Showcasing your work and building visibility
This article is part of a Design Baithak with Hardik Pandya, held in Ahmedabad recently. The Baithak was faciliated by Jui Pandya and Tejas Bhatt.
A Design what?
Baithak literally means a seat.
In Ahmedabad lingo, a Baithak means a place of gathering. Passing through the city, you would see groups of people gathered on the side of roads conversing. The city is a very social place, and people claim and personalize public spaces for this purpose — they make the public spaces their own.
The Design Baithak is an ode to the local culture and we wish to have as meaningful (and often meaningless) and fun conversations as all the Baithaks in the city.
About Hardik Pandya
Hardik Pandya has been working as an interaction designer at Google for the past 1 year. A self-taught designer with academic background in Electrical Engineering, he worked with InstaMojo, Ola Cabs before joining Google in 2017.
Authors
Jui works as a User Experience designer at Aubergine Solutions, a UX design and engineering studio based out of Ahmedabad. Her satisfaction of existence as a designer is fed knowing how a designer’s job is to meet both- users’ needs as well as business goals.
Tejas designs award-winning digital products from his tiny studio called 3 Sided Coin based out of Ahmedabad, India.
Hiring in today’s world happens in really serendipitous ways.
As a designer or a UX/UI researcher, it is important to be aware that hiring in today’s world happens in really serendipitous ways. People can only find you if you put yourself out there, have your presence out there about what you’re doing, what you are working on,what you’re all about, the complex problems you’ve worked on, and what you’ve helped the companies with. These few tips will help you stay ahead of the game.
Have an online presence
The design community is pretty active on Twitter and hence it has become important to start off with a presence on Twitter. The community is usually very receptive, supportive, and share a lot of useful things. Have a Twitter account, follow the right people and ask the right questions. Don’t be afraid to reach out to them, ask for help, they are all always always helpful. A strong presence and identity helps a lot when working with accomplished designers.
Write about design
Write about problems you’re facing, problems you’re trying to solve. If you are facing problems in your freelance world or in your product company, share how you solve them, share the story how you got some quick wins or how you got some really long term major wins.
The more you share, the more you will self-learn, and the more you yourself put your work in a perspective. Everyone’s doing important work. We take it for granted because we are so involved in it that we forget the bigger picture. The moment you start writing about it, you feel how much of an impact it had.
You wouldn’t realize the impact projects can have until you sit down and put everything on a page. Build a case study, build a portfolio full of stories about the kind of work you have done. It is hard work, it is not fun often times because its growling work.
You need to have your work speaking for yourself before large companies even have a first conversation with you. Design as a field is so crowded, there are thousands of designers in Bangalore and million outside, you need to differentiate yourself, you need to have an identity that sets yourself apart from the other folks.
The leverage is — most people are not doing this.
Most people don’t go out of their way to build an identity, to share their work, to talk about their work, be present in the community, share knowledge, or help others, they don’t do that. The more you do that, the more you create value and the more people remember you, you create that level of leverage for yourself, and the differentiation that people generally seek.
Everybody wants to work with great team members, how would you say that you are a great team member? Your mocks won’t say the story, the story only comes out by the words you share, by the personality you share, the way you present yourself in conferences, in meet ups, in meetings 1:1 with other folks in the community
Go out of your way to spend time with folks who are doing great work, share your stories with them, share your stories online. The internet is incredibly powerful, like a megaphone that you don’t need to control 24x7. People search for you, they already know more about you than you would ever be able to tell them in a face to face meeting. So why not take that effort!
Tools are not important, you putting yourself out there is important and having a consistent personality is really important. And in a crowded world, where everybody is doing similar things, differentiating yourself is the only way to grow in your career and the only way to land really shiny opportunities.
Chase people
Chase people you always wanted to work with.
I did that with @Sunit Singh. I had heard a lot about him when I was working at Instamojo, people were all about him — “He is this designer who built Cleartrip and he is one of the smartest people in the industry right now and if you ever want to grow as a designer, you should absolutely be working with him.” That night I literally searched him all over the place and I learned about the kind of work that he has done and sent him a message saying, “Hey, I am a designer who works at Instamojo and I want to have a coffee with you and want to talk about design stuff, there’s no agenda as such.” He said, “Okay, lets meet up.” This is a big deal, people don’t normally say yes. I don’t know why he said yes, but after that first meeting, it is about how. You want that first meeting so that you can have the second and third and fourth meetings. Your first meeting is to make a break.
Everybody is always hiring. You should know that if you come off as somebody valuable to them, you have a job offer, not in the first meeting, but in the second, third or fourth meeting. Or they at least remember you to refer you to the right place.
Sunit said that was going to put me through to this team, and that I will have to talk to these 3 people. All three of them gave me three separate design exercises. That was new to me, I had never done that.
I put two back-to-back all-nighters and got back to them earlier than expected. I was actually worried that when they say give it a week, come back next Monday and we’ll discuss it, me doing it early might come off as cutting corners. They might think he might not have given it 100% efforts. that’s not how it works in startups, thankfully. They said, “You gave it a fair shot, you gave us a solution in two days, I think it looks good, when do you wanna start?” I said, “I haven’t talked to Instamojo yet, so I need a week”
Anyway, the gist of the matter is conversations matter. You meeting people matter a lot, and if you are not in a situation or in a geography where there are lot of inspirational designers, have conversations with them over Skype, over phone, doesn’t matter. All you need to do is leave an impression that helps you pull yourself out of wherever you are right now. We all want better work, we all want better companies. So look for the people and chase them.
How do you make sure that these kind of conversations are mutual, it is not obvious that you are leaching off their knowledge?
Don’t worry too much about outcomes or key-takeaways, focus on leaving an impression initially. There are lot of subtle ways to do it.
Smart, well-known people are also insecure. The smarter and the higher up you grow in your levels, the more insecure you get because there are always smarter kids coming off the clock, they’re always ready to replace you. They always want to talk with you more than you want to talk with them.
I reached out to Luke Wroblewski when I was in San Francisco, and he said yes in the first message, he said “Okay, lets meetup” And when I met him, our conversations were about wood chopping and bicycle riding. He is building this wooden ramp because his kids love cycling and he does mountain biking. The meeting was 30 minutes, but we ended up talking for an hour and a half. He canceled one of his meeting , because we were having fun and he said “Okay, lets continue”
Agenda is not important
- What’s important is you being human and genuine with them. If you say you want to grow in your career, that’s not a thing to be ashamed of. You want better projects, you want to work with better teams.
- Being honest, and being open helps. Being genuine helps. But having ulterior motives, pulling the conversations to your set agenda doesn’t scale well to all people. Some personalities don’t take that very well. Go with an open mind, go with an open agenda, have couple of topics in mind, for eg. talk about how it is working in Google, how does one grow in Google or startups, how does enterprise work differ from consumer work, things like that. They generally like talking about things open endedly. Don’t have set structures.
Do your research about the person
At Google, you have access to the whole campus map all over the world, so you can literally see where everyone sits, including Sundar Pichai. You have an access to everyone’s desk location. When I travel overseas, in Mountain View office, Googleplex, I want to meet with a lot of folks there. So I set up a meeting close to their desk, that’s one obvious hat, you don’t want them to change buildings to reach you. I look at the meeting they have before, what room they have meeting in, and how much would they have to walk to come meet me. I go out of the way to take a cab, or something, to go there and have a meeting with them. Make it easy for them to meet you.
That works in open world as well, if you want to meet somebody who works in certain company, you can ask to meet after hours. Find a cafe or a good place near their workplace. Don’t inconvenience them, try to remove hurdles from their end so that they meet you. Ultimately you want to meet them, but right now you need them more than they need you. It may be different later, but that’s what it is right now. That’s how you make it easy for people, you do your background research so that you are not completely talking nonsense and things that they are not interested in. General topics of interest you of course need to know. That’s how you keep that conversation engaging and interesting.
Ask for introductions
You know a few folks, and if they know a few folks you want to meet, ask for introductions.
I met Soleio, who designed the ‘like’ button on Facebook. He is the guy who worked with Mark Zuckerburg in the early days of Facebook design, back in 2007. I wasn’t thinking he would ever meet me. It only worked out because I met Noah Levin when Noah was traveling to Bangalore, Noah works at Figma, and he is ex-Google. Noah said, “You should meet Soleio ” and I said, “I don’t think that’ll work out because he is a design VC now.” He said, “No, I’ll introduce you” I said, “Okay, go ahead.” He shot him an email and Soleio said, “Yeah, fair enough”.
That’s when you really are using your network to help you move forward. Introductions help a lot because their connections are much stronger than your connections and you just need to leverage, so you may end up meeting some really cool people that way. All you need to do when you end the meeting is that you ensure that you had an experience, that you have them a message away if you ever want something from them or if you ever want another meeting, if you ever want to talk with them.
Provide enough value, fun and engaging discussions that help them form a better idea of who you are as a person, that’s how hiring is done, people don’t want to interview you, they want you to join them as soon as you can. They have to go through these interviews because they don’t know you. But when you have these kind of introductions already done, the path is that much simpler. It helps in hiring, it helps in landing projects, it helps in referrals, all kinds of things.
How do you then position yourself better?
The way to position yourself better is to understand strategy and business. And design as something that is larger than UI and interfaces. Design in the service of humanity, design in the service of society, design in the service of something that actually shapes human life. that’s the only way to understand and have a bigger impact, have a solid future that’s not gonna go away. Like strategies are not gonna go away.
Technology doesn’t solve Humanity’s problems — Sundar Pichai
There is a lot to be done with design where all those facets are important and design’s role is right there. And if you don’t understand all those things — psychology, society, economics, history, you slowly are in the danger of being out-priced.
I call it out-priced because AI will eventually be cheaper to hire, and faster to replicate than humans. So yeah, that’s one way to look at it.
