```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2F4IiQQOEdmqPcCsjTqlta%2F675771b5-c62a-47d9-b58b-eb65db640a8a.png?alt=media&token=141f98dd-27f6-4d6a-9462-e5f74006de11","id":"675771b5-c62a-47d9-b58b-eb65db640a8a","width":640,"height":458,"filename":"IMG_3872 Medium.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Is the grass green?","border":false}]}
```

After the Great Layoffs, I’ve been seeing too many people declaring the [death](https://www.fastcompany.com/91027996/the-big-design-freak-out-a-generation-of-design-leaders-grapple-with-their-future) of [design](https://medium.com/@martynreding/how-to-survive-the-design-leadership-reckoning-ff2856bf4733) leadership and with the rise of AI, the death of the digital design industry as well. but I find that it’s a badly informed take and no offence, but according to me, written by outsiders or written about a specific industry/region/designer. In fact, there are a lot of highly [priced](https://maven.com/rachel-kobetz/dls-career-architecture) [leadership](https://www.designdept.co/series/design-leadership-fundamentals) [training](https://www.aiga.org/design/design-leadership) courses out there these days.

Over my career of 10 odd years, I’ve had the honour of being an observer in the product design industry of 2 countries; India and Indonesia. My perspective comes from my vantage point of living in the Silicon Valley of India and professionally, from being part of the growth stage of the well funded startups.

For this article(rant?), I will use Startups vs Big Tech for sake of categorisation. Big tech would have the minimum expectation of being a listed company operating across more than 1 geographical region. Meta and the other MAANG companies would fall into big tech but do remember that they are the new entrants in a space already filled by CISCO, Intuit, Adobe.

Post the dot-com bust, we saw the slow rise of today’s modern digital startups. First in the Silicon Valley and then in the rest of the world. This was mainly fuelled by the VC funding and still is. This lead us to look up to the Silicon Valley companies and the folks there as thought leaders for design. And rightly so since they were working on products we admired and used half a world away. That scale and magnitude is definitely something to be proud of. They encountered and solved problems at scale, establishing standards, registering patents and forming user behaviours that we take for granted today

But in our part of the world, even today, digital product design is still attempting to break out of its UI and UX tags. When I started out in 2014, UI/UX was the predominant way of describing designers in big tech, and even startups. Of course there were exceptions, but I will ignore them as outliers. The startup I worked at back then, was one of the first in India to adopt Facebook’s popular convention to start using the term ‘Product Designer’. Back then, the Indian digital design industry was so small. You were separated by 1-2 degrees from everyone and arguably, it’s still that small. The VC funding however gave rise to a notion that tech startups are a lucrative career compared to the dominant IT/ITES industry. This led to a gold rush fuelled by opportunistic bootcamps and certification courses, most of which churned out low skill designers. However, unlike the West, few companies thrived and hardly any have scaled and now we have a supply-demand problem at hand.

This leads us to where we are today:

1. Local companies are not getting ‘Big’ enough or if they are, once they get listed, they need to justify costs and respond to the market. It’s quite easy for decision makers to take that call and cut a few roles to keep costs in check. Easier than getting out of your software license contracts to cut costs. Also much easier to do this when others in the industry are also doing layoffs. Smaller companies imply that there are fewer senior roles to be filled especially when most teams out there are feature factories who know what to build next.

2. In my experience, Design leaders in startups have always been expected to play a dual role of designer + manager. Infact the designer aspect is valued a lot more while the manager title is granted to keep designers happy. That said, Most companies do not know what to do with the design leaders that they hire. So often, what you encounter is the Design Leader who is a figurehead to appease the junior designers with almost 0 influence on business outcomes or worst case, to be head of design of a design team of 1. This explains the short tenures because those roles are just not fulfilling.

3. This may anger a few, but in the current state of the industry, design progression ladders don’t need an IC track beyond the level of a senior designer of 5-6 years of experience. If you are not a Meta/Google, I don’t expect there to be scope or complexity that needs Staff Designers. So where have these senior designers been going? Well some of them move into “Manager” roles without the skills to operate in them while others tend to move out of the country to join companies which may have grown to a larger size or worst case at least they get to experience a new culture.

4. The skills you need as a manager are different from the ones you polished as an IC designer. Being good at Figma can only take you so far, if you don’t have an affinity for bureaucracy, then being a manager is a bad fit. On the other extreme are the managers and heads of design, usually from a background in older big tech companies, who were at positions where their job was to pontificate about design and innovation. These folk tend to be disconnected from the day-to-day work and that’s bad for the team as well. Both of these are highly replaceable roles.

5. And finally, we have not moved away from the worker productivity categorisation of industrialisation. Bell curves are common, business wants to keep control and budgets are paramount. I would like to argue that Design never got a seat at the table. The “Design Thinking” hype that got thrown around by IBM, McKinsey, IDEO was for their own PR and has run its due course. Everyone likes an optimistic story but rarely would you find actual organisation leaders(CXOs) believing in the value that Design brings to the business and actually investing into Design. That is as true today, as it was a decade ago and hence good fulfilling design jobs are few and far between. \
   \
   This does not paint a very rosy picture of today's design industry but after all these years, this is my honest take on the state of affairs. Perhaps we've been swayyed by all the positive marketing around design, perhaps we've believed design in tech can save the world, but in reality, designers find themselves in a dystopia that they don't want to acknowledge. The old folks of the industry who have survived, will continue to do so but if you are a beginner, If you want to stick to design in tech, I recommend that you choose a discipline like engineering or product instead and leave your empathy at the door.

An Insider's perspective on Design in Tech 2024

A decade ago, the ‘product designer’ title was being used to refer to designers (and still is) working on physical products. The adoption of using it for software designers got a shot in the arm when [Facebook adopted it](https://qr.ae/pGQdVi) for their designers. Until then UI/UX was the term of choice for folks in the industry and used to indicate a specific job that the designer performed in the team. This was indicative of the shift from the delivery teams working with client requirements (enterprise first) to product teams (rapidly iterating consumer tech) which had to learn and uncover what was the best product they could build. Due to the scarcity of product designers in the space, companies started acquiring design agencies around the world \[1\].

The ‘product designer’ now had to start looking at what they are designing as a product and not be restricted by your traditional mindset of UI and UX responsibilities. This would mean that they would need to learn about business, uncover user insights, use data analytic tools, have technical understanding, etc to design their product. These aren’t skills that come naturally to designers and there-in lay the problem. Not every designer wanted to be a “product designer” but it was an aspirational job for designers given the pay packages were miles ahead of what designers were paid in other industries. More and more companies started adopting the term of ‘product designer’ to follow industry trends and attract talent.

But even then there were few orgs which took design seriously.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FKntvBURjVACXpVQQMi0n%2F2059ea33-c3e3-4e03-802a-420875458352.png?alt=media&token=79af1d1a-6691-4676-91d5-cc05aec93074","id":"2059ea33-c3e3-4e03-802a-420875458352","width":1352,"height":782,"filename":"Screenshot 2024-09-30 at 1.57.50 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Source: 2014 interview in Dezeen [2]","border":false}]}
```

Even today, most orgs don’t really provide a space for designers to thrive in the product space and even today, there are probably a handful of product designers and product orgs in the world, the rest is mostly good PR.

And what are the aspects of a product designer that sets them apart from other designers?

### Quality

The primary aspect the product designer optimises for is quality of delivery. Quality being subjective makes it hard for the different disciplines to align over what this means. For me, it means that the product designer needs to understand the constraints of business and development to be able to deliver the best outcome possible in the defined timeline. You may want to build that perfect animated transition, but let’s be real, that’s not really a user need most of the time. The product’s usage and success should be the thing driving you towards excelling as a designer.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FKntvBURjVACXpVQQMi0n%2F9d0aaf02-e6cd-4624-9154-8693ff0b1a85.png?alt=media&token=ba7d6ebe-33bb-4ba5-9ae0-ed5ef533da32","id":"9d0aaf02-e6cd-4624-9154-8693ff0b1a85","width":320,"height":320,"filename":"1*p-r_tZIGaXkREwQ2SOdtHw Small.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Pablo Stanley's take on 'How not to be a better designer' [3]","border":false}]}
```

### Curiosity

Just like Alice, a product designer has to be inquisitive about their users and their behaviour and the systems they inhabit. The ‘product designer’ need to be comfortable looking at dashboards, analyzing events as well as drafting a research plan and talking to users. The best way to level up as a product designer is to learn from what you are building and putting out into the world. And this learning tends to compound as the years go by and helps you take decisions when faced with new design challenges.

### Craft

The product designer is actually [T-shaped](https://spotify.design/article/finding-your-t-shape-as-a-generalist-designer) despite a lot of folks thinking that they are generalists. So although the industry largely refers to the visual polish as ‘craft’, I don’t feel its restricted to just that. You could be a ‘product designer’ excelling at copy writing, or a ‘product designer’ inclined towards the code side. A good team is made of many such designers who can learn from each other. If every designer you hire (or in your team) has a similar skill set to you then there would be limited direction for you to grow in. Some teams out there have chosen to double down on this kind of team building but to me that’s building a design specialist team.

### Agency

This is a quality which is rare to find. I feel this is because most designers tend to be introverts and love to be comfortable in their “space”. It’s easy to spend time in the world making pixel perfection your entire personality, it’s not easy to go out on a limb and argue for a decision to be made. Unfortunately, agency is what helps you level up the ranks. Agency is what gets you a seat at the table. Another hurdle towards product designers developing agency is that they need to be part of good teams run by design leaders who support and sponsor you and those are really scarce in supply.

### So where do we go from here?

* I see that we need to address this at a system level, today the ‘product design’ comes with a better salary and so for designers to get better pay it’s better to call themselves Product Designers. So things can’t change until the hiring parties don’t get better at their jobs.

* No one designer is the same as the other. Organisations should be cognizant that there are no such thing as generalists and design their career rubrics in a way to suit the different kinds of designers on their team. This helps each designer to grow in their own way within the org.

* Job descriptions could be honest up front of the kind of designer that they are looking for rather than getting ChatGPT to write it. There is no point lying about this, infact it just takes you lot longer to find someone.

**Footnote:**

1. **John Maeda's Design in Tech report 2015, Slide 4** https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/design-in-tech-report-2015-45858974/45858974
2. **Silicon Valley "didn't think a designer could build a company" says Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky** https://www.dezeen.com/2014/01/28/silicon-valley-didnt-think-a-designer-could-build-a-company-interview-airbnb-co-founder-brian-chesky/
3. **Pablo Stanley, Collection of Random Comics** https://thedesignteam.io/collection-of-random-comics-d66f32ee9c52
4. Thumbnail courtesy, **The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com**

What is a product designer?

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FTBYF8ISlmEkEZEJzUU2T%2F608cf06d-4041-4b1c-9146-4aac1500164c.png?alt=media&token=b7454b55-a71c-4adf-b264-204455a157f4","id":"608cf06d-4041-4b1c-9146-4aac1500164c","width":2066,"height":1160,"filename":"Screenshot 2024-09-03 at 10.32.42 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Screenshot from Rams","border":false}]}
```

You often see people stating that they are joining as a solo designer in a Startup and want advice. Them being the solo designer shouldn’t directly impact their effectiveness.

Here’s what I feel matters the most towards their success:

### 1. What is your role?

Knowing why they opened the designer role is important before you take that job. I recommend that you ask the hiring manager this question during your interview rounds and also ask to speak to the critical members in the team you will be joining. I take it that most Founders open a position because they got some feedback from customers or because their investor told them to. They may not be ready to invest in what can make a designer effective in their role.

### 2. Fitting into the team:

The team would need to adapt to having an in-house designer working with them. The team members would need to understand what the role of the designer is and how they could work with them. They would need to take time to adapt their workflows or create new inclusive processes. All this is hard to do and the designer(especially a junior one) wouldn’t do very well without a sponsor.

### 3. You need a sponsor.

One of my key learnings has been to choose to work with someone who will be your advocate in the organisation. It’s the single most important thing to look for during the interview process. The best teams I’ve observed had CEOs being the design sponsor and their products tend to win at least in terms of product quality (a product’s success is more than it’s quality, but that’s another post) Don’t believe me? Well in \*Rams\*, Dieter Rams states “If you don't have someone who stands behind you, then you can forget it.” And cites it as a reason for leaving Braun.

Of course, not every Startup out there succeeds and there’s no guarantee that the team you join will survive but its always good to make sure that you enjoy the team you spend there and learn how to become a better designer.

---

If you are looking for advice on what you can do as a solo designer to succeed, [this post I wrote after my first year as a designer](https://medium.com/user-experience-design-1/what-every-young-designer-should-know-abb2af79f43e) may be useful.

Evaluating that Solo Designer job

Last night, I was thinking about how much the interface design and protoyping landscape has changed in the last decade. I started using Sketch and Marvelapp in 2014 when the predominant tools were Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop/Fireworks for UI, Balsamiq for low fidelity, Axure, Omnigraffle and Keynote for clickable prototypes. Some of these still exist today. While others like Antetype, Invision are no more.

I was taught to design on [Photoshop](https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/17928/what-is-the-exact-role-relationship-of-photoshop-in-web-design) at my first job. Even though, modern app stores had released three years earlier, websites was what we were designing back then. The Photoshop art boards we designed, would be ‘sliced’ and used in our HTML/CSS mockups. '[Redlining](https://x.com/teehanlax/status/560820287953195008)' was common practice for dev handovers. For personal projects and at hackathons, new age CSS/JS libraries like [Twitter Bootstrap](https://getbootstrap.com/1.0.0/) started being used. The designs I made back then are horrible and still exist in un-recoverable file formats (Okay, I actually found a photo of [one design](https://photos.app.goo.gl/yx1heXKvGiAFAkNn7)). Back then, I was a developer with an engineering degree working in a MNC IT company so I can’t blame myself for it.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FTBYF8ISlmEkEZEJzUU2T%2Fde441683-44f2-4cb8-97c0-71a7b612ba1d.jpg?alt=media&token=30afccf8-8f10-4393-b5ad-fadf7805db6a","id":"de441683-44f2-4cb8-97c0-71a7b612ba1d","width":390,"height":242,"filename":"image002.jpg","type":"image/jpeg","caption":"A wireframe of mine from March 2012 for an event discovery startup idea.","border":false}]}
```

When I was at Design school, using Adobe Illustrator for its vector capabilities became common place. We worked on information graphics and photoshop just didn’t cut it for our workflow. It was largely a skill problem since we had no teachers for our tools, whatever we did was with knowledge from the internet and our peers. Outside in the world, the industry was using tools like Axure, Omnigraffle and Keynote and Teehan+Lax had legendary status in their community for their annual release of their iOS kits.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FTBYF8ISlmEkEZEJzUU2T%2F0ca51ac7-78f8-4ae1-90a7-1ffb490dea1b.jpg?alt=media&token=5671e822-6785-47cd-9c97-436afa3a4825","id":"0ca51ac7-78f8-4ae1-90a7-1ffb490dea1b","width":2000,"height":1389,"filename":"teehan-lax.jpg","type":"image/jpeg","caption":"Teehan+Lax pictured in their iconic profile photo","border":false}]}
```

By the time we graduated, there had been changes in this ecosystem. Sketch started picking up market share, smart phone penetration was trending up and collaboration became an important buzzword. It was 2014.

By the time, I started my internship, Material Design had launched and I upgraded from my ancient Sony Viao to a MacBook Air (on EMI). We adopted Sketch and Marvelapp at my workplace.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FTBYF8ISlmEkEZEJzUU2T%2F17e4e925-1f89-4d67-8746-6b7b6ca1f7fb.png?alt=media&token=e144c508-7b13-4917-b76c-378ff7300dd1","id":"17e4e925-1f89-4d67-8746-6b7b6ca1f7fb","width":3084,"height":1784,"filename":"Screenshot 2024-09-06 at 3.23.30 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"My first Marvelapp prototype - June 2014. Created for my Master's submission, still seems to work.","border":false}]}
```

Back then, Sketch files were saved in Google Drive Shared Drives for archival and access across the team. You still needed a license to access proprietary content so we still needed to redline screens and share exports in folders. This lead to tools like Zeplin, Invision and Marvelapp coming in to fill this gap. The next year, Facebook released [Origami](https://engineering.fb.com/2015/02/24/ios/introducing-origami-live/) built on top of Quartz Composer followed by [Framer 1.0](https://medium.com/insightdesign/this-is-how-i-tried-framer-in-8-active-hours-trial-c4a8a0392267) in the next year. That was the start of making prototypes multi-dimensional and letting users “interact” with UI elements and granting access to device hardware sensors like camera. There were [people](https://medium.com/framer-prototyping/making-framer-prototypes-talk-to-each-other-web-sockets-framer-85eedd2243aa) [that I](https://dribbble.com/shots/3699875-Life-Advices-app-Concept/attachments/9971472?mode=media) [knew](https://x.com/vikxlp/status/893453311210250240) making really cool stuff with this.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FTBYF8ISlmEkEZEJzUU2T%2F19179985-9942-4160-b673-81abb30fc37b.png?alt=media&token=8da5ba54-9382-446b-8800-83db6296dc80","id":"19179985-9942-4160-b673-81abb30fc37b","width":3084,"height":1784,"filename":"Screenshot 2024-09-06 at 3.47.49 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"An Android date selector prototype I designed on Pixate and got implemented in 2015","border":false}]}
```

Next, Figma and Abstract started up trying to solve the file organization and collaboration problem in their own way; Figma’s USP was that it was browser based and hence could be used by non-mac users so great for budding designers who couldn’t afford a Mac. I didn't use Figma until Jan 2022. 

Abstract targeted the existing Sketch user base and tried to introduce branching to the designer audience (albeit unsuccessfully?). [Framer X](https://blog.prototypr.io/framer-x-preview-9d067f35cf9a) built some hype but it didn’t catch on. I had beta access and building out a component system on Framer X(React) needed Dev support which most design teams didn’t have the luxury of. This (circa 2019) is when you started noticing design teams around the world having UX Engineers in their rosters. Design systems evolved out of style guides with the help of UX engineering and now we take design sytems to have both a design and code aspect to them along with voice, tone, illustrations, etc.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FrBDaIj0bHYOqqEGyPcDaFZ93p8O2%2FTBYF8ISlmEkEZEJzUU2T%2Fb27d0d2b-6476-4fd2-a744-fbb00b5e96e9.png?alt=media&token=a53cf617-7967-48d3-bd19-93ec5e022d0a","id":"b27d0d2b-6476-4fd2-a744-fbb00b5e96e9","width":3084,"height":1784,"filename":"Screenshot 2024-09-06 at 4.12.19 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"A responsive no-code app I built on Glide to help me expense bills for work travel","border":false}]}
```

Then came the no-code/low-code revolution which simplified the ease of creation further and tools like Glideapps, Bubble and Landbot now make it easy for you to prototype and share ideas. And that brings us to 2024, where we are seeing the rise of AI assisted design and dev tools getting focus. These aren’t there yet but I wish with this we can sunset that beaten to death question of “Should designers code?”

How far we've come: The last decade of design tools

Senior Design Manager @JivaAg

What every young designer should know

A short read on my learnings from my first year as a designer at a startup

Newsletter (Archives)

A biweekly newsletter I write about design management and other design stuff. 

Near, far, wherever we are!

This is an article of our talk titled 'Long distance relationship: How design and research collaborate at Gojek'

Leadership Essentials

Management Essentials

Electronics and Communications Engineering

I spoke to Kavan Antani, CEO of Indiefolio, as part of the podcast series 'DesignOops' centring around design operations and management.

Gamify DesignOps with human connection with Kenneth

Saloni and I were interviewed about how the NewCampus courses have impacted our working style at Jiva

On Designing team growth

This is an excerpt from my fireside chat with Ownpath in 2021

Challenges with Transitioning to a Design Manager from an IC role

A summary writeup of a twitter space a few of us did with Obvious regarding hiring designers

Creating a stand-out portfolio: Advice from design leaders

Quoted:
“I treat the interview process as a reflection of the org. Are they using a generic job description? Are they able to communicate well during the process?”  Kenneth D’Souza, Product Designer, Gojek

What Designers Want

Responsible for the clinic-doctor facing product, the Practo Partner app on Android and iOS. Defined guidelines and directed a team of designers working on it between 2015-2017

Practo Partner

Jiva Agro is an app focussed on the agriculture retailers in Indonesia. We released this in April 2023.

Jiva Agro (formerly Jiva Grosir)

The Sahabat Jiva app is used by our Micro Collectors on the ground to offer various services to the Indonesian farmers. In 2023, we started a redesign project to simplify the app.

Sahabat Jiva App

Responsible for the merchant facing app which caters to usecases like food and grocery orders, online and offline payments, POS, etc.

GoBiz

We rebuilt the farmer facing app, Jiva Petani with our new design language 'Akar' and released it to farmers in Indonesia in June 2023

Jiva Petani App

Gojek has teams split across different countries, we've been working remotely before the pandemic. Feby and I spoke about how design and research collaborated across distances using metaphors from a long distance relationship.

Long distance relationship: How design and research collaborate at Gojek

I joined as a senior product designer and eventually lead the Merchants product design team. I worked on and oversaw all the merchant facing products like GoBiz app, GoBiz web, GoBiz POS, Midtrans and Moka.

Senior Design Manager

Working on improving the revenues for smallhold farmers in Indonesia. Currently responsible for the product design team.

I joined as the first design intern in 2014 and saw the team grow from 4 to 32. I worked on the doctor and clinic facing products like Practo Ray and Practo Partner.

Kenneth Mark Dsouza

2024