 My topic is standing strong and leading business by design. First of all, I would like to ask you all who all holds a position as a leader in any organization, as a design leader? Anyone? Okay. Oh, that's great. So, I believe design is everything today and I guess you all must agree with this. And design is a pillar on which every business stand. Design in today's is acting as a change driver and obviously it adds value to any organization. My talk will be divided into four important aspects. Firstly, what does it mean to be a leader in design? Who is a design leader? A person who has graduated from a well-known college, has an amazing portfolio filled with amazing works, have creative solutions to every problem and keeps beards where specs comes to office wearing jeans. Okay, you can ignore the last part. But if any organization were to write an advertisement of design leader, they might think something like that. Do you agree or not? Maybe not. Actually, then who's a design leader? Design leader is a person who concentrates more on leadership. I'm not saying they ignore design, but actually they bridge design, they build design as a bridge, as a conjunction point to bring clients, to bring organization, to bring team together. Okay, you are going back to the ancient time. You all must have heard the story about Ramayana. Anyone can tell me who was the design leader behind the Ramsey to bridge? Anyone from the audience? Nalini, yes, that's right. So Nalini were the people who were responsible to build that bridge. So design leader comes here in the picture. Everyone can design a good product, but all cannot design an outstanding product. A design leader makes this thing happen. Okay, the other part of the design leader is to maintain a balance, to strive a balance between managing his creative team and having a creative vision at the same time. Because leadership starts with people and at the moment you get this balance, boom. You need to see how the world, you need to see the world around yourself. You need to see abilities, you need to dig out passions. You need to arouse your creative team to be a good leader. Okay, now what attributes a design leader should possess? It may look like a cheesy cake, but it's much more than that. You need to, along with having creative abilities within yourself, you need to have a lot of other ingredients. Like you should have a greater vision. You should be able to motivate your team. Encourage them to do teamwork. Next one is, what eight leadership behaviors a design leader should follow? Trust me, it really works. The first is, act with empathy. Being a leader, if you want to take any decision, always stand in the shoes of the other and then take any decision. Think from their perspective, you'll be always right. Trust your creative team. As I mentioned earlier, your team is your key to success. You need to trust them, until unless they have given you a chance not to trust them. Give them freedom, give them all the love which you can let them to grow. Have a creative vision and make sure your team is aligned with your vision. They should know what your aim is. Communicate ideas and design brief. Whenever you are talking with a client, always collect the correct information and pass it on to your team. Because the success of any product depends upon the creative brief. I guess you almost have attended a workshop before. Learn and teach. Learn and teach is also very important because you need to keep yourself updated. And of course, at the same time, you need to do knowledge transfer as well. Set an example and be a role model. Be accountable. If something goes wrong, be ready to take the arrows. And if something goes well, please appreciate your team and be great and express gratitude. You should always have a predefined process and your process should be well known by your organization and your team members. Once the design brief is transferred until you reach to the final end product, there are three stages. First is when your idea is raw. At this point of time, you need to arouse your team. You need to ask them why, what, when. Just remember the idea doesn't have to always come from you. And once the idea is processed, give your advice to your team to refine the idea and implement it. At this point of time, you need to act as a user, as an end user. And after the idea is refined, the concept has been finalized. And to reach the final design, you should help your team to present it to the world. The role of a design leader is to raise awareness of the design process and the positive effects design generates. It's very difficult to explain your concepts, your ideas to non-designers. But a leader should have the skill. Okay, next one is what impact can I make on people and business? Design leadership can create a lot of impact on various sectors like educational sector, social sector or any organization. And the impact is very positive. And you should work with user-centered approach. Okay, now I'll take you through few of the case studies in which we have used the right design skills, design leadership to make the product a success. This is an application which we designed for Samsung and it's called Samsung Sports Flow. This application, you can see the numbers upon the screen. It had 0.5 million plus users. This was designed during the time of football World Cup. And the user experience was made much forward rather than just curating news and images and pictures. The users were able to see and watch videos and live actions. This innovation helped the business to take a leap. Another example is an application called Fitsys. In my organization, we have a culture which we celebrate on Apple Day every month. On that day, every employee has to go through a series of health check-ups. And this process, before this app was designed, we used to require four volunteers and they used to devote their eight hours to do the health check-up of 200 employees. But after this application was developed, this time reduced to four hours. It saved time of the resources. It saved money of the organization. And of course, it strengthened the relationship between the employees and the organization. Another example is an application known as Doobles. In most of the organizations, the salaries and payrolls are managed through lots and lots of Excel sheets. It's a very time-taken process, requires a lot of manpower. And we built this application and it helped in reducing the time, reducing the dependencies and with more accurate results. Last point is, if you guide your team properly, if you act as a good leader, you can pull the future of any organization forward. And this future can be pulled by bagging great clients and by generating revenues. Upon the screen, you can see a couple of examples. These are the clients which we have bagged in recent years. The result of this is, of course, it generated a lot of revenues to the company and that's what a good leader should target. You said there's a time when a designer needs to act as a user. Yes, a design leader should act as a user. So can you explain what you mean by that and how to do that? See, I mean, once the brief is transferred, being a creative director, the brief is transferred to me. So my first responsibility is to arouse my team when the idea is very raw. You need to ask them to brainstorm, you need to ask them to ideate, you need to ask them to conceptualize. But after you summarize the things and the final concept is in front of you, you need to give them advice. You need to act as a final user and criticize them. You need to give them soft love and hard love. Yeah, sure. Isn't that against the user-centered design process where you actually need to involve the actual users and not get into the shoes of users? I mean, this stage comes before the idea is finally implemented. That part of user-centered design and final user testing comes after you implement the ideas. And user means you should, as I mentioned, you should always put yourself in the shoes of the others and then think. Your team doesn't exactly... Yeah, I have a small question. You said the user-centered design process comes before finalizing something, right? No. Actually, we talk a lot about personas and user scenarios on all these things. Yes. It's all about user-centered design, right? So instead of acting ourselves as user, we actually go and talk to people, actual users and get information from them. We do a lot of contextual inquiries and all these things. Then we create stories around them and we create personas. Based on them, we create... That's what I think you're referring to, right? See, this process comes between when the idea is raw, you conceptualize and you define the final product. And in the middle way, if being a leader, if you won't act as a end user, how you will give feedback to your team members? Of course, that process is obviously involved, but somewhere as a leader, you need to act as an end user. I have one more question. Can you go to the 25th slide? Yeah, you said before that four employees, eight hours. Yes. That means one employee to us. No, four employees need to spend eight hours to do all the procedures. Okay. Like to do health checkup of 200 employees. We have 200 employees in our organization. Okay. That the process was entirely manual. Okay. And after we implemented the design through the application, the process, the time reduced to four hours. Anyone can go and anyone can just upload his profile, anyone can go and stand on the weighing machine at any point of time and get the health checkup done.