 with you is, you know, how in my higher education in India, and studying anthropology and sociology has impacted my career. It was tough. As I mentioned, you probably heard my panel discussion and a little bit of introduction about myself. It was challenging those times, you know, for women to go into higher education, leave a site, taking up studying anthropology. I should explain to my parents and friends and family what does anthropology mean, studying humans, right? Yet, people want them on to journalism. I mean, what are you going to do? So it was a challenging time those years where women never really pursued humanities, or if they did pursue humanities, it was only to establish good marriage, rich kids, and that was our ultimate goal, right? But I'm here today to talk to you about the long journey that began in India. And the many lessons I've learned along the way, and how it has impacted shade to what I am today as a design manager. So long enough, I want to share with you some of the stories about my journey when I started off my career as a journalist in India. As a young journalist, back to a woman journalist, I was tasked with a tough assignment, you know, I tried to name expressing. There was an increase of fatalities in childhood slums in Mumbai. So my editor sent me to do a feature of child wealth in slums in Mumbai. For those at no Mumbai, you can imagine what it was like with this assignment. But I took it upon me. And I was scared. I was nervous. And in those times, unprepared for stepping into slums. So I thought my job was to follow this mid-life. And through the Karabi and Bandra slums. And you can imagine, there was a call of screaming and yelling that came from one of the house. We dashed in. And there was a woman in total distress and horrible condition lining up, bleeding, fright and fear written all over her big face. I was sick to my stomach, nauseated, wondering, what am I short of feinting? But I had to take a grip of myself. This was not about me. This was not about me at all. This was about this woman going through childhood slums. They gave me a chair, and made me sit next to her. I put my notebook down, and I held her hand. But what I experienced that day really taught me about connections, making connections, making connections, the empathy. And that lesson has guided me to today. It really made me realize that when we talk about empathy, it was a lesson to empathy, understanding who you are, or who your users are. It was a tough lesson, but I can tell you, I was able to write a great expose that really revealed how childhood in slums happens. So that is how I learned the primary lesson of ethnography, of user research, and how you really begin connecting with your users. So my first, oh, I missed talking to you about where I migrated. So now I work in the USA Oracle. That's my team in USA, and I work as part of the advanced research. So like I was saying, here's a lesson, an example of the slums of mobile. This is not the picture taken when I was there. Certainly they were involved now, and they certainly have better signpostage, but empathy. So this is the principle that has guided me. I really feel this principle still stays very close to my heart, because it's the essence of innovation, design inspiration, and solution, building a right solution. Once you understand and relate to your users, you know what you have to build. This ability to connect and understand the world that we live in really is the proof of designers. And I say that's the proof of design. Today it's a challenge, because user research is always compromised. Time, agile methodologies, the time to rush to market, and maybe roll out the products even before they've been tested and vetted, really is the challenge of our time. So keeping a focus on who the users are, what they need, is a challenge. And I say don't give up that challenge, because time and time again, I've seen the products being come back redesigned, redone again, because the user research was not done. So do not compromise. Any time projects that compromise make assumptions about who your users are, what the problem that you're solving, if you really don't understand the purpose of your product, don't even go further. That's my key role. So I want to quickly say that this lesson has taught me, and throughout as I've gained experience in this field, I've never lost my sight towards this. And really, despite all the challenges, I've succeeded in making sure that I really question until I've understood the user. Even if I don't have the time to go out and do the research that I have to be, I challenge my managers. I challenge the customers to understand, to tell me if they don't give me the right requirements, if they don't tell me who my users are, I can't design the product that's right for them. So this is one of the principles that I've learned. The second thing that I've learned along the way in enterprise application. When I started working in one of the large enterprise companies, I was probably the only human factor as an engineer hired. It was a company created by an engineer, who founded by an engineer, run by engineer and develop. And they were really bright people. The product was very successful. They migrated from green screen to Windows-based product. My challenge was to make the product usable. And my first task was to redesign the interface. So I redesigned the interface. And it was a big success. So I was invited, our whole team was invited to the founder's home for dinner. He introduced me as the woman who made my software look pretty. I took that as a compliment and a challenge. Because I knew that the usability problems in that product were many. And to understand the complexity that had built in over and over again with patches and adding feature functions, really, you lost whom. It was my inability to understand what were people doing with this product. So I started asking questions. I need to talk to customers. I need to talk to people that use this application to be able to understand what's wrong with this product. After many, many complaints, everybody would tell me it's not usable. There's people this. What can you do about it, et cetera? Finally, there were some customers in South Carolina who were invited me to come and see. And imagine South Carolina a few years ago, I don't think so. Improving in the US, but they're also still challenging. When I went there in this office, I could see that other than the receptionist, there were no women in the office. I was entirely, I was supposed to follow a purchase officer, basically a purchasing manager, and understand the contract negotiation phase. We're building a purchasing solution. From the beginning, when I met this manager, he was the team lead for his team. I was supposed to sit with all the purchasing managers. I faced a lot of resistance. Why are you here? Why is an Indian woman here? And why are you interested in my job? So it took me a lot of struggle, strength, and courage to start to stick through that whole week. Follow him around, follow his team around, trying to understand what they're doing with the product, what kind of pains are they having, and where are the opportunities for us to improve the design? After a good hard week of first words, it ended up in a happy note. When I gave him, debriefed him, and gave him my assessment of his task flow, where are the gaps, where are the pain points, and an assessment of the task flow, what he was doing, where are the opportunities for improvements? He looked at me very strangely. I've had a very upset, something is wrong. And he said, man, nobody's studied my job in such a detailed way. And I took that as a compliment. But yes, it entered us with a good handshake. I went off with a great amount of information back to my development team, and was able to design the solution, which was really actually a much usable solution that met his needs. I went back once, before, and I was treated very well after that experience. But this whole cycle taught me one thing, the second lesson in my career, which is grit and perseverance, staying focused on that user's role. It wasn't easy coming back and trying to make a change in that. Years of design that the engineers had created to make them redesign the product from ground up. Because it was designed wrong. It was designed with the feature functions in mind rather than the past flow in mind. When it changed completely to the past flow in mind, it was a lot of work for designers, admittedly, we had a whole release. This whole effort required development and managerial support. But it required my grit and perseverance to push this change within the application. It's not easy. Even the founder who once invited me to his house as a lady who made the software beautiful, wondered what was I doing there. But the product was successful and I was allowed to hire more people. That was, to me, a success factor because I was able to bring in a team of people and I actually came to India to hire my first UX team. The second lesson, as I've learned in my design management career, of course you can pursue it with passion, but what do I mean by that? Actually, passion, I've learned to passion and appreciation, I wanna say. Because what I've done, as I've hired people from multiple discipline, I've realized that our discipline is a multidisciplinary field. And everybody brings a tremendous amount of strength, visual designers, cognitive psychologists, social scientists, computer scientists, visual designers, even information architects, management, business, everybody brings contribution. So when you interview people, depending on what your needs are, don't exclude people that come from humanities or liberal arts background because they have a contribution to make in this field. The key thing is what are they doing? What is the skill set they're bringing? Are they strong in the skill set? Do they understand the broad knowledge required to design a solution? Design requires a great broad knowledge. You sometimes think of wireframing, if you understand the tool as your and you think we make good designers, actually it takes us much more to understand what it takes to make a successful design. And that really requires working as a collaborative team. I have product managers here from Oracle. I've worked with product managers of trying to educate them in music experiments and I'm so happy to see you here because I think more and more product managers, project managers, engineers, if they take, understand your domain and you understand their domain, there's a wonderful handshake that can happen which is we design, we all work as a team to design their solution. Let's know us versus them, it's we. We are designing the product and the solution. So this is the passion that kind of I feel has driven me to where I find that now as a design manager I'm moving more into impacting the future minds. And I wanna say this that this appreciation of broad discipline, I wanna see that expanded in young children, there is a focus still in technology being the driver of solution. And I agree, technology is a driver of solution. So I'll give you a good story, I have an interesting story of my experience when I've gone to Mexico. I have a team in Mexico as well in Guadalajara. And I was asked to judge a Technovation competition. Technovation, I don't know if you've heard, this is a program all around, it's a global program where they're encouraging children to innovate in young children, high school children, middle school children, particularly girls. And the reason why I was invited is I was a woman designer. So they invited me, I was impressed. These girls, these were high school girls, they were asked to build a product that would help their communities. And we were asked to judge on it. I was impressed by the entries and the amount of work that these girls, the passion that they brought to the table. And what was interesting to me is that as judges, we were all called to give our feedback to the girls of how the project was, how they'd run and give them some inspiration. The judges that went before me spoke in Spanish so I didn't understand what they were saying, I don't speak or understand Spanish, I wanna learn. But when it came to my turn, I just talked about how impressed I was with their design thinking, with their passion, what they brought to solve problems in their community. There was a, the winning team had done a design on how to for girls to press a few keys in their cell phone to alert they were in a dangerous situation. So really they were solving real problems. And I was applauding them for pursuing that passion. I said, go for it. Don't worry about it, don't go. Because these girls, I noticed, had a very creative mind. They didn't wanna be pushed into careers of technology or science or engineering. And when I stopped talking and I thanked them for it, there was a huge applause. And I wonder what was the applause for for me or them? And one of the judges came and told me, he says, useful exactly opposite what we were telling them. We were telling them girls must code. And this is the whole thing, where we have pushed these women to go into technology to learn code. We must learn to program. There's a whole initiative in the US called STEM. I don't know how many of you have heard about STEM. STEM is science, technology, engineering, math. It's a wonderful course. And certainly it's encouraging women to get out, come into the technology field and contribute. And I totally applaud that. But it's missing one concept, A. So now STEM has changed into STEM, science, technology, arts, and math. And I think that's an amazing, that's the most important contribution. And that's what I feel is that arts, humanities makes a tremendous contribution to design thinking. And that's really where design thinking really begins to change. When you've heard in this conference, I think a lot where people have done very successfully, but what's missing is cognitive understanding of human beings. I think that cognitive understanding of human beings is really what we need in our field. And the more and more we educate ourselves, the more and more we are welcoming to people that are coming from humanities, from liberal arts background, you know, arts design background, I think they have a tremendous contribution to make. So even though my journey was tough in this year, I came from humanities and struggled to survive in engineering field, I say that in the future, the next generation should be welcoming to that and there should be a wonderful merge of the two science and math to create this design thinking, which is what drives our product solution. So I hope my story is an inspiration that no matter what you pursue, where you come from, if you like science, if you like programming, go for it. I don't say that that's not the right track. What I'm saying is if you have a creative mind, if you come from visual arts background and you wanna move into this field, yes, there is room for you, yes, there is a contribution you can make. You just have to follow your passion and move and go towards making design successful because everybody of us have made a foundation. Thank you, I think a very good question. I think design thinking involves really getting to the crux of the matter. To be able to grasp and analyze, I think Ana comes back to critical thinking, right? Because the ability to quickly analyze a problem. When I go to customer sites and we kind of hear problems with our software and there are many. We try to nail down very quickly where so was the product customized? Who really uses using the product? How many complaints they're getting? You've got to be able to have that design thinking that requires us to quickly grasp and analyze the problem. So can everybody be, yeah, if you have purpose, thinking stills, you can't be a good designer. Ha ha ha. Why do you think that enterprise products make such good money despite design thinking? I'll answer the special, but I'll do my best. Yes, they make money. They make money out of feature functions. Because the industry is really a vicious problem. If you ask the buyers who buy this product and me, you ask them why they're buying feature functions. It's still competitive. So and so is offering more. What are you offering? If the scale is more feature, more functionality versus user experience, then you are going to have the feature, right? So my job has also been to educate our customers. You know, we've started to talk about, I've created a program for UX Direct, which in Oracle is educating the customers once we roll out and sell the products. You know, many people go, why are you going out and we've sold the product? But the product, is it adaptive? Is it just sitting on the desk? Is it being used to its full capacity? We need to explore that until we have that information. So it's a vicious cycle. I think consumers have got to become consumers of enterprise products. Have to demand the same amount of user experience that consumer products have. I think it's happening. Customers are becoming more aware, you know, as technology is getting in more and more hands, people are fulfilling all the products. Customers are getting savvy, even if they don't know or understand fully. So they are demanding products that have good user experience. They want to have. So it did come. But I think the fact that they make money, they have the potential of making more money if the user experience is good. Because in a way, user experience has become a differentiator. So it can make more money if they only understood that it's not a feature, but the user experience as well, that's it. We can make one question. I just want one question. Okay. No. Okay, I can take two questions. I can take. I hope to question. Okay, sorry. Okay, so my question is like, when we talk about design, we say, you know, think creative, think light out of the wall. So what we do is like, we tend to automate things. And then when you go to the user, say like, your job is automated, the user says, I don't like it. You know, because he gets afraid of losing his job. Kind of automating more and more things and all. We are creating at the same time the catalog of unemployment. So how do we handle the situation? Because now if you see Tesla, it's a driverless car. So what are we doing actually? We are creating an unemployment for some people. But an opportunity in another area. I think that's what as designers, we need to think about. When we're not solving a problem that's mundane. Maybe driving is mundane. I wanna talk, I wanna listen to music, I wanna do other things. Why should I focus on driving? It's stressful. Driving in adorabata. I mean, if somebody could drive for you, why do you wanna focus on driving? You wanna be working and doing things that you love. So I think we have to make our users whose job that we are automating. Think differently. And I think that's an important message to me as user experience people. Don't take it to the end users. When we market our products, we have to market in a way that the improvements you make actually are gonna make their lives better so they can pursue the things they wanna pursue. Not do the mundane jobs that they have required, you know, impressed software or you don't have to drive the cars that are. So I think it's an inspiration to change things. That's how the process comes in. Change the mindset of our users. I face that problem, but yes, that's. I wanna know how you are going to develop for our users. So what are the challenges that you face? You know, are there different types of applications? You know, I don't know if you have a solution that you are designing for your users. And how do you actually tackle them? Or do they come to you ever? Or is there a result or a result at the, you know? You know, I don't flatter myself. They'll come to me every time the situation happens. I go to them. I try to see, some of the challenges I see that technology and the new cutting edge always drives me, you know? There may be people that see augmented reality, we see bots coming, we see all these solutions coming and people rush to build products all the time. Whether there is the design thinking involved and the development of the product is not hard. So I insert myself in innovation labs. And I'm like, have you ever thought about what solutions you're solving? Where's your use case? Where's your user? What's the problem? So I'm very, I'm known for a rebel culture. And I'm very subtle ways. I insert myself. We have a design lab and when I give tours, I go into tours and then I'll ask questions. And you know, and that way I can invite it back into those labs and say, okay, you go tell us, show us how. So what are you doing from offshore? From India? Yes, yeah. Ask questions? See, you're from the US, so you can able to do whatever, like in April and everything. So I'm sitting here in India because whatever the product owners or product manager is doing, so that's what we are, we need to know. So based on that, only we need to design. You know, it's not about location anymore. One thing I've tell you, tip that I taught my India team and they became successful and left and moved on. Yeah, that's what it means to be able to move on. They actually, what I taught them is to ask questions. If they didn't understand, I said, don't go into just a yes mode. You know, we have this culture of yes man, yes man. They said, no, what do you mean yes? Do you really understand and agree with me? No, it's what's happening. So they went to ask questions. What's happening in my algorithm? I'll take it off. Yeah, I'll take it off. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, love you.