From Customer Experience Exec. to Product Designer!

A Story with Takeaways and Resources to get started with a designer career from my journey which began with working as a Customer Support Executive, then as a Software Engineer, and now leading a design at an org, making heavy impacts with SAP transformations!

Learnings from Being a design team of ONE

This presentation will summarize my learnings from being the only designer in a company building SAP-driven, complex solutions, working with highly skilled and experienced folks, and focusing on how I try to carve my growth journey as a designer.

- Being only a designer can be fun, but challenging as there’s no one to brainstorm, ideate, or review with.
- Best performed when seen yourself beyond being a designer (don’t be JUST a designer, be more)
- It is 50% figma+ 50% Collaboration
- Understanding, and taking advantage of your team’s knowledge about business, customers, product usage patterns, opinions about similar/competitor’s products,
- Have frequent design feedback/ Product Review discussions with devs, sales, and marketing separately, document the inputs and review with your product lead to see what all can be considered
- Scheduling frequent reviews with non-focused groups (i.e. interns at your org who do not use the product) to see if the UI makes sense to them, how/what they would do differently if they get a chance to design it
- [so many learnings to share :) ]

Design Thinking for Product Teams and Beyond

A designer’s tale to Developers, Product Managers, and everyone enthusiastic about building digital
products:
“Design Thinking for Product teams and beyond.”

Think of the Software Development Cycle and skip Design for a moment, how does that feel?

We will simplify the ‘Design Thinking’ exercise in this talk with relatable and interesting stories.

The session will include:
-A Quick Intro to Design Thinking,
-Some interesting examples to showcase design thinking in the product-building journey,
-Understanding User Persona and ideating while designing an intuitive experience
-A go-to template to follow design thinking as a collaborative and strategic tool with other stakeholders to build better digital products.

WHY:
- Working with tech folks with no background in UI/UX/CX/design can get challenging for small design teams
- Design Thinking can fill the gap between product and design by making the understanding of requirements efficient
- Design Thinking helps everyone to think of a product not only as a technical solution but user-centric solution, from various aspects

HOW:
- Designers can do a 30-45 minute designing thinking workshop/session with product teams, introduce them to design thinking and have a few case studies summarised (depending on the team size, and availability)
- Prepare a small (7-10 Questions) Design Thinking document, a generic one that can be appropriate for a variety of products/features/modules that the org envisions,
- Capture information, including why we are designing this. How other teams can use this feature? Any ref. to share? do we have all the resources available to implement this? , questions that make the product team think about the feature from different dimensions,
- Keep the document shorter and the questions straight. Encourage folks to fill in the document before starting the design discussions or help them do so.
(I will be sharing a sample design thinking doc, folks can refer to it as needed)