Beyond the PX: In Conversation with Saptarshi Prakash, Product Design Manager at Swiggy
Welcome to the #IndianDesigner conversation series in the 8px magazine.
This is the Fourth interview with Bangalore based designer, Saptarshi Prakash
Saptarshi is a self-taught product designer. Being an engineer from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Madras but he chose Digital Experience Designing as his profession because he believes problem-solving can go well beyond the limits of engineering.
He has worked with some of the well known startups of India like Housing.com, Zeta, and many other big and small names around the world. He’s currently overseeing Consumer Design at Swiggy, India’s largest food ordering and delivery platform.
Enjoy, and see you next time :)
For those not in the know, can you explain who Swiggy are?
Swiggy is to put it in short, in the present day, the King of convenience. To put it in simpler goods, anything which involves any kind of delivery from one place to another place, to your homes or your offices usually it’s done by Swiggy, starting from food, that used to be our forte for a long time.
We would deliver food from restaurants to your home or any other preferred place. And we have extended up to grocery, medicines, pet food and these days you can even use just the concierge service of Swiggy. That is, you can send a charger from your home to a friend’s room or anywhere you like.
What has been your design journey up until now?
Design was always my hobby. So it started way back in school. I was in school, the year was 2003 and my parents bought me a computer. When they buy you a computer, you as a kid, just go ahead and play around with all the stuff which is there, and then you try and explore.
So one thing that I wanted to do was to make greeting cards. Be it for a birthday, New Year, or something. I called up the dealer from where I bought. So they came and installed this software called Photoshop. That was my first time with any kind of design, they didn’t know how to use it. That’s when I started playing around with the tool that I didn’t have internet, so all that I had to do was from trial and error.
I would just go edit the pictures, change the color of my tee shirt or change the background of my profile picture or something. So I would do all the stuff, but I never thought that this would ever be my career.
And then, I got into an IIT, but after going to my engineering college, I figured out that there are many more resources from which I can learn. But I was still more of a Photoshop person. So my Photoshop skills had improved once I had gone to college. I found a lot of things on the internet. Then there are many seniors who are just like me, who went into graphic design, who would design a lot of stuff. I would go and meet them and get tips and tricks from them. I started designing posters, t-shirts, and all from college.
I never thought that this would ever be my career. I could never imagine myself doing the work of an electrical engineer all my life. I always thought that I’m more of a leader, manager, or organizer. Maybe I would do an MBA sometime in the future and just get into a corporate life is what I thought. And that’s how I took an MBA sort of job.
I was a project manager at an MNC here in Bangalore. And even then, I wasn’t sure that I would resign, and the year was 2014. Although mobile apps or smartphones are getting more and more popular Android iOS devices, it was still not a talked about thing. Then in 2015, things changed a bit. There were newer startups which came, people were talking about startups. People were talking about the design of certain startups, something which never happened before.
There was this company called housing.com. And it raised a good amount of money. It was founded by some college kids right out of college, IIT Bombay people and people started talking about it suddenly. Their designs can be compared to the stuff we just made in San Francisco or in Silicon Valley. And that similar kind of stuff is happening in India. And that’s how everyone got to know it. There is something called UX design. There’s something called app design and it could be a career. So around that time, it was a college senior, he was also a design lover, just like me. He got into housing, he joined housing as a UX designer. And then one day he called me up and said that housing is still hiring. Would you want to join us? You have a good sense of visuals. Your analytical skills are good as well because you have been through engineering and you know all those stuff and it just about mixing those two things and creating a proposition which just works.
That’s how I professionally got into design.
What does your typical morning look like?
I’m not a morning person, I don’t get up in the early morning. I’m a night owl. So you would find me awake till three or four in the night and I will be doing something or the other, reading something, learning and all.
I reach the office by some 11:30 or so, and that’s when work starts. The first aspect of my work involves mostly managerial work i.e. attending a lot of meetings where we discuss, brainstorm, and we ideate as to how we can solve certain problems that our users are facing or if there are any new projects or new features that we are planning to build in the Swiggy app. So I along with the other teams, stakeholders, and my team members as well, we get into long discussions like that.
And the second aspect is hands-on work. Of course, many managers do not do hands-on, but I liked doing that. I feel that, if I have grown and become a manager as a designer, it was because I was good at something and that’s why I have grown.
There are usually one or two projects which I take up myself and I do not delegate it to anyone, but I take it up myself and I do it because I feel it makes me better as a designer because I’m within the system and I’m working on them.
Do you have any design hacks?
I certainly follow a process, but I do not know what the name of that is because I haven’t gone to a design school. So I do not know the names of a lot of theory, but having said that, there are a lot of things which I experience have taught me.
Even if I know the rules I always question — why is this rule followed here? What is the reason that this step exists?
I believe that rules are nothing but a set of common things, which works for majority of the people.
Do your career aspirations encroach your life?
I think it is there across my life. I feel everyone is a designer in a way. Because if nothing else, we design our own lives, right?
I mean, you can look into your grandma’s or your mom’s kitchen and the way things are arranged, it’s arranged in a certain way. It’s kept in a way so that it works for them. You may not know where the lighter is, but your grandma will certainly know because it’s at a certain place or where the wheat is or where the rice is. After all, she kept it just like the way she needs it based on the frequency of how much she uses.
So she’s a designer in a way. She has designed something which makes it convenient for herself.
How do you design ‘for the future’?
What I believe is the future is not predictable. We cannot predict, no matter how hard we try it.
Today, if we want to innovate, we will have to keep expanding our horizons. We should get out from the realms of what is possible, what is feasible, and try something completely out of the box, which may seem like a joke right now because it’s not possible, but it’s certainly going to be possible in the future.
Can you explain the team dynamic?
We are around 20 people right now. And the team is headed by the VP of design, who’s my boss as well, I report to him and two verticals in Swiggy.
First One is the restaurant side of things. That is the app using which restaurant uses to accept and process orders. And the second one is what our delivery partners use for accepting delivering and relaying orders. So these are different verticals, broad verticals within this Swiggy. I’m a design manager on the consumer side, and likewise, other managers take care of a restaurant and the delivery apps and everyone has their teams as to a couple of few designers who work on that vertical.
And in addition to that, we also have a small research team. Right now it just has two members and they work across all three verticals. They are like the common resources. So they are full-time researchers. We identify what calls for research, what is that we want to validate or what is that we want to find out. And then they work towards that. We work very closely with, of course, other designers, product managers, engineers from the engineering teams (SwiggyBytes), the developers, and once in a while with the business marketing folks as well.
Because whenever we are solving, the product is not only restricted but in the app when we are thinking about solving a problem, it’s the complete customer experience that we are talking about.
Will your product exist in ten years time?
We started with the food delivery and we did a fairly good job at that. We did a good job and a reliable job of bringing food from a restaurant for your home. So that led us to think that if we could do that well, why can’t we bring anything from any place to anywhere. It’s about removing the boundaries. We performed well within a closed boundary where there were certain restrictions.
What if we remove those restrictions and go wider? That’s where all the limits started to go off. And that’s exactly where grocery, medicine, and every other thing gets unlocked. I would want to see Swiggy, being the go-to destination for any kind of services for the users at least in India, if not the entire world, where any kind of thing that you want to be moved from one place, preferably to your place, you would think of.
What advice would you give for those interested in kick starting a career in designing for the market?
There are two large main things that I usually say, first one is to start thinking like a designer. Whenever it affects our life, we look at it, but a designer doesn’t just use and look at it. They critically analyze every aspect of it.
And the second one is to get better at your craft. It depends on what kind of design you want to get into. By craft, I mean, how good are you at making a screen or making an interface? How easy, comfortable, or beautiful can you make it?
Just because you’re a design graduate, don’t think that you know your work is done because your work starts now. Now what you do, onwards, what you do will depend on what kind of a designer you will become. Of course, whatever you have studied is your foundation. That always remains with you.
I thank Saptarshi on behalf of the readers of 8px for being a part of this series and sharing his inspiring insights. Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed it
Until next time 👋
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About the author:
Shivam Dewan is a product designer based in New Delhi, India.
Remote worker by day, Flaneur by night. Feel free to reach out to him over Twitter @theshivamdewan
