 So we had a couple of keynotes now and we're going to have a slight change, we're going to have a panel instead of another keynote and then we're going to break for lunch. So there's going to be a very interesting panel and in the morning when Mr. Bapu and Mr. Shyam presented their notes from yesterday's round table, a few of you approached us asking if you could be a part of it. So I think now is that time. So we have a couple of experienced folk who have been leaders, design leaders in their companies. So firstly I would like to introduce the moderator who will subsequently introduce the other panelist. So Shilpi has over 15 years of experience as a designer, strategist, user researcher and educator. Currently she's the founder of Coach Labs, an innovative consultancy where the mission is to help business leaders of organizations discover new opportunities for growth and optimize the process to implement new ideas. Can I please have you on stage, Shilpi Kumar? While the panelists arrived, let me give, I'm really excited today with the panel that we have. Out of the panels I decided and Kaladhar helped me pick two non-designers and the rest designers intentionally and the amazing thing is that they are design leaders in their own different contexts. So we have Rebecca Rubens who's the founder of RISOM which is India's first multidisciplinary sustainability design studio working at the intersection of craft, design and sustainability. She's also an author of two books, Bamboo from Green Design to Sustainability Design and then Holistic Sustainability through Craft Design Collaborations. Then we have Anand. He started a company 10 years ago called Grammar. Anand is a data scientist, he calls himself. And design plays a very important role in his organization. He's recognized as one of India's top data scientists. He leads a team who tells beautiful visual data stories. You might have seen his booth in the last two days and learned more about his organization. He's also a gold medallist from IIM Bangalore, an alumnus of IIT Madras, London School of Business, IBM Infosys, Lehman Brothers and BCG. So thanks for being part of the panel. Then we have Troy Asmone. He's a founder of the design organization for ServiceNow which is, I thought it was a unicorn but it's far beyond a unicorn now based out of San Diego's. And he has an interesting journey because he's one of the non-designers and who now leads the design or built and leads the design operations and service design product. So he, product and design leader behind ServiceNow's experience strategy on proving from products on platform to platform-based products as companies continue to scale. So it's a growing organization that he's now trying to bring design and grow design into. And formerly, in a variety of product development roles from Fortune 500 to startup-sized companies. Resides in San Diego, like I mentioned, enjoys surfing and motorcycles, reading, and the list goes on. Then we have Mohan Krishnaraj, who's the VP and global head of UX design at Harman International which is a Samsung company. He's an advocate for user-centric design with two decades of experience in the industry. Mohan has proven record of enabling UX-led business transformation. So that's an interesting perspective where he's trying to bring design into a huge organization. He has mobilized teams across domains and geographies integrating data, design, and engineering to deliver seamless customer experience. And he's also the author of a new book that he's released in this program, Great Balancing Act from User Expectations vs. Experience. So welcome the panelists. So it's great to have you guys. And I strongly believe that design leadership changes are based on the challenges we get and we're trying to solve. So this is a perfect panel to bring that about. So just though I have given a brief introduction of all of you, I would love to... Oh, did I? No, I did. I did. Sorry. Well, I would like to start with understanding a little bit context about the organization you're from, the role and the role design plays in your organization briefly so that the audience has a little bit perspective of why we're seeing what we're seeing. So do you want to start, Anand? Sure. So I lead Gramnur. We are a design-led data science company. And the bulk of our work is taking analysis which comes from machine learning and narrating them as stories. You've probably seen our work. If you've seen any of the television coverage of the elections in the last five years, that's broadly our work. And the structure of the organization is like many of the organizations you will be working in. There's teams that have both designers and non-designers. In our case, the unusual thing is that we have statisticians working fairly closely with designers. And there are also consultants and programmers who are tossed in into the mix. So typical workflows, for example, the meteorological department gave our analysts some temperature data, effectively district temperature for the last 100 years. The analyst processes that data, passes it on to a designer. Now the designer's job is to figure out what kind of visual representation makes it most useful for people to interpret. And they said, let's put it on a map and animate it over time. Which a programmer took and created a visual out of and made a video into it. And then a consultant looked at it and said, wait a second, why is there a flashing spot right in the middle? And which led to the discovery of the district of Belaspur being the only district in India which has a counter-skillic weather pattern. It's hot when the surrounding areas are cold and cold when the surrounding areas are hot. The role design plays here is in surfacing the insight from data in a way that hasn't been seen before. That's really what we do. Great. So I have the challenge of convincing the larger organizations about design. So I'm sure it's not unique to me, which is a problem with most of the designers here. When it comes to business, every organizations are very different and their DNAs are different. As designers, we have to first adapt ourselves to the DNA and then inject the design fluids into them so it makes sense to them because we have to be more empathetic to the business and the business stakeholders on what they would look for. So my role is pretty challenging in that way that across Harman, all the divisions have different DNAs and we need to kind of convince them why experience plays a major role on it. So with that, the design challenges that we go through in each of these divisions are very different and probably we'll talk about a few examples going forward. Yeah. And specifically, I was really intrigued by the fact that you lead human, which is a spin-out, design studio, which is spun out of the organization, which is unlike many other organizations who are acquiring and I will hear that from Troy as well. The lucky part was that the CEO is very committed to design. So since the last 10 years, the design has been there, but he consolidated it to make it like a human. Human is an agency that works within Harman going across. Yeah. Okay. Hi, everyone. So I am the founder and principal designer at a startup called Rhizome. We work with holistic sustainability design and because everybody looks at the things holistically, everybody does everything there. We work in an information systems model where things are very decentralized. So while we have our core team of designers and specialists, we work more as coordinators with other experts. Sometimes we build softwares for governments. We work a lot with institutions. Sometimes we work with mainstream like Godrej or Titan. And whatever money we make, we end up losing it by being Robin Hood and working with small startups. So that's pretty much what we do. Hi, my name is Troy Asmoon. I head up a product platform design at ServiceNow. It's been a long journey. I've been there since the beginning of the design journey at ServiceNow. So it's something we might talk about later. But the current challenge is that we are faced with a revolve around scalability, scaling from one to nearly infinity with our solutions that we design. And then also ones of complexity. It's a highly complex environment, developing a platform that enables the creation of experiences versus products themselves. And the abstraction thinking that's necessary for you to allow the creation of experiences. And then finally, and this is probably the one that would be most aligned with the challenges of leadership, bringing the right collaboration across designers that are working on multiple product outcomes. Designers working on platform, core capability, collaboration with engineering teams to see the value in the work we're doing. And finally, collaboration with people in product roles that are very focused on product-based outcomes. So now that the mic is with you, I'd just like to add an additional question around, your case is specifically very interesting to me because you went in as a product manager, I think, right? And then you grew throughout. So I'm just interested in how the meaning of design leadership has changed or evolved through your career in terms of, and what were the triggers and moments that really made you what you are? Sure, yeah. So for me, I spent most of my career not in traditional design roles. I was in engineering and product management roles. I wasn't aware of the fact that I was a designer and had been a designer since I was probably around five or six years of age. It wasn't until I was in a management role that I ran into people that did design professionally. And I asked them, you know, I was curious, subconsciously, I guess. And I asked if I could read a book on it and I was recommended the classic Don Norman book on design, the design of everyday things. And I got about six pages into it and I just put the book down on my desk and I thought, oh my God, I'm a designer. And so I suddenly just changed my career path and bought every book on design that I could get in one order from Amazon and disappeared for half a year and then came back and started thinking about all my problems consciously from a design perspective. And then the background in engineering and product was actually very helpful. It was almost like an investment, you know, over time that starts to have compounding interest. And so I could look at a design issue and see the engineering reasons or the possibilities based on the engineering challenges and then on the product side, the outcome needs. And so coming into service now, there was no design. Like I mentioned, when I came there, we were at the beginning. There had been attempts to bring design in but the attempts had been very design outcome focused versus product outcome or engineering constraint focused and so there had been no traction. So when I came in to do product, you know, I saw problems that were product outcome problems or maybe they were engineering problems and I framed them as such with those stakeholders but the solutions that I presented were design solutions. So, you know, one example I mentioned to you the other day was when I came there, it was considered normal to right click on the interface in the browser to find controls to do work. It's not very discoverable, of course. So I mentioned that and the founder of the company who was my mentor just looked at me blankly and said, we've been doing it that way for 10 years and we're worth $10 billion. How much are you worth? So I didn't really have a response to that initially but I thought about it for a day and I came back and I said, well, if we're going to build a mobile product, are we going to have people long press on the UI on the phone? That's not going to work. And he said, okay, well, what do we do? And I said, this is a 2013 or 2014. And I said, well, there's this new thing called a hamburger and so then, you know, a month later we had, we were like Burger King or hamburgers everywhere. So we had to reel that in and reduce the amount of hamburgers but that was the start and it built some credibility as to the needs of thinking about design and we built it from there and then over time we could bring in professionals that were design centric and bring in design language because we'd shown value based on these product engineering perspectives. Anand, I'm curious because you're also a non-designer but you're an entrepreneur first. You started this company with a vision and now you have to deal with designers. I'm just curious about some of your... It's particularly tough because, I'm just curious, how many of you here don't have a design degree? Just raise your hands. Wow. Okay. So this is for all those non-designers, right? I'm in good company. We are in good company. So my, the only design course that I took in college, my teacher gave me an F, which is the only F that I ever got like in life and she said, Anand, look, just make sure you don't get into design as a carrier and literally here I am. All right, now she wouldn't be thrilled. She'd just be, she'd turn her head and despair the state of design in India maybe. But the point is this, you can learn and that's really what we've been doing. For me, that was the biggest personal thing because from there I then had to start by leading a team of designers. And at that point I realized that it was beyond personal learning, it was more about mentoring. The thing is, I'm not someone who can mentor somebody to create great designs, but the niche that I found there was interesting because it was around helping people not create bad designs. Ultimately, there are 100 ways of getting things wrong and a few ways, niche ways of getting things amazing. My job, it turned out as somebody who's leading a team was making sure that people don't mess up so badly on areas so that the beauty of what they're creating comes out. How do you do that? Checklists, for instance. So since we deal with data, one of the basic things that you need to watch out for is make sure that you always limit the number of categories. A designer creates a bar chart with four categories. The actual data has 40 categories and you can't even read the numbers. Or, let's take names. The designers has just put in the label. When the programmer puts in the label, let's say for election coverage, it turns out that there's one candidate whose name is Manu Ganapathy Ramakrishna Jayanti. That's not gonna fit on any screen, right? So you've got to watch out for this and put in ellipses. These are elements that constitute a checklist of what not to get wrong. Which doesn't quite take you to the wow factor, but at least allows you not to be inhibited by a certain element. And that was the big learning. How does one transition from being personally a good designer to being a mentor? The next transition was how does this apply to the industry as a whole? I mean, how does one translate a vision? In my case, it was dealing with data to something that the world can apply. And there my learning was that there are patterns everywhere. There are patterns of visuals and interactions that map to specific patterns of insights. And if you do a certain kind of analysis invariably, there's an association with certain way of representing it. And that was a pretty big learning. So overall the transition has been, like I said, right from getting an F in design to sitting in a panel among designers has been odd. So that takes me to the next question, Mohan. If you can take the mic. You know, we talked about leadership a lot in the morning. We talked about empathy, ability to drive discussions and so many things, right? We heard from Andy. I'm curious, how is design leadership different from any other leadership form? And I know it is different, but I would like you to talk about some of those additional things that you have to do while you're leading a design organization. I think personal experience also is that as designers we get too lost into design world and we are more a community oriented, we are in the family, we remain in the family and want to be within that sensitivity. And every designer, I agree to some extent, is very sensitive. We discussed this also that we have sensitivities at different levels. And with that sensitivity, we probably do not explore more into what's happening in the organization on the other side. So which means that how is design impacting? How do I quantify design? How do I prove this that this is the revenue that the organization is getting because of me or because of design that I have done as a designer? So these are things that are generally not a comfort zone for a designer, but that's what will lead to become leaders. But to become leaders, you have to be all rounded. So you need to understand those aspects. If any junior designer can hold a conversation with a C level or a CEO that your product might have a disruption coming by because your competition is doing something different and we are not following that. If you are doing the same thing, then we might go down in overtime. So these are certain things that has to come out of the instinct and come out of the comfort zones and do this. Like I said, it is not easy path and designers are like the crown jewel, but never crowned. So when I say that it's more difficult to get a position on the board or sit on the board to make a decision or even be an influencer for a decision because design is always thought like a cost or it's more of an investment to make it look better. But today's world has really changed. Design is the tip of the arrow that gets the whole thing into the organization. So as long as that realization has come in from every organization, but still the positions of the leadership is always restricted to other leadership but not for the design leadership yet. Anyone wants to add to that? So in my experience, everybody actually designs, right? And there are so many books and seminal books on design which say that everybody who figures out what they want to do and the best way to do it is a designer. So I think the issue really is with professional designers or educated designers who've received an education. And the fact is that in the real world, whatever your expertise, unless you talk to the other people who you work with in a way which all of you can together build a solution, it's not gonna work. So as Mohan talked about design being the tip of an arrow, it doesn't mean design through a professional designer as an educated designer because often professions leak expertise into each other. And if this didn't happen, every expertise would just throw a solution over the wall to the next guy who doesn't know why that happened and what to do with it. And eventually what comes out and often it happens in design teams in larger companies, the end solution is a Frankenstein which everybody threw over the wall and nobody wants to now have accountability for it. And nobody feels accountable because you just did a small slice of the design process. So I think that for me a design leader and what is so important about design leadership is the aspect of being able to see a coordinated kind of compound picture, negotiating it and actually being more of a listener and a coordinator rather than the solution provider. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to sound very preachy here. So I do want to jump on to some of the challenges but just to remind, there will be chance to ask audience questions. So all those designers and non-designers, if you have any questions, please raise your hands and we can ask along the way. But so, you know, it was interesting. I, do you have anything to say? Yeah, go ahead. Maybe. Yes. Yeah, so designing a leadership to Mohan's point, it's there's the challenge around the sensitivity. I think as designers we tend to be very introspective because we're thinking about others and trying to be them sometimes to put ourselves in their shoes and sometimes that works against us because, you know, as a stakeholder we sometimes shy away from the conflict or we're busy in our own world thinking about the problem. And I think it happens to everybody whether you're a new designer or you're a design manager or a design VP, that's part of you. That's part of the reason you got into design. But the thing to remember, regardless of your role and the thing at least that I remember sometimes when I have to get up and lead is that though I might have this inclination to just, you know, kind of ruminate, ultimately I came here to make sure that the people that use our product, whatever the product may be, come first. And so I think everybody can agree they want happy customers. And you know, if it means I have to go out of my comfort zone to make sure that we have customers that are happy with our product and we do something we can be proud of, then damn it, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna get out of my shell and I'm gonna say, hey, we've gotta do something or it's not good enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Since you say about, you know, what do users want? A lot of design these days is actually much more participatory, you know. It's actually users who are designing stuff. So as a designer, you're not designing a product or a system or a solution. You're actually doing meta design where you're designing a method which allows the user to design. So this is, you know, something that's, again, throwing up the role of the contemporary design leader, the role of the contemporary designer is not actually finding the solution but designing the system that finds the solution. That's a really good point. And I think one of my mentors, Larry Keeley, always said, we have design methods to provide. What we want to do is reduce the risk of failure, right? So what you're doing is providing processes and methods to say that, okay, there'll always be a risk, but, you know, the risk, market risk, business risk and technical risk is a little less because now we have a certain method to follow. So yeah, that's a good ad. So what are some of the challenges, I mean, Rebecca, that you as a design leader have to face? And I know you work with the government, you work with bodies, nonprofits, organizations, but I think there's, I just want to introduce to the audience, like there's a lot more to designing pretty pictures and pretty objects and I'm really curious about some of the stuff you are doing and bringing to our country. So actually we work in the domain of sustainability, which is a discipline in flux. Nobody has unraveled it yet and nobody has cracked it yet and if they had cracked it, there would be no climate change. So it doesn't look like anyone's cracking it anytime soon. But similarly, and simultaneously, there's this explosion of innovation from different disciplines who want to provide inputs or want to provide a piece that might solve the puzzle, if not the entire picture. So for us, we have our clients who are basically sustainability evaders. They don't want to be sustainable because sustainability costs money. They don't see it as an investment, they see it as an expense. And on the other side, you see the governments or the public, so institutions who find themselves in the sad role of policing sustainability, but they don't know what it's about either because actually no one knows what it's about. So at that sense, at some level, you have to be a design activist. So being a design leader is about being a design activist where you find an opportunity, find a solution, create a system to do that, then convince policy makers on what that system is and then convince mainstreams as to why they should follow that system and why that makes economic sense to both parties. So for one of them, it's economic sense and for one of them, it's political or ethical sense. So in that sense, often I think design leaders are also design activists because they're chartering new territories of opportunity. It's interesting what you're doing at a government level. I feel like having worked with companies like GE, it's like internally you're doing the same thing. You're advocating. I mean, I would always introduce myself as an advocate for user perspective. So you're doing the same fights. You're trying to get the budgets for the value of research and design. So it's interesting how you bring it to the other level. So anything to add to some of the challenges and new challenges that we haven't talked about yet? So more from design challenges, I think as projects, as organizations, everything will be going fine. From a very designer's heart perspective, when you see everything is going fine, is also not a good state to be in. And if Kotak is an example that we can take as an organization, they did really well and everything was going fine. But there was something that was coming by which is disruption. And that challenge is something that nobody can easily identify. But yes, the only person who can identify is designer from my perspective. So what can disrupt? What is coming by? What is the competition doing? How are we doing best? What is industry going forward? So the design challenges doesn't end with doing something right and finishing with the organization but also challenging that. I would disagree a little bit saying not only designers, I think non-designers equally can look for that disruption as long as they're empathetic. They understand the human behavior and what's coming all along. But the eyes on design is only by the designers. It's they only care about the user experience. The users are the ones who will get disrupted. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. We face a slightly different kind of a challenge on the data design side, interestingly. And it has to do with the ethics of what gets published. Given that it's data and it's therefore evidently fact-based at least in a certain sense. Actually post the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for instance, and it just broke out and everybody was concerned about how elections can be rigged. And that was before the Karnataka elections here. At least three media agencies called asking, look, is this really possible? Can we do it in India? Incidentally, six politicians asked, called asking if we can actually do it for them. So there's always this trade-off of can data be used for the wrong purpose? And you've probably heard this joke, right? The mathematician, a physicist and an accountant are asked, what is two plus two? The mathematician says four. The physicist says approximately four. The accountant walks over and says, what do you want it to be? So ultimately, data can give you any kind of answer. And we face this kind of a challenge, particularly when we were designing for the UP government, a health indicator. The question is, each district has a health performance as an absolute number. Now, the numbers may all increase, the numbers may all decrease. We could show them as absolute values or we could show it as ranks for each of the districts. The trouble is when all of the numbers are consistently increasing, everything looks good and we're fine. That technically reflects the state of affairs. But the intent that the minister had was to make sure that he energizes the team at any point to make sure there is consistent improvement. So the intent was to make sure that at least half of them or whatever are not performing well enough and therefore use the ranking. The ranking will rise or fall no matter how the absolute performance is going. So I think one of the challenges that we have is the trade-off between a known intent, which is essential because otherwise you won't quite know why you're communicating, what you're communicating. And the ethics of pushing an intent through that design, that's a constant battle. I don't know if there's an answer to it, but it's something to factor in. Yeah. Troy, I'm curious. Yours is a really fast growing company as what I see. What are some of the challenges related to scaling? Yeah, so we have had scaling challenges, I think, from the very beginning. Initially, like I mentioned, we had no designers. So once myself and one engineer took off our disguises and we became designers, it was two designers and 2,500 engineers. And then from there, we had to figure out how to grow the team because now we had acceptance and hiring the right people out of the gate was super challenging because nobody knew who we were. And so it meant that we had to burn a lot of calories, finding people and going through a lot of the wrong people. And then to grow quickly, we looked at acquisitions, we conducted an acquisition that doubled our team from about 20 designers to 40 designers. That was extremely challenging. It was very risky. There was no one else I could go to and ask. Ultimately, I was the only person that would be accountable and there was no one there to get really a encouragement from because it was kind of the blind leading the blind really. So that was a really great memory actually. If you ever do an acquisition, which no one goes to acquisition school, I don't think. So you may think this won't apply to you but it very well may someday apply to you. You may be that person or one of those people looking at joining with another company. The one thing to keep in mind in that situation is there'll be a day when you wake up during the process and you realize that you would never want to work at that company or the day that you realize you would work at that company and then you have your answer and then you go all the way. You go all the way. You either run away screaming or you get as much money together as you can and you buy that company. And so that's the process really for that. You gotta use your gut because there's not time. You're not gonna get all the data either. Obviously when you're looking at other companies they're not gonna tell you everything. So there's a lot of intuition needed. So culture is king when you're doing that kind of a merger of cultures, right? So that was a big challenge. And like I mentioned earlier the real big challenges now are how do you really scale when you've reached kind of that level where you've got multiple products, multi-billion dollar revenue coming in and you've got dozens of designers joining every couple of months. How do we educate these folks? How do we make them effective? And that's all really about finding common denominators and the experiences and as a leader communicating a vision of what the purpose is because the problems are so big it'd be like if you wanna get to the moon, right? You wanna put a person on the moon. It's not like one person's gonna be building the rocket and designing the rocket and flying the rocket. You're gonna have thousands of people. One person just works on the fuel tank. One person just flies the rocket. One person just goes on the moon and you've gotta be that person that's like, everybody, we're going to the moon. Today we got one tail fin done on the rocket. That is awesome. We're 0.2% closer to 100% and just being that person that can keep the vision and never give up and then when people think that there's too much to do they can at least see that eventually we're going to the moon. That's a key part of leadership. Design or any. We heard the Steve Jobs video. I think that's what he was saying. But I see two approaches, a lot of organizations take is one is leave their risk on one person's Steve Jobs to run the show. And then there are other organizations like PNG where AJ lovely really infused design in the culture of the organization. And so I feel like that one is less risky because you're not with the loss of Steve Jobs things are different. So I don't know, I'm just specifically interested in Mohan being in a big corporation. What is the path you guys take in terms of creating a culture versus leadership in that sense? Yeah, culture wise I think when large companies merge between many companies there's a mix of a lot of cultures. So when you see a lot of cultures coming in there are some design oriented culture because design oriented culture has to come from top down. Otherwise it's very difficult to survive in the organization. So anybody trying to infuse design from a lower end is absolutely zero I would say because the design has to be valued from top down which is why most of my conversation is on how much can you hold conversations with that level who can make a difference to you. So as long as those levels understand the importance then the culture will trickle down the path. But within the teams I'm sure the excitement is more on what sort of jobs are they getting? What sort of activity are they getting to do? Are they getting the monotonous wireframe designs visual designs kind of a job? Or is it exciting that we can talk to customers and try to be a part of their vision to make a change in the futuristic design? So if that excitement is there then designers would stay with any culture. They would still live with the culture because they're excited about the work. Or in many organizations mostly the culture plays a bigger role where they stay back for culture if the work is not happy. Yeah, I'm curious, what do you mean when you say design culture, creating a design culture? What are the ingredients? So mainly appreciating culture, appreciating the design culture, taking the point of views of designers or the design thoughts. And everybody in the room is not sticking to a project plan and a requirement document that comes with a customer. So they're allowing scope to go out of the scope and have this discussion. So these are the different types of cultures that comes in. Most often bureaucracy and red tapes stop these things. So if you're able to cut through that is the culture I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, no, thanks. I wanna open up the questions to, since we're at the challenges stage, I'm sure all of you guys working in different organizations have questions, so. Hi, this is Ashish here. I run a design studio called NetBrahma in Bangalore. We've been around for 12 years now. So my question to you guys is, where do you see design leadership in the next five years? Because we all know the current state, we all know what we've gone through. But what does it take to see the next five years more specifically in terms of India and obviously the global landscape? Where do you see design, design leadership? What are the interesting things or patterns, insights that you guys get? Great question. So the future of design leadership. Who wants to take that? You wanna point it to anyone or? I think it's a general question. Yeah, whoever. Sure, there's a bunch of patterns. One that I see is designers becoming not just, design leaders being not just designers, but designers and other things. I can certainly say that there's an increasing number of design leaders who are actually developers. There's a fairly large number of design leaders who are domain experts and won't be long because before there are design leaders who come from an analytical background. And this change I think leads to a couple of things. One, a certain amount of fragmentation or specialization. I mean, just like medicine evolved into specialism to the point of you have any anti-doctor and so on. That's certainly one trend that I am seeing. But also the cross pollination of well, people like myself and Troy who are not designers themselves who are coming into design bringing in a certain amount of our own backgrounds into this. So it on the one hand means proliferation. On the other hand means combination with other fields. That's definitely one trend. No, I was trying to say that most often this cross pollination like you said rightly is great. The same thing is required from designers also to cross pollinate into other divisions. So that brings more leadership. And as we can see from year to year, we are seeing a lot of startups that is that they're wriggling out of the overall clutches they have within the organization and they want to get free and do something that they really envision. If those company becomes big tomorrow is when the design leaderships also will reach the boards faster. I mean, it did not have to wait for five years, I'm sure, but it's going to reach faster. And if any design led organizations will always be the futuristic path for us. So we've actually been studying for a client whose name I cannot disclose the role of designers in organizations and strategies. And based on our studies, what we can figure out is that designers are actually ideally placed to do bigger things than what they're doing. But if you look at the emergence of the role of the designer over time. So in the 80s, it was very much the designer as a superstar. So you had these post-bar horse leftover like product designers like Philip Stark or post-modern designers. After that in the 90s, you had this whole phase of designers being design managers. So managing teams of people who are producing or designing stuff for markets which are not local. And now you see more designers as key strategists to the pulse of the business. So there are actually a lot of studies which depict the role of the designers and they point from designers being I-shaped designers that is domain experts, you know, where you have a little at the top and a little at the bottom. To designers being T-shaped designers where you know a lot and you also talk to a lot of people. To O-shaped designers where you know everything and you're looking at everyone but perhaps you don't have domain expertise in anything. And your job is actually to become interfaced or networked with other T-shaped members of an innovation team who may not be designers but may be part of the design process. So I mean science indicates that's where design is going in terms of leadership. Yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, you know a great, we talked about this the other day, a great product person if you work with them, they'd be solid designers too and the same thing holds true for a designer. They're gonna make a great product person or they're gonna make a great designer if they're a product person or designer or product person if they're a designer. It's because they have context and empathy. So for the designer to become an effective leader, they've gotta start building context around why are we doing what we're doing, not just for the end user enjoying it but the business outcome. That's really gonna be the unifying theme across business leaders. I think it's so old saying that profit is a cross functional goal. So if you're focused on creating a product that will sell and that's the motivation behind your design decisions, then that's the kind of leadership that will communicate very well across the C-suite in your organization. You know, and it's funny as researchers or designers, we are so trained to empathize with our users. Even if we use like 50 to 70% of that empathy with empathizing with our internal stakeholders, I think we can do magic. That's been my experience anyways. Any other questions from the audience? Yeah. Hi, sorry, can I go? Oh, yes. Hi, my name is Prachi. I'm a user experience researcher with Microsoft. Building on Ashish's question, right? We touched on culture, ethics, advocacy. So as design has these really powerful tools to change culture, I would love for the panel to share examples of, you know, looking a little inward. If you've used these tools to change the culture of your organization, your team, or a person for the better in any way. Thank you. Great question. One thing that I found very powerful is language training. Just helping designers express themselves. One part of the question is, here's the design. Why is this what it is? And coaching them in explaining the design in a way that different kinds of audiences can understand. So that's one kind of linguistic surgery that helps. The other which is perhaps more important is language training in interpretation. The client says, you know, I don't get this wow feeling. So instead of taking a deep sigh and just walking away, it's about saying, okay, let's translate that into potential set of possibilities. Do you think that it's the color scheme that doesn't work? Leading an inquiry, but making sure that they're trained on the right kind of words to use at these situations. That's probably had the best impact. Just letting people know that they could explore with curiosity and literally use the words. I'm curious why it makes a huge difference in comparison to the normal language that we've seen designers use in the past. That's definitely had the largest cultural shift that we've seen. So generally when people come from different disciplines, they're trained to ask different types of questions. So say a scientist or somebody who's working with very absolute answers would ask a what question. What happens when these two things come together? People who come from, say, the social sciences ask the why questions. You know, why is this person responding like that? As designers, we ask how questions, which first, look at what happens. Second, why it happens and how can we influence or change that and basically change reality. So I think that the greatest cultural shift in our organization is asking people to not just jump to the how questions, but look at a scientific perspective, both form very quantitative aspects, also from very cultural why questions. And then come in as a designer. And again, when I say as a designer, I don't mean a professional designer. I mean anybody on board the design process, which for us is everybody. Everybody has an opinion and we think that's great that everybody should have an opinion. And I often tell my team that, you know, whether you like what he or she's saying or not, it is free advice. Do what you want with it, but please listen. So getting people to think in a more scientific sense in terms of taking feedback and deciding what you want to filter on what to apply is a great cultural shift that's happening in our organization. What are the powers of innovation is you don't have to have answers to all the questions. And I feel like, especially when I grew up and as an industrial designer my first job and all that, we were hesitant to ask questions because we thought we don't have enough experience. But I would challenge those young designers to ask questions irrespective because you know the people you're asking those questions, I bet they don't know the answers either. So I think it's more important to ask the good questions or the right questions to move forward. Any other questions? Hello. Yeah. I'm a CX professional. Though there is a lot of overlap between UX and CX and actually both are meant for the improving the customer's experience or the user's experience. I see one area where there is a slight conflict or at this in practice it appears. Unlike the UX, CX focused more on the multiple touch point of entire journey. The conflicts happens here that CX is towards more the customer centric and UX appears to be more product centric or the offering centric. So how to navigate these conflicts to make more synergy between the CX to empower the customer experience? That's the questions to the panel. So mostly the question between, it's a thin line between UX and CX all the time. So typically when you design it for users the way they use it, the way you can persuade them is different while when the CX part comes it's more of a larger audience and how most often how can we design for a larger community. This is typically the difference like MVP is more of a viable product which is a tolerable design but MLP is a loveable product which more a group of people loves it. So when you're designing more for a larger audience then the considerations is different against one particular user that you're targeting to make sure he's happy. So we've gone through the personas path and we've seen making it user centric but more cultural aspects are coming into where the customers from different regions have different expectations. So matching that is more of a customer experience that brings in a larger view to it. Any other thoughts? No, I just think previously a lot of companies were focused on products. So user experience was really important how they engage, how they feel, how they use a particular thing. But I think now we've realized over time that service is really important, how you treat your customer, how you sell the product, how you launch them to the market. All those are also important and designers can help with that. That's the biggest part. So I think that's the way I see the difference. So quick answer is UX is part of CX. There's a question here. Good morning, I have a question to the panel. In an age of remote working becoming a pattern, what barriers do you have or experience with designers or UX teams and how do you feel the age of remote working could be made a success with design leadership? Your thoughts please. So to take that question, how much remote is the question again? So most often organizations decides to be 80% remote and 20% on-site with the customer. But there has to be some representations on-site or with the customer to make sure the rest of the remote works fine. So when I say this, there has to be one representation who is bringing in that cultural aspect of all the remote and capturing all of the remote aspects and making sure he's representing it well. Just to represent, they will be like 20% or 10% whatever the organization decides to have it with in front of the customers to make sure that the remote is successful. Completely remote is still not a viable option with all our aspects that we have. Even we talk about so much of technology implementations but we still struggle connectivity is on phone. We can't still take our mobile, the calls on mobiles yet. So we are still not there from an overall connectivity perspective but remote working as a process works fantastically if you have a representation of certain percentage on with the customer so that the communication is happening clear and face-to-face and every representation is clear to them. While on calls, while on WebEx we can do as much possible but the cultural differences might come in. I mean typically we have these examples of India working with Europe where we are doing something for Dutch and working with China teams to do something on industrial design. So we have a lot of challenges when it comes to cultural fitment itself. So that's where with a team of about 300 in human which is part of Harman we have about 40 nationalities. So which is why it brings a lot of betterment when you build the teams to have different nationalities within then the globalization or the globalization becomes easier. Though I'll probably take a slightly different view to that. In our case the trade-off has been that remote is not an option. It is necessary. I mean sometimes even within the country one lady in Nagpur, one in Mumbai and we just can't get them all together. So yes, it does have an impact on quality but oddly enough by just being forced into a remote environment I'm finding that our ways of working asynchronously are improving. So we're finding the tools and having people put the comments and learning how to put comments better which actually improves the work-life balance a bit because then it's not something that a large number of people have to come together and so on. So if it's possible to experiment with a pure remote environment in a few cases I think the learning that comes out of it is quite promising. Yeah, with remote teams you do need to have some physical connection at some, there either has to be a stakeholder that's in one location or the other or at least the teams come together. The big reason for that is that in design I think everybody would agree there needs to be a certain level of joy but for there to be joy there needs to be a certain authentic relationship where people really appreciate each other's contributions and company and for that to happen there's no more effective way than to sit down face to face and work through some problems together even go out to dinner, tell a few jokes that sort of stuff creates the bond and once you've done that then you can go to the remote situation and you have a certain level of camaraderie that's almost impossible to achieve if you don't take the time to make that initial investment. So it's not a black and white I think that there's a gray area there that will allow you to create that sense of community with your teams regardless of where they're at. Absolutely valid point. I mean how many of you in this audience would be interested if all of us were on the screen? Hello, one more question Shilpik. My name is Uarun. Earlier Shilpik you spoke about jobs and how a personality like that represented design at Apple and what his absence would mean for that and Mohan Weri-Appli spoke about culture and how culture is much bigger than a figurehead. So I'm going to ask a bit about culture. I work with this, I work at the startup called Bizongo. We're on LinkedIn's list of top 25 startups to work for currently. We place a lot of emphasis on culture and right now we're scaling up a lot. We're hiring designers, we're hiring design leaders and as an organization that emphasizes on culture we have a fairly well-defined culture. While we scale up I've seen that it's one of the easiest things to lose culture. How do we maintain culture as we scale up and across locations? I'm particularly interested in what Troy would have to say because service now is spread across locations, there are lots of people and so on. Sure, so as an example, when we decided to grow our design team here in Hyderabad myself and our head of user research we took a lot of time out of our schedules to personally be involved in every single interview. So we probably did about, once they came to the point where we had a face-to-face type of interview we did about 50 of them and of those 50 we ended up with three or four designers that formed our core team and the rule that we made for ourselves is we're not hiring anybody that we wouldn't want showing up in our office in San Diego, California tomorrow. So it's all about not taking any shortcuts on the starting kernel, right? It's just like your design, if you're doing architectural design. You've got to have sound principles for the starting architecture of your design or the whole thing will collapse a few months later. And I think that's really the secret. And what happens is companies and organizations just wanna grow really quickly and they take a few shortcuts and hope for the best and then it just, it's like a snowball. It starts rolling downhill and the next thing you know you've got this office where they say, oh, those guys are in the other office and we don't wanna work with them. We do it our own way. We're better than everybody else type of stuff. So you have to be very conscious of that and when you do start building the organization, invest the time to either bring them over or vice versa. So you send people to that team to make sure that it builds as one team, not two separate teams in the same company. I hope that helps. That did help. Anything else from the other folks on the panel? Okay, I can take it. So mostly culture is, I would say, I mean, you would have seen families with 100, 150 people. They take big pictures all together. There are some fundamentals that pass through from the two pair that they started, right? Like a startup, they start small and the culture goes down. But as long as how much do you allow dilution is what matters. How much of seriousness is there on the culture? If somebody is doing something beyond the cultural ethics of the company, how seriously is that treated? And it has to be top down again and how much of dilution are you allowing? Like every aspect of a culture needs to be treated like more like a process, more like a non-compliance to things not being followed as a culture. And a non-culture fit can actually be a reason for a person to be taken out of the system. I mean, to that level, if it is serious, then the dilution is very limited. Everybody will believe and from the belief on the culture is what will take us places. So for us, we've figured out that first of all, for promoting a culture or maintaining a culture, we don't believe it should be done or that it can be done without everyone being on board. So for us, we work with a lot of companies who come to us with this issue of having some kind of ethos for the institution. And it's especially difficult when there are so many cogs in the machinery. So you have a government, you have an NGO, you have and everybody's working as one big team. So what's really important is to communicate a vision, to have the guts to change the vision, if there is a vision shift, admit it and understand what implicit changes that mean in the culture of the institution or the culture of the project happening. And most importantly, we have discovered for us, this kind of a compliance approach that, if you don't fit in there with the culture, you get cut loose or whatever, it doesn't work. So there's a carrot and a stick approach and we feel that as an organization, you are comprised of small parts. So unless everybody is on board, it is not the culture of the organization because everybody makes the organization, you just have the vision. And everybody shows different ways how to implement it. So if you're not willing to move, change or open up, you will eventually die if you don't evolve. And I think meeting culture is the biggest pain point I've suffered through in my early career ages where you wait till a meeting and remote work question also is the same thing. When you're remotely connecting, you always have a purpose. I think people should meet without a purpose and that's where what sparks new ideas. So I think that's... At the same time, I would say that if you don't fit into the culture, please get out of that system because that may not be your culture to fit into it. Yeah, yeah. And I think my big question is what is culture? How do you define culture? What are some of the key words or things that you think when you say culture, what does it mean? A question to the panel. Well, it's very simple, but what I always tell people, a good culture is a culture where you don't do anything that you couldn't explain to your mom. So treating other people as equals and being transparent about what you're asking for and being authentic are key parts of it and also being yourself. You simply can't create a great culture if people are afraid to show who they really are. So that means different ways of talking, different ways of thinking, different viewpoints, great cultures and business settings. There's that freedom to be yourself but there's also an expectation of results. So yeah, that person might have some pretty strange views but that's great design work and they're also very open to my strange views from their perspective. So there you've got a great culture. You've got a great business culture because you've got that diversity but you've got a shared focus on let's make the best product we can possibly make. And on top of it, we're talking about design culture which is really sharing shared values on what design is or what design can do. Right, in the sense and equality of, we may be different but we can all agree that we wanna be the best designers we can be and we're gonna help each other get there. Yeah, yeah, nice. So as we wrap up, I just want to ask a closing question to the panel. What advice would you give to the group of young designers or non-designers as they evolve into a design leadership or leadership role in organizations? I mean, I would clearly say that any, there is no levels in designs because any fresh graduates coming out of designers, how much of a years we have spent in design, we definitely will be more eager to learn from them because they come with fresh thoughts and design is all about fresh thoughts, new blood, new thinking. Once we start getting into a comfort zone of, yeah, I have done enough and I've learned enough, now I can start relaxing a bit. That's when the positions die out, the potential dies out and the opportunity dies out but every aspects of the newcomers that needs to be showcased well, you need to get access. Don't get into organizations which are very stringent on that aspect where you don't get a culture to be open, where you don't get a culture to have, express your perspectives, like you said. So most importantly, expressing your perspectives is very important and if you can't convince your design, if you are not confident about your design, who else can be? It is your design. So as long as you can take it to any level and talk about it strongly, that will take you places. So that's the only advice I would say. Yeah, and if you do get stuck in an organization like that, then you have to have the ability to take risks and speak up, I think. I'd say teach as you learn. It's a good way of learning in the first place but it also puts you in a position to be able to mentor people which will typically be your next role. So I'd say there's three things. Great design or ship. You're only as good as your last product and don't let anybody else define who you are. You get that. You get to define who you are. I mean, everybody on the stage has been told they can't do it because of whatever stupid reason someone told them can't be done or you're no good at it. You get to make that choice as a designer and that includes if you're not getting the support you need, if the organization doesn't understand your value, you get to make the final call. Everybody here I think had a mentor at least once or twice in their career that believed in them. And everybody deserves that opportunity to have somebody in your career that believes in you and they see your potential and they give you the challenges you need to grow. Yeah, so for me, the advice I would give is be fearless. Be fearless even in making mistakes. Be fearless in getting up on whatever you do. There'll be a lot of times when things go wrong. Make sure that's not because you didn't put in the work. Make sure that if you are wrong it's a learning experience. So work hard, don't complain and be honest. Yeah, no, that's a great advice from the panel. I know the crowd is starting to get hungry now. So we're gonna, unless there's some pressing question from the audience, I think we're gonna say thank you to be a good listener and good questions today. That was a very interesting panel. A lot of good questions, a lot of great answers and I could see the audience were hooked. They're still here, in fact. So a round of applause for our panel and thank you, Shilpi, for moderating it. It was very well done and I would like to call upon stage Mr. Narendra, who's the co-chair for UX India to distribute a token of appreciation from our side. Thank you.