My 6 months as a Product Designer at BYJU’s

The pandemic was a tricky time for any career opportunities. During these turbulent times, I was on the lookout for my 1st design job. After several Interviews and hundreds of cold E-mails, it took 3 and half months for my entire recruitment process to get to an end.

After a couple of years of being on a roller coaster ride of learning, adapting, and applying finally, it was my time. I had finally started my journey towards Product and Design.

Ahh, I felt so good after knowing, I was selected and would be part of the Design team soon. Yes, I had heard about them but never seen what it meant to be one amongst them. But now being a part of BYJU’s Design team for a while I can say it’s all about learning, collaborating, and fun.

It was a unique experience altogether. It’s a combo of excitement and nervousness. In this pandemic, where everything happened remotely, whether onboarding or work, things at BYJU’s were still fascinating.

Today as I complete over 6 months at BYJU’s, as one of the youngest product designers, the journey has been enriching and full of excitement at each step. And would really be happy to share my top 10 learning experiences with all those Aspiring Designers.

let’s Start!

1. Being in Product is like Deep-sea diving- ‍🤿

• It’s very vast, wide, and tricky when it comes to product-based companies, working on a single product every day, thinking on problems to the core, and coming up with solutions through all those constraints and it’s never easy. Looking even at small interactions in animation or some small tweak in a color makes a huge difference.
• Having a set of your users with diverse kinds of tastes, satisfying all of them is not an easy task.

2. Learn to observe. Observe to learn- 👀

• One of the real facts to digest in the earlier stage was that business goals play a huge role and are a major factor for ideas that walk out through the door of reality. Often times it’s not just about you solving a bunch of user problems and meeting the needs. In short, it’s about your designs to change measured metrics that PM wants and bring conversions.
• This means that you needed to learn how to speak the language of business people, key decision-makers, and stakeholders of the project. And during the journey, I was fortunate enough to work with experienced designers who presented their designs to attract and hold their audiences’ interest and tailor their presentations to suit their requirements.
• Soon, I started imitating the key points, the body language, and the words used to communicate your design effectively. I believe this was the most important advantage of being a Product Designer in a mature organization under experienced senior designers.

TIP: It’s always learning a knack for how to observe what others are doing and try to use some of those aspects of your work. It’s not just about design that we need to be inspired from but communication, research, workflow, collaboration, even file naming system can all be improvised.

3. Use of newcomer advantage- 🙋🏻‍♂️

• Newcomers are usually given a lot of Freedom. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to ask “stupid” questions. Your co-workers will feel valued sharing their knowledge, and you’ll gain their respect along the way.
• It’s too early to tell if things look good or bad. Outright criticism might even make you look foolish since you don’t yet know the full context of decision-making. But don’t lose your beginner’s mind. Ask questions to get to the root cause — how did we get here? As you collect info from various sources, start building your own model of the situation at hand.

4. Getting to know your manager and how things work- 🤝

The first thing you as a designer need to do is driving a conversation with managers to learn about their standards. What counts as underperforming, meeting the bar, and going above and beyond? Depending on your Role, the standards are different. This becomes one of your crucial conversations of initial months, which also covers these topics:

1. Advice on how to succeed in the role.
2. Organizational challenges to be aware of.
3. Tracking and documenting work performance.
4. Opportunities for support and training.

5. Learn the Product and Design rituals-🎋

As a designer, you’ll want to get up to speed on the process of doing the work. Here are some initial things you need to know

1. Always have the Source of truth for all design decisions made and on the status, you are in the project either by mails or any mode of contacts like slack/notion (Never by words), It helps you to rely on the decisions made before rather than never-ending changing requirements.
2. Always make a note of how a project is kicked off, by whom
3. Always remember how you are associated with the project (Accountable / Responsible).
4. Check how the formal design review process runs during the sprints so that you can plan your days well.
5. Have a clear knowledge of how the Design systems are being used

PS: Don’t worry if you don’t have it all covered before you begin your first project. Doing the work will help you resolve many of these questions and potentially raise better-informed questions along the way.

6. Hustling with stakeholders- 👨‍⚖️

• Managing with stakeholders on different projects, understanding their requirements, providing creative solutions, and living up to deadlines is part and parcel of a designer’s life.
• Here at my company, I learned to hustle my work and stakeholders. And thanks to the guidance of all experienced hustlers in the team, they would tip me off with their words of wisdom on stakeholder and work management.
• Here are some of my critical observations on stakeholder and work management:

1. Always calculate your time Deliverables
2. Never promise something you can’t deliver.
3. Always ask for a little more time than what is required. Use it to make sure everything is arranged properly before you present.
4. When in doubt ask for feedbacks, discuss internally with the team and get back.
5. Always split your bandwidth accordingly, break your work into smaller bite-sized chunks. It will help you in achieving a manageable structure.
6. Make sure you are using shared vocabulary conveying your ideas from their perspective.

7. Always seek help- 🫂

• The success of our work depends on our ability to get support from everyone on the team. If we don’t do that, our designs will never see the light of day. As simple as that, seek help when required.
• As it also says “Fail Fast, Learn Faster”, the more time you waste on being in dilemmas, the more time you waste learning something new. Always keep yourself curious about everything with a student’s mindset which adds up a heap of opportunities to learn and relearn.

8. Use research to support design to escape subjective matters- 📊

• The truth is that All Designs are Subjective. What seems obvious to me might not be obvious to you. What works in one context could fail miserably in another. But using data to support your decisions is the golden ticket to getting agreement because it is the most scientific way of demonstrating that your designs have the intended effect.
• Project owners and the project manager are the usually ones who will be benefitted from these efforts, which intern will reduce no of answers thrown at you.

9. Create something than thinking more- 🤔

• Creating a couple of variants in design is more powerful than thinking thousands of them. Unless you start solving the problem you never end up finding hidden constraints and edge cases associate with the problems.
• Always make sure of the question, what technical requirements will influence the design? Accessibly, browser/operating system version, device pr viewport size support, responsive/adaptive/mobile or whatsoever.

10. Paradox of time-⏰

• I was under the impression that more time for designing equals a better product in any design field. I was wrong. The initial weeks taught me that more research time is needed to make the project a smooth sail to our destination island. Research is the most important aspect of the design so that the following steps will feel like a no-brainer.
• Also, when designers have lots of time, we will never come to a satisfactory state. There’s always the “This could be better”. We need some sort of constraints to limit us and work with the synthesized data we got. Having clear strategized sprints associated with the mild-stones makes us clearly define our work efficiently through each day so we never lose track.

The Journey Continues- 🚕

From learning to unlearning, I am still doing it all. What makes BYJU’s a sanctuary for budding designers are the passionate people, committed and dedicated to building products that democratize the world of education while enjoying every bit of it along the way.

This is just an overview of how my initial months as a Product designer went. Some of you may have even more interesting things to share with us. Please feel free to do so in the comments. I’m still a student of design and I’d love to learn a lot more.

Thanks for reading, hope it helps.

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