Learnings at Razorpay Design
Six lessons in six months at my first design job
After college, I got an opportunity to work with the design team at Razorpay as a full-time product designer. This is my first design gig, and here are my top 6 learnings.
I joined Razorpay in June’21. I got this gig straight out of college and started working from home due to the pandemic before moving to Bengaluru HQ in February’22. The past six months with the Razorpay design team have been amazing, and here are a few.
Most of the insights below are digitally obtained by collaborating with the Razorpay team. Let’s Begin
Absorb from your peers as much as possible
When starting at Razorpay, there were a few obvious questions revolving around my head for the initial weeks around:
What do I know about Fintech?
How does a payment gateway work?
Are payments more than UPI, But UPI is free what are we doing here?
Why do people even use Razorpay?
Who exactly are the users?
What problems are we trying to solve and how?
Talk to your manager, fellow designers, developers and especially product managers. To grasp this better, you must start talking to subject matter experts and the people who have been in this domain for a while. It can take a month to learn what your company does, its products, and how they solve customer problems. Watch user interviews, read product documents, release notes, and don’t be shy to ask questions even if they sound silly and obvious to you.
I went ahead and scheduled a 1:1 with many people to get answers to these questions. You will never be able to understand each product in detail. Having a basic understanding of all the products will help you design better.
Organise your work — Organise your thoughts
There is a constant question about why I should invest my time documenting my decision, process, and designs when I can spend that time making my work better. The obvious answer to the problem above is that it will help the person picking work after you to understand it better.
However, if you take out 30mins to document what you did today on a project, you will be able to reflect on your decision better. Doing this will allow you to pace yourself, make more informed decisions and help keep track of your progress.
Sure, there will be some projects which are ad-hoc's and war room projects where documentation cannot be possible side by side, which is fine in these kinds of projects.
Adhoc tasks will come; plan for them too
It is common for you to get Adhoc tasks apart from your primary tasks due to policy changes, heavy service requests, and requests from a prominent client/merchant.
As a designer, you want to ship high-quality designs and the best experience possible in all your projects that you take up. However, when you plan ETA’s for that roadmap, you think that you will only be working on this one item, which will never be true.
Always keep some 20% extra time while planning projects, this will allow you to accommodate these Adhoc tasks.
Planning your roadmap will reduce your mental load, and your team will be more agile. You can prove to be resourceful to your teammates on a personal level.
If you feel that you are on track to complete this task early than your scheduled time, give time to document that project better. See if you can get feedback from more people other than your team.
Make developers and PM design with you.
Yes, as a designer, your task is to design Figma screens and prototypes in the end, but in reality, everyone can design outside Figma. Ideating, sketching and journeys can be created by anyone. If your devs and PMs are involved from an early stage, it will fast track your process, and you will not get stuck in multiple feedback cycles.
I prefer to do this by organising brainstorming sessions before starting a project. I set up a 1–1.5hr meeting where I give context around what we are doing in this project, tell them about who we are solving for, and we start making user journeys, rough ideas and sketch wireframes in the end.
Adding PMs and devs to be a part of the brainstorming sessions leads to co-ownership of the end solutions, unlike a traditional waterfall method where people may feel their work is transactional. It also allows you to look at things from a different perspective and identify common expectations and patterns.
This exercise will give you a pool of thought and ideas. 70–80% of all possible use cases will be solved by this method early.
Measure your designs
It was complicated to measure your designs when you were in college doing self projects. You don’t have access to users and their data, and you cannot see how are they using your product/feature. However, this changes when you start working for a product company. Here you have access to user data. You can see your product in the hands of users.
You can measure them in two ways relational and behavioural. Relational metrics focus on how users think about your product and understand nuances of your design like discoverability of features, ease of use, learnability etc. Behavioural ones focus on their direct interactions with it and get a sense of how the overall business/feature is performing.
You know where your users are facing issues in using your product. You can define KPIs to track your design and see to what extent a problem is solved.
To know in detail how exactly you can do it, take a look at this:
It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
For the first few months, you will be full of energy, taking up every problem under the sun and trying to put design solutions. But, you need to understand that these projects will keep coming one after the other. You need to take a break from working and analyse your work better.
Yes, the primary goal of your work is to improve the experience for your merchants/users. But, your design learning should also happen. Always ask this question yourself.
“Are you a better designer than you were last week?”
A full-time job is very different from an internship. As an intern, you know you are there at a place for X number of months, so you can try to maximise your effort over there and punch everything with all you got. But, as an FTE, you need to take breaks and work at a constant pace to keep going.
Summing up
Designing in a product company is very different from designing in your design school/college. You will get enough time to do proper user research for some projects and apply all you learned in design school. You will have to go with a hunch and test them out.
All you need to care about is making the best of what you have and finding more innovative ways to solve the problem at hand.
If you love solving problems as much as we do, please take a look at below:
