From an Analyst to Product Designer: How I made a successful career change and what I learned

Hello, I am Shruti Dang, a product designer at Blackline. To give you a little brief about my company it is one of the topmost B2B SaaS-based companies, provider of cloud software that automates and controls financial close and accounting processes. As a designer here, I am responsible to collaborate and align with product and engineering partners overseeing multiple projects where I plan, design, and execute user-centered design thinking practice and processes to achieve end-to-end user experience by setting success metrics utilizing qualitative and quantitative methodologies. I take pride in being a BlackLine employee as I have learned and grown as a designer in the last 4.5 years I have been with the company.

In this blog post, I want to take you through my career journey, the pivots I managed throughout, and things I learned as a designer. It’s been the journey of a lifetime.

I started my professional career in New Delhi, India at Mercer, a multi-National corporation as an Analyst. My work there involved maintaining and tracking insurance policies for clients all over the world along with training and mentoring new hires. In everything I did, my approach was to always look at the issue at hand and provide creative solutions. Though I had a great 5 years there, there was always a creative itch.

With the corporate experience and advertising degree under my belt, I started looking for an opportunity to reinvent my career and not only be a step closer to creativity but become a creator. I decided to take a User Experience course at General Assembly which was a 10-week full-time course consisting of 500+ hours of study both in-class and after hours, learning and practicing fundamental UX tools and methodologies with instruction from industry leaders.

This I have to say was one of the most pivotal steps I took in shaping my career.

Today, I would like to share those learning with you in the broadest sense. Feel free to see how you can apply these in your day-to-day and make the world a little more creative in every pixel you put out there.

The things I learned during my time there are things I still apply to date in all the projects I work on. Sharing some of my top learnings:

1. Power of storytelling: Storytelling has the power to share history, present, and the future. It can strengthen or challenge our opinions and values. Always share your journey as a storyteller to gain more trust in your values and the value you could bring to the position you are applying for. I was honest about my career change and shared the core values I could bring from having a management background to being an experience designer. The skills not only helped me get a job, but it is also a super important skill to have as a designer. At BlackLine we use storytelling to get insight into users and build empathy. Creating personas to represent target users and add conflict to stories that reflect their user journeys and problems. This art of crafting stories not only helps to understand the users’ needs better but also becomes easier to communicate the user’s journey to the engineers to build empathy and create a solution together.
2. Networking: Your network is your net worth. The connections I made here led me to not only pursue the path to be a designer but also helped me in mentoring in the journey. Networking in any profession is important but I have seen it as creative’s it becomes more advantageous because you not only are building connections but also you can look up to their work for motivation and turn to them for support or collaboration. As a new designer, I found it very beneficial to go to UX events. Being in a professional network with designers inspires you to be better and keep up with the new technology in the industry. There is always something new to learn from one another. Relationships are the single biggest assets we could build in our careers.
3. Always keep learning: Albert Einstein once said “the day I stop learning is the day I die” and I can’t help but agree with this statement. The world and industry around us is constantly evolving and we should always be ready to pivot to new tools and techniques. Learning is not only about the tools that can always be improved on but having a growing insight on the fundamentals and the basics to the next level is keeping yourself engaged. And it doesn’t stop there, it is very important to also apply these skills to your projects. At BlackLine we have an education reimbursement benefit where we can leverage to improve our skills every year on a topic of our choice. Every year I make sure to keep track of my skills by following an industry-standard skill matrix. For example, last year I took an Intro to Graphic design class at Art Center to grow my visual design skills, and this year I enrolled in a few NN/g classes, UC Berkeley extension to dig deeper into research learnings. Constantly improving my skills helped me get matured in my design decisions. This journey is still ongoing as it is important to constantly refresh and or improve on to the next level with advanced skills.
4. Value of research: Understanding the real reason is very important to truly understand what problem you are solving. Not knowing the ‘why’ would always lead you to a circle of unknowns. We don’t have to intimidate people with too many ‘why’ questions but being patient and finding the right time to ask the right questions is the key. I have also seen the value of predefining metrics when we start a project. Only validating or user testing before the development is not enough, its true success should be measured after the product has been launched so we can keep track of user behaviors.

I hope this article above has given you some insights into the workings of a designer and my career path as to how I got here.