Stories by Karthi on Medium

What i mean when i say “teach”

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:19:44 GMT

My dad is a prof. He has been a Dr. Subbaraman for 45 years now. With a double phd and post doctoral fellowship in genetics and plant breeding he never stopped learning. Even today he is either reading or writing and in other times he walks the dogs. While my respect for his academia is super high, I always stayed away from only theoretical aspects. Hardcore doer in many ways. While teaching is in my blood, I stayed away from it for a long long time for the fear of the label “Professor”. I did master classes every now and then, without much awareness I jumped at every opportunity to share my learnings to the ecosystem and was happy teaching to kids (I meant engineering/design colleges and high schools). This is a pattern for almost 5 years now. Sign of getting old or appreciating parents, understanding their life a little more or a stage of human life may be. Knowing something and teaching the knowing are two different things. Fermented knowledge is wisdom for me. I guess with more fermentation it gets only better. Soaked in, totally with the various methods of imparting knowledge in the past two weeks. Once again, I feel my ignorance is vast compared to my knowledge. Teaching is a way of giving away a part of you, growing smaller and becoming humbler day after day. 🙏

FOMO

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:19:03 GMT

Every day one or other wicked(thought provokingly sweet) thought pops. Very few thoughts are totally liberating in nature. Today one of them struck. I was guesstimating the number of books in my home library, including my Kindle as of today. Just the genre of design books crossed 1000+. As a counter, I guesstimated how many days I have before my expiry date hits me. Maybe another 10,000 days tops if all goes well (that is 25 years..LOL !). I am sure I will have more books as days progress as more folks are writing fantastic stuff. When am I going to find time to go through all this? The thought was overwhelming! The problem solver’s mind is continuing and overworking as I am typing… Will share my perspectives on how to solve it (if I find any solutions). In the meantime, in this world of abundance, how are we going to curate, what to read what not to read, avoid the fear of missing out, genuinely learn things that matter and do all the above in the limited time we have in a day? What are your thoughts on this? Any hacks, solutions, strategies to deal with this ?

Full Stack Unicorn

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:18:28 GMT

A full stack designer is a myth. This unicorn is not born yet. We frantically look out for this breed in recruitment to elevate product experiences (and not find one yet). This is a fantastic news as design has finally a seat in the table. The con is since they are not available we somehow want to create them in words at least. Sigh ! When will we wake up and become aware that we can’t be so many things at a time? In my view, if we accept who we are, where we are and start a design career from there we will be awesome designers. Willingness and inclusiveness is the first step. God has been very kind to designers as he did 50% of the job by creating the human system in a certain way and this doesn’t change so much. Because we are humans, human factors will be fairly easy to grapple if and only if we give the necessary time to unfold the human in us. When will this jargon war stop and real design happen? The first step is to accept we can’t be everything. The rest will unfold. If you seriously want to be or become a designer take that first step. Then let us talk more. Happy designing!

Progress

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:17:50 GMT

42 DAY1s (thank you, Jeff Bezos) passed by, rather quickly. Xperian is marching forward every single day, helping designers grow holistically & professionally.

In the past 40+ days, we conducted 10+ experiments via Xperian Labs. Each initiative gave us tons of learning. Some were super duper hits and some were utter flop shows but everything enhanced our clarity on what to do and what not to.

We dabbled with profile-portfolio reviews, conducted webinars, taught design from our hearts to professional and aspiring designers, conducted corporate training, designed screens with 60% plus efficiency and at 40% low cost (a design factory model), we placed right designers in the right organisations, we guided companies with better strategies, we raised our voice on behalf of all designers, we shared the secret sauce of design (not sure how many got it though), we mentored designers, we reviewed their work, we shared honest feedback with challenges and we did all the above with only one intent, i.e: to elevate the quality of design globally by elevating YOU. Finally, we decided to write our first line of code. This is the greatest moment for a product designer. Here comes an ecosystem just for you to help you learn, grow and work professionally. Stay tuned!

Designer Hiring

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:17:09 GMT

Paint the customer for Recruit was a cute question that came up in our staff meeting. Here you go. There are two sides. One is the organization who wants to recruit and one is the designer who wants to advance in the career path. When they have approached Xperian, it means they are very picky and choosy about their designers. On the other end, the designer has typically 3–4 offers and is very picky and choosy about the company they work with. Our work is to see if there is FITMENT between these picky and choosy folks. Typically organisations or founders who approach us have High Ux maturity. They know the nuances of design hiring and also know that it is a breed hard to pick out from behance and dribble. They are willing to pay a recruiter to find means they are super serious about design and they care about it. Others will say spread the word in LinkedIn. So people who are only serious about their teams and careers are our customers. Everyone else is NOT. These designers don’t even look out as they already have many pending offers. The beauty is in raising the bar for the designer and for the organisation. Can’t get more interesting isn’t it ? Moral of the story is Who is not your customer is as important as who is.

Why, Why, Why

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:16:36 GMT

I am a WHY person. If my Why is not answered, I can’t move forward. Sometimes I am stuck (in a nice way). To know the WHY, I start the search and find the possibilities. 99% of the times, the search has been rewarding. It advised me, what to and what not to. It also grounds me to how things REALLY are. Not how I perceive them to be, not how I feel it must be, not how i see it (the lens) but how it really is. The HOW comes after the WHY and WHAT. The inside-out journey is as described above. The contrary to the above is the outside-in journey. Show me the WHAT first. It starts with, what is in it for me, how can I extract value out of this, what am I getting if I spend this time or $ or effort or energy etc. The divine impatience that human beings have scares the hell out of me but also energizes me to go one full circle and run back the opposite direction. The first part is the designing process and the second part is the design communication process. I see that sales or product management or marketing or operations are no different as at the end of the day we are talking to human beings only who take the avatars of customers, stakeholders, bosses, peers, team members etc. If the Why is strong the rest can be managed better inside out. You now know what outside-in is all about!

Serving Designers

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:16:04 GMT

It is the same designer, same skillset, same attitudes, same tools but performs differently in two different environments. Have you noticed this? And this will make or break your organizational capability. The core of organizational culture is the ability to produce max results by raising the individual to his/her max potential. Of course, it is not just the designer who produces everything in an org. We all know that. There is a cross-functional team, leadership, vision, business model etc. Those are different slices which can be seen under the same microscope of org culture and all of them WILL align at the max potential. To solve this problem of any designer, any organization we Xperian created a framework of guiding principles that will result in raising the max potential (yes any designer). Last week simplified it even further and only one item stood out. The secret sauce is to see a designer beyond the deliverables, beyond the perks, beyond his/her fickle mindedness and beyond the competencies. To see him/her with care for his/her career beyond the current organization then that designer’s max potential raises! Yup, this is a time taking process but it is one time. Thought leaders are talking about authenticity for a long time now (obvious right?). Give it a try !

Buzz vs Core

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:15:11 GMT

With more buzz words around, with more definitions peeping out, with more and more perspective churning, I am sometimes afraid to utter the word experience design ! Gautama Buddha, once commented that a spoon cannot taste the soup. I guess we all are the spoons trying to make sense of the soup in various ways. Our attempts are tireless. Everyday I wake up with a little more understanding and internalization of experience inside me. This came to me yesterday when I was trying to put something together for a video shoot. My definition of design is a movement from ambiguity to clarity. Going further down I asked what is the aim of design ? It is all about “disrupting behaviours” and giving “newer impressions” that just makes us better human beings whoever we are and whatever roles we play. It is not the driller but it is the hole of the jobs to be done framework. The hole is the behaviour disruption and the driller is everything else we do in the form of methods, tools, processes, perspectives and frameworks. I could breathe a little more after that. I still feel words could only do so much justice that I am still a SPOON trying to make sense of that SOUP. I will not ask do you agree ? But do you feel the same way when something strikes inside like a thunderbolt….

Hype Cycle

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:14:12 GMT

If you want to know what is in season and hyped up, look for the words Powered by . Now “Powered by AI” is the sticker that is making rounds on all products. Suddenly the talent pool around AI, ML, VR etc has a decade of experience in the new hype area. This is a hype cycle and the industry goes through several such cycles and all areas have their own. How fascinating! All said and done, as a designer you want to ride the cycle or ride above the cycle? The choice is yours. Tools, methods, frameworks, emerging tech, and new trends should only enable you further.It cannot become you. Something to ponder!

Teaching vs Doing

Karthi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 05:13:43 GMT

I didn’t realize that teaching a subject that you breathe every day and is so close to heart needed so much preparation! To put things in perspective, for delivering a 30 hours lecture I needed almost 300 hours of preparation behind the scenes. My first official product design class ended today. I hope I left the participants with a little more confidence, a new pair of eyes and a lot more love & respect for design as a discipline. Feedback says so and so do their eyes with that sparkle! At first, touching 100 product professionals with love for design sounded skeptical but today it felt (really) real. While the classes are done, I guess only now my work starts as a coach. Getting hands dirty with application in the real world is where all the concepts will come alive and experiential learning starts. 6 weeks, 300+ hours, no weekends, no days off was truly worthwhile. The intent was to teach product design to product guys from a practitioner’s viewpoint by bursting all the prevailing myths, knowing where to bend and break the rules and how to deal with anything and everything that may come to them hereafter in the name of design. Xperian School’s MVP is done and time to take the design school to the next notch. Stay tuned!