KeepTruckin’s Head of Design Shares His Journey From Islamabad to San Francisco
Khushnood Qadir aka “KQ” is the Head of Design at KeepTruckin. Headquartered in San Francisco, KeepTruckin is a tech company that makes fleet management products for the trucking industry in US and Canada. KQ was one of the founding employees of the company, and has led its design efforts throughout. Today, KeepTruckin’s global design team consists of nearly 20 multidisciplinary designers with expertise across the full spectrum of design. To learn more, check out KQ’s portfolio.
IxDA Pakistan + UXDP (UX Design in Pakistan) hosted a fireside chat with Khushnood, moderated by Awais Imran, held at KNCT Hub in Islamabad. We talked about KQ’s journey into design, his experience working in Silicon Valley, designing for the complex trucking industry in US and Canada, growing as a designer, and a lot more.
Photography and title illustration by Zain Adeel. Article transcribed by Tashfeen Ahmed.
Awais Imran (AI): So Khushnood, tell us about your story! From the day you were born to your early days as a child discovering your artistic/rebellious/design-ey side… all the way to today working as the Head of Design at KeepTruckin.
Khushnood Qadir (KQ): I was born in Peshawar. My dad was in the army so we kept roaming around the country. I couldn’t really make any friends when I was growing up because every time I made friends, we used to move away.
Initially, I didn’t know that I was ever going to be a designer until I actually started working on design after graduation. I didn’t know what design really was and what the field meant to the world exactly. Whenever we used to pass by NUST, my dad used to say, “You have to go and study from this university”. So that just became my big goal. I found out now but surprisingly, I was suffering from ADHD at the time, so I failed in high school and when I went to college, I failed Math in my first semester but somehow made it through. That was one of the most difficult phases in my life and I couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
Up until that point, I used to sketch to clear my mind and fight anxiety. I used to make doodles in my classes and even had a comic series in my college magazine. I also made some large sketches that are hung up in my home right now. So that was my only interaction with design early on, you can say. To save myself from the embarrassment of failing, I joined the Arts Club and later became the president of the club. I did try to quit art when I failed for the second time in Math. After that my dad was like, “You need to think about what you want to do in life.” So I started focusing again more on my studies until graduation.
I was really fortunate to be friends with Kush Kella and Shaneeb Kamran at NUST. We worked on our final year thesis together and wanted to build a product out of it, so that’s where Pagify was born. We started working from my one-bedroom apartment in Bahria Town. Pagify was a really great tool for developers, and it got us incubated at Plan9. It was kind of my first professional validation after graduation. Working with Kush and Shaneeb made me realize that my life after college could be a whole new adventure.
So we started building the product more formally at Plan9 and got mentors from all over the world to teach us about running startups. One of the mentors was Shoaib Makani, our current CEO at KeepTruckin. He came and met all of the teams at Plan9 and liked our product. We were struggling at that time with finding the right target market for the product. We were engineers and didn’t know much about the business side, so we built the technology first and then thought of solving problems afterwards, when it should have been the other way around. We made a product for web developers thinking this problem existed and it did but our solution just wasn’t right for it.
So that’s when Shoaib said, “You guys can join me at KeepTruckin, a new startup that is going to revolutionize fleet transportation, starting with the US”. That’s when I joined KeepTruckin. Ever since, many great Pakistani designers have passed through and are still in our team, and the good thing is that whoever joined our team has been good friends with me.
AI: You have 6–7 years of experience in design, could you walk us through your self-learning journey? How have you grown as a designer?
KQ: Most designers in Pakistan are CS graduates, since there aren’t many formal design programmes in the country. My journey was the same. I knew how to code a little bit, but didn’t really like it. I started with online lectures on Treehouse. When I started working with KeepTruckin, I really enjoyed that process because I looked for answers to interesting questions as part of my learning like how do you put meaning in a logo? How do you create brand identities from that? So it was more of me going out and finding resources for every problem that I faced as part of my work.
At KeepTruckin, I was put in a position where I had to design a mobile application for users based in the United States. It was a tough challenge to solve because of my lack of experience and the timezone difference.
I remember that my first mobile app design was hideous and I still look at it and cry, what have I made! But it was okay at that time to solve that problem. When I started expanding my knowledge, I realized that design is not just art but a very polished problem solving tool.
AI: Tell us specifically about some great resources that helped you grow?
KQ: Sure.
- Treehouse Online
- Alan Cooper’s About Face 4
- Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things
When I started to get into design leadership, I started studying resources for building a design team that functions properly with the business. I learnt more about how to measure design maturity. I went through the detailed accounts of interviews and design leadership resources by Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures. In the US, I grew more rapidly as a designer as compared to when I was in Pakistan because of the exposure I received.
AI: What could you have done to grow twice as fast as you did in the last 6 years?
KQ: Maybe doing a bachelors in CS and then turning that into a masters in HCI or something more design-oriented…
AI: How did shifting to the US change you personally and professionally?
KQ: In Pakistan, I started suffering from depression because I didn’t have the courage to face anything directly. But in the US, I was on my own. There was an initial cultural shock, but I made it through. With KeepTruckin, I could order anything I wanted so I had access to a lot of resources and books. So I kept reading and expanded on my knowledge.
My fundamental belief as a designer is that:
Every designer should be able to work across all platforms of design and apply design thinking to anything. Design thinking should be platform agnostic.
Awais suggested a really good resource for ordering books online — Fabingo.com. He mentioned, “When we were giving away books on UX Design in Pakistan, we found 9 out of 12 books on Fabingo.”
AI: What were your expectations before you went to the US? What was the difference between your expectations and reality when you set foot there?
KQ: Before going to US in 2016, I had only seen it in the movies. So there was a cultural shock and it was tough for me. Maybe it’s tougher for a lot of other people who move into the US. Getting used to life over there is extremely weird but also exciting i.e. if you love learning new things and meeting new people. When I landed in San Francisco, my first cultural shock was seeing a naked dude walking in the street. I was like, “Wow! This is a completely different place”.
I didn’t have a credit score, nobody trusted me and nobody let me rent their place since I had a Pakistani passport. It was a really challenging time and I didn’t have a house so I was crashing with a couple of friends. Then an Asian woman let me live in a tiny room at her place until I built a reputable credit score and started living in the apartment.
So there’s a whole new nature of practical challenges that you have to deal with.
AI: There are very few companies in Pakistan that hire people here and take them to the US. We know US is the hub of the Western world for technology and design, so if someone wants to grow as a designer, what path can they follow?
KQ: If you want to grow your skills, there are millions of resources available online. You don’t need a design degree for that. But if you want to have a broader career in the field of design, then I suggest you should try to go for a Masters degree in design abroad.
I’ll mention a couple of good programmes:
- Academy of Arts, San Francisco. I really like their course for modern media design that covers a lot of areas from web to mobile to digital design.
- General Assembly Bootcamp has shorter courses and bootcamps you can opt for.
Community Questions
Senam Khan: Which Pakistani public institution, system or sector would you like to redesign — why, and how?
KQ: My biggest pain in Pakistan is taxation. Pakistan collects a very small amount of tax and there are a few people who submit their tax. So income tax experience is what I’d really want to design. It’s not about the screen design, but it’s about the experience of the entire tax filing journey. There’s way too much ambiguity.
AI: If I want to learn about design maturity, where should I go?
KQ: I’d definitely start reading Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz. InVision also recently came out with a detailed report on Design Maturity that’s worth checking out. I also recommend InVision’s Design Leadership Handbook.
Awais also recommended Nielsen Norman Group’s article series on UX Maturity.
Umair Khatri: 80–90% of the startups don’t know what design is. How do you think design is maturing in startups?
KQ: It’s always an uphill battle, unless you’re a level 5 design team. That’s when the CEO and CTO are so immersed in design that design becomes the goal of the business for example, Google.
Design awareness is not as much about designers, as it is about the non-designers and more about communicating the value of design. Understanding the business goals and aligning them to design is essential.
Amal Rathore: What are the ways to speed up the research analysis after the research is conducted? And how to convince the non-designers in the team to spend more time on analysis?
KQ: I’d solve this problem in three ways:
- Break bigger problems into smaller ones and test for smaller interactions with a smaller user-base (i.e. have smaller sprint cycles).
- Don’t take more than 5–6 users because with 5–6 users you can understand the trend.
- Use Timeboxing Strategy and the Double Diamond model. Use 4–5 days for research. First two days for recruitment and then the last two days for testing.
You have to be data-oriented but not always data-driven.
This event was a great learning opportunity for me as a designer. I’ve recently joined KeepTruckin as a Product Designer in their App Marketplace team. I’m really inspired by the team spirit, design thinking, processes and methodologies that the company is already using.
Before joining the company, I thought it’s going to be really difficult to communicate since half of the team is based in San Fransisco, but surprisingly, the communication is very efficient. Mainly because of the team culture and also because of the tools that we use. I hope to stay in touch with the design community and grow by being part of such events.
