 All good? So, you know, we're all designers, right? I don't believe you. See, one of the things as designers is, you know, we always think of people that we meet as walking, talking, hidden pain points. So, all of you, I know you have a pain point. So, these are two things that I'm going to try to do with this talk. So, the hidden pain point that I'm going to try to convince you about is, how fast can you actually do your work? I mean, we think we're doing it fast enough. Really, how fast is fast? You need to do things really fast. And I'm going to tell you some things that we do, and hopefully you can apply it in your work, if it makes sense to you. So, if I've convinced you that you have that hidden pain point, then I've done my job today. Okay, so, since we're all comfortable here, let's start with a UI UX problem. So, this is a representation of the UI UX problem, okay? We'll assume that this is a, let's say, one year it has to be out in the market. We have to work on this for a few months. This is what the problem looks like. Let's also assume that this is a solution to that problem. So, this is a well-crafted, beautiful solution, very elegant kind of a solution. And this is kind of hodgepodge, okay? So, since we're all designers here, right, how many of us are designers here? Okay, so, for the most part, we think of our job as moving from that side to this side. So, that's how we're going to be measured. How good was the output at the end of the day, right? Let's just introduce the element of time over here because that is the thing that people always ask us, how much time are you going to take to get to that point? So, now if I said that this was done in one week and this was done in six months, we know the story. The thing on the left looks like the initial sketch of the ideas. And the thing on the right is, you know, you've done the entire process. You've come up with the design. It all looks great. It's fantastic. We know this. Again, expertise over here is measured on two counts. One is the quality of your ideas. Even if you've done something in the first hour or the first week, people are able to understand whether that idea holds merit, right? And the second part of it, which is your expertise in taking it forward and executing it well, how well did you do the process? Did the final outcome really look and, you know, does it really work really well? So, these two are the components of expertise. Now, I'm going to just swap the time. Now, if that was done in six months, what would you say? I'm telling you, this is the worst nightmare for me and for most of the clients that we work with. If you say, you know what, I took six months. You know, I did the whole process. I've been working on this, working on that at the end of the day. If this is what you come up with, then that's really where people are afraid of designers. So, we'll be doing a bad job if that's what we do. And in direct contrast to that, if you're able to do this, which is really good work in a less amount of time, that's when you make an impact as a designer in your organization. Are you with me? Right? So, we've been doing this for a while. We've been trying to see how can we reduce the amount of time we need to actually do good work, right? So, we've got a process. It's called the Design Springboard. I'm going to tell you a few of the things that we do and really see if it resonates with what you guys are doing. So, to reiterate, you need to have really cool ideas. You need to have very good execution done in a very short period of time. That's what the Springboard is about. Now, those two on top have colored differently because everybody has got an opinion about design. You know, everybody. I mean, with design thinking and all of that, everybody has got an opinion about design. So, that's where all the time goes. Nobody has any opinion about time. One week is one week for everybody. We thought, let's focus on this because everyone can talk about the other two till the cows come home. You would not get anywhere. But if you say you're going to do it in one week, okay, they'll listen to you. One week is very, very objective, right? So, what does less time mean for companies? It's definitely less money because you're talking about the time of the organization being reduced. Less time is less risk for obvious reasons. These are the standard ROI of design kind of things. So, if you're able to do it in even less time, you're probably going to have less risk. And that is in today's day and age for any company, a solid competitive advantage. You with me? So, what is the design Springboard? So, think of it like, I mean, think of it like the T20 version of doing design. So, until T20 came along, we were happy with tests and then there was ODI and then there was T20. And a lot of things happen when you start thinking in that manner. If you have only so many overs to play, how do you change your strategy? And we were faced with that question in coming up with better ways of doing what we do. The end of the day, it has to be very effective. So, take any standard UI UX problem or a company that comes to us, they're building a new product. So, there is a brand component. We do the brand strategy, their identity and their communication piece. You also look into UI UX in terms of prototypes and validation and assets. And sometimes we do both of these together. Sometimes we do them standalone. And we do it in one week. So, I'll explain how we're going to do that. But the idea is that you get one week to bring out version one, that's it. And then you do as many sprints as you need to come up with more refined output. So, I'm going to talk about three things that we've learned so far in how to accelerate and how to change the way that we've been working. So, the first thing is to reimagine all the sessions that we've been doing. Now, if you have to do something in one week, you can't have meetings. So, the first thing that we threw out of the house is meetings. What I mean to say is, if somebody wants to give you an input, let's say somebody in the dev team or something, you invite them over for a co-creation session that you are conducting. Let them sit with you, draw out the solution. It'll take you 15 minutes to talk, 15 minutes to do. We prefer doing. So, if you're going to be able to eliminate as many meetings as possible, you're going to save time. So, we're all about saving time. Let's talk more doing. That's one thing. We structure our time to the dot. So, if you have one week or a few weeks, we have every day broken into four slots. Every slot is planned for in advance. If you know that the CEO has to be in the room, you can tell him which slot and he has to be there and give you that time. Since it's all very structured, people are able to manage that time. So, structuring your time has become very, very important if you're going to try this kind of exercise. So, for example, if you were doing a ideation session on some problem, we have it down to, let's say, 15 minutes of time. You've done this kind of exercise, right? In standard DTU, we've pulled those things out. But we do that. We say that there is this kind of a co-ideation session going on. There's 15 minutes for you to draw, 15 minutes for somebody else to explain what their idea is or just put it out there so that people can do some sort of anonymous voting. But really being able to structure your time down to the very minimal kind of time required is what's going to save you time. The other thing that we do is, you know, because we have all these CEOs, all these guys are in the room as and when required, you have a lot of internal wisdom which is acted upon immediately. So, there's no, you know, design session here and then you go and present it to somebody else over there. You've got to eliminate that. You've got to bring them, tell them it's 15 minutes and they'll love it because that's the way that we do it. So, I told you we were working on branding, UI, UX. So, there are many, many tracks and we have different people working on different things. Parallel tracking is the only way that we save time. And you also need to find out a way where people can talk to each other early on. So, that's a very, very key thing in saving time. So, the sessions are designed so that if there's a team doing user validation, their insights are recorded, being spoken about to the branding team, being spoken about to the people who are designing concepts, this kind of a cross discussion is very, very vital in saving time. So, first things first, reimagine all your sessions. What do you not need to do? Throw them out of the house. The second thing that we do which is very interesting, I think it's very important for all of us, is what we call the design sadhana. Sadhana is basically a practice. I mean, if you take a look at music or, you know, sports, all these folks are, you know, they're practicing from morning till evening, all for that one race at the end of the month. The only way that they can perform for that race or for that music performance is by doing a daily, you know, daily exercise. Design is not some, I mean, our incentives are almost 30-40% based on this sadhana. So, to give you an idea of what this is, people work on different aspects of design on a constant basis. They identify what to work on and they work on it every day. An example of that is we've heard about empathy, empathy in design and, you know, all of that. So, we don't believe that empathy is to be done during a project. That's really not how we look at empathy. Empathy is something that's an inherent life skill for a designer. All right? You can't be empathetic for two hours or two days in the beginning of a project and then forget it. It doesn't work that way. So, the only way to build up on all of this to be more sensitive is if you practice, make it a point to practice every day. So, you spend, if you can spend 15 minutes to one hour, just identify a few things that you think you have to work on. That's what's going to get you better. Work on sensitivity, creativity. How do you solve problems? At the end of the day, we figured out that when we go into our, you know, clients' offices, we're doing a performance over there. For us, it's eventually a performance. And if your performance has come up with better ideas, it's not happening there. The real work is happening every day. When you've spent 15 minutes to one hour, if your task is to work on creativity, you've identified a problem, worked on it, come back to the office, you're discussing how that was creative, how to be more creative. What does it mean to come up with a variety of ideas? Where are you getting stuck? Those discussions are where you become better. So, we work on creativity, we work on aesthetics. What makes things look good? We work on logic. When we, as designers, we are faced with bad logic. There's such a thing as bad logic. And, you know, you need to be able to identify that and respond to that. And you have to practice for that outside of all this working time. So, there are a few things. We work, people come and present what are the latest apps that they've seen, what are the latest tools that are available. All of this is part of Sadhana. And if you guys can identify two, three things that you want to work on, work on it daily, so that when you come down to the office, you're ready to perform all those things. Now, again, we just have one week or two weeks to do what otherwise would take you maybe six months. How do we do that? So, we had to question all the, you know, standard design processes just to see where we were losing time. So, we are all familiar with those, you know, processes, right? We have to start with some empathy. Then we have, you know, or that we have to create insights. We have to make solutions, build prototypes and go test it. Somebody drew those circles out there and then they drew those arrow marks like that. And so that made it kind of like a serial order. You do this, then you do this, then you... And then finally they drew a circle saying, this thing keeps going on. We were thinking about that. We walk into the room thinking that all these processes are simultaneous. There is no, you know, there's no time when you're stopping to think about a solution, right? There's no time when you're stopping your validation sessions. There's no time when you're stopping to empathize with the user. Everything is happening all the time. And that's a very, very key difference. If that mindset changes, then you're able to do things much faster. So imagine all those processes happening at the same time. Then your challenge is, how do you manage all those things? What I mean to say is this. We have one team who is always doing user validation. They're going on doing that. And there's somebody else who's always doing solutioning. At any point of time, let's say three days into the line, you take a snapshot of what's going on. This team will tell you where they are with their empathy or their understanding of the insights. These people tell you where the solutions are. These people are telling you what's happening with validation. It's just a snapshot. So that's been the change in the way that we've been working. Re-looking at the process from a serial order business to always on all of them are happening at the same time, it's your ability to manage those snapshots that we've been working towards. Okay, so one final thing over here, which is as designers and especially if you're working in a company for a longer duration of time, one thing that goes out of the window very often is having a lot of fun. So when you do work in this kind of a one week, one month format, it's just too exciting, I can't tell you. It's just brought back the whole fun into what we were doing. Every month you're working on different domains. One day you're working for healthcare. The next month you're working with a farmer. Then we are working with the airport. I mean, it's just wonderful as designers to be able to have those kind of challenges and have meaningful breaks in between those challenges. So we now have a model where people get four days or five days of a break between these springboards and they're loving that. And by doing this, like I was talking about the sadhana earlier, you know where you're growing as a designer because you need to work on this aspect of design. So that's easily measurable and that's an easy thing that you can give to different team members so that they can grow in their own career. So we found these sort of secondary effects of just by shrinking time, what are the other things that are happening in the company and we think it's great. So back to the initial problem statement. I don't know if you guys recognize this as a hidden latent pain point but try to reduce your time. It'll make your work really, really fun. And I've just given you some ways that we do it but find your own methods but shrinking what's really not required brings back that life into our profession. Thank you.