Beginnings
I was born into the colorful culture of India, where I learned the craft of Design. About 4 years ago, I moved to the US and made the transition from a graphic designer to a product designer. To be honest, I didn’t know what product design really was. My design education at RIT and UX internships helped me understand the craft and processes that go into creating meaningful product experiences. I realized how product design is a strong force that shapes interactions in today's world. The famous Massimo Vignelli said there are three important aspects of Design: Semantic, Syntactic, and Pragmatic. Product design became my happy place that truly embodies that philosophy.
I couldn’t have made a better decision to drop everything and come to the US.
After graduating with my Master's, Proscia, a Medtech startup, gave me the opportunity to use my design skills for creating experiences that will revolutionize the fight against diseases.
Being part of an early-stage startup meant that my job entailed much more than doing just product design. Here are some of the things that I did and learned along the way to help my company reach its first million$ in sales.
Design Education
“Design is way too important to be left to only designers” — Tim Brown (creator of Design Thinking method) Design like innovation should take place on all levels of a company or team to be effective. Democratizing design brings a broad range of backgrounds to find solutions, as well as defining the real problems. As Proscia's only designer, educating my team on using design thinking as a problem solving tool was paramount to my success. I turned the challenge of not having a design team into an opportunity by helping my team become my fellow designers albeit non-traditional.
My approach to solving user problems is to focus on ideas and user interfaces that deliver great user experiences to our customers. And it has to do with a conscious focus on people, what they want, and what they really need. Through a series of internal workshops, discussions, presentations; I gradually infused these design principles into my team and the company's culture. As a result, the company's focus on product design has improved, bringing more time allocation and dollars toward creating delightful experiences for our customers.
Stakeholder Management
I think while designing for end-users it's critical not to lose sight of how the product impacts other stakeholders. While designers are accustomed to designing for user needs, they are not usually taught how to manage and take the needs of stakeholders into account in the user-centered design process. As the only designer, stakeholder management was an undefined but important responsibility. Stakeholders hold a big influence on the outcome of a project, making their needs important. I've observed the most beneficial way of stakeholder management is to treat stakeholders with the same empathy as end-users.
While designing for pathologists high subject matter expertise was required. Early in the job, I was able to bridge the gap in my knowledge by learning and working with key stakeholders like the chief medical officer, product manager, and the sales team. They helped me build a good understanding of this specialized clinical field in a short time. I was also able to cultivate a collaborative culture to user-centered problem solving. This not only elevated my UX practice but also gave me the opportunity to influence the strategic direction of the product. As a result, I was able to direct product strategy toward an increased focus on accessibility. I also managed to mold the way product was developed by focusing on solving user problems and creating an experience over launching features.
Design Management
The company didn’t have any pre-existing Design tools or processes when I first started. I lead an inquiry into the team's need and found that they struggled with loosely defined product requirements with no design direction. Making sure the product requirements are researched and clearly defined in the design was key. I helped the team build an iterative end to end design process starting from discovery, ideation, execution to testing.
The product, engineering teams were small, with a handful of remote stakeholders, with no prior experience using design tools. This was a perfect opportunity for me to introduce Figma as a collaborative design tool perfect for design collaboration and developer handoff all in one tool. The engineering team loved Figma and were able to start using it without much training. As the product evolved, I also developed a Figma file management and design version control system. As the design maturity of the company increased, I also started creating a design component library that would serve as an informal design system to help the design team to scale with consistency.
Product Management
In a small startup with big ambitions, everyone on the team was treated as entrepreneurs and our motto was to win as a team. Being short on resources and my interest in product strategy, led the product manager to give me the opportunity to delve into product management 6 months into my role. I started actively assisting the product manager in defining product requirements, thinking about the business value of each theme of work, and managing things on the ground by maintaining the delivery schedule and troubleshooting delays.
Coming Together
As a solo designer, I wore my hats, juggled many shifting priorities to overhaul how the company developed products. The new approach was to provide a delightful experience on the shoulders of functional excellence. The impact of process development and continuous improvements led the organization to high-efficiency gains that could be seen in the increased output every quarterly release. The product as a result was reborn to go from marginal sales to a 5x adoption rate to reach its first million dollars in sales.
There’s a lot more to say and a lot of lessons learned in my time as a solo designer. See below if you’d like to chat more!
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© 2020 Khushboo Agarwal