizations at scale. As products grow, things tend to trend toward complex thinking, complex solutions and complex execution. Like tight alignment, simplicity is a goal th...
I’ve been leading the talented Design team at Unacademy for about 2 years now. I’m incredibly lucky to call such a talented set of people my team. They’ve made my job possible (and to a great extent, easy) in the 2 years. Everything we’ve been able to achieve as a team is all due to their collect...
There are lots of different opinions on how responsive one should be at work. Even more so for the leadership. Most of the arguments against being a quick communicator / responder are about unnecessarily conflating that with productivity. I think that’s weird. Sure, for a leader, being a very act...
Distraction, divergence and complexity are 3 defaults in organizations in absence of forcing functions. This detailed exploration covers essential aspects of the topic, making it accessible and valuable for all readers.
Note: All the work I showcase here has been done by our team and we share collective credit for it. We’re proud of all the work we do together.
This stems from an interesting situation that arose at work. The article provides an in-depth analysis of key concepts, backed by real-world examples and expert perspectives.
I’ve seen quite a few very successful teams. Teams where the environment they share is so conducive to collaboration and extremely high alignment that their collective output is far better than the sum of their individual outputs.
You read this all the time – Reflect on your day. Make notes. Jot down how things went and what you can improve on next.
Every org’s culture is essentially a filter. It retains people that are a great fit who end up doing well, while the rest churn out.
Creating and using personas in design is an unsettled topic. There aren’t many good examples out there for personas that are well defined and even more importantly, used the right way.
Amidst the furore of scoping, specing and developing features, the very often forgotten aspect of building products is making those features successful.
Reviewing design portfolios is my favorite thing to do. Now that I am hiring actively, I also get to see a lot of portfolios every day. Outside of the usual quirks I notice in portfolios (misaligned text, wrong icon colors, padding issues…), poor copywriting is what jumps at me the most. It’s ver...
The most important disruption to have happened to how people learn, has been the penetration of the internet. Online video as a delivery medium makes access to high quality education possible for large masses of population.
Design roles and titles are usually a source of confusion in the industry. We’ve seen both ends of the spectrum – way too specific roles, and the ‘Everyone is a designer’; and then a few variations in between.
Building a good design org is a very interesting challenge. The differences in scale, product area and culture of startups mean that there are different ways to build a good design org. At Unacademy, we have developed a specific expectation from the designer’s role and have built an org around it...
Leading a team is a whole new challenge. From being a strong IC working on very high impact projects at Google to coming into the high-growth Unacademy has been a pretty big shift.
You notice how some people you work with have a very astute and mostly correct intuition about a variety of user scenarios, behaviors and product performance?
Triaging your work is one of the most important skills that can meaningfully improve your quality of life at work while still ensuring a consistent high quality throughput and impact.
The drums of keeping your product focused and crisp have been beaten way too much – so why then, do we see so many products diluted by a mixture of features that feel loosely connected at best?
Mentorship is an interesting privilege in life and career. If engaged at the right phase, it can do wonders in contributing to your growth, and can then even provide you the necessary solace in your moments of despair.
One of the most valuable product culture trait I’ve observed and seen bear fruit is to evaluate critically our past launches and work. When a certain feature doesn’t feel right for the current time and the state of the product, we’ve grown to not be afraid of unlaunching it.
This essay is about sharing the insights and learnings I derived from my experiences at a large organization, that can help you be more effective if you’re in a similar situation.
When I joined Search, everyone told me it’d take me about 4-5 months to truly grasp how big of an organization it actually is. I remember that I’d laughed… “it’s never taken me 5 months to grasp something”.
Late last year I spoke at DesignUp 2019 on the importance of Design Documentation as a skill for designers in large organizations.
I appreciate the conversations around design portfolios that rear their heads every now and then in the design zeitgeist on the Internet.
Put time to think in your schedule. Thinking is working. Your career will be decisively impacted by things that don’t look like work - your kindness, how you communicate, how you collaborate, how you resolve ambiguity and conflict and so on. Your career is the most important product you (shou...
A lot of people ask me about working with a strong leadership in very large organizations from the point of view of someone who works on products.
There are a lot of interpretations out there of the word Delight in the context of Design – almost to the point where the jury is still out there on what it really means. The most popular interpretations are references to what Delight does to the user of the product.
I joined Google back in October. Joining a company of Google’s size and scale has been quite a revelatory experience.