Industry spotlight • align magazine

Amrita Ganguly — Lead Product Designer, Swiggy

Animated movies, gaming, fashion communications — journey of life long passions to leading design at Instamart, Swiggy

Trivia #1:
Collects elephants and accepts them as gifts

Can you describe your childhood growing up in Bengal? How did your background influence the career choices that followed later on in your life?

I grew up in a small town called Chinsurah in West Bengal, and spent the early 17 years of my life. Trust me when I say this, I had the most stereotypical Bengali childhood. You name it, and I have done it. Singing, dancing, drawing, learning musical instrument, all were part of the package growing up. My mother had been a strong example before me of a confident, financially independent woman, which quite early on in my life helped me build the image of the woman that I’d like to become.

My narration of the background would be rather negative, which happened to push me to choose and build the life that I have today. The choices for higher studies were very unoriginal (or rather hailing from a small town, and not being able to access the world wide web out there at home, I was left to be unimaginative). The only companion which helped me imagine my life differently was through a very scandalous magazine (as labelled by the parent folks) called Unish-Kuri. The way forwards seemed very mundane and stereotypical. Life seemed very slow and predictable there. I wanted to break free, and unlock my potential, which resulted in me wanting to study something else than what had been decided for me.

As soon as my 12th exams were over I frantically started looking for study options while awaiting my results. On one hand I was told by my parents to fill out forms at local colleges for English Literature and Economics (a Humanities student, yes) or I was asked to consider music as an option as I come from a family of many music professionals. And on the other hand I was researching to study journalism initially, and that’s how I stumbled upon the world of Symbiosis. SIMC printed an advert in The Telegraph back then talking about their bachelor’s programme. The course structure however was not something that appealed to me. But soon enough I found out about the design courses offered by Symbiosis, and I was sold on the curriculums. I had got a ticket out to escape. Then followed a lot of drama at home which will require as much storytelling as the LOTR Trilogy. Long story short, I left for Pune much against my parent’s wishes, but they knew better soon enough that I could not be on this journey without them.

Trivia #2:
Known to beat up eve-teasers and put perpetrator behind bar in her teen years.

Do you remember that crucial moment when design ‘clicked’ for you, and you wanted to get involved more heavily?

I remember it vividly. There’s two different milestones, one when design as a whole concept clicked for me and when UX did.

Milestone I (2000–2008): The design bit was an amalgamation of animation movies and computer games. I spent a lot of time being in awe of the mystical mechanisms of animation movies, it started with the movie Monsters Inc. (2001) which till date stands as one of my favourite watch. I was captivated by the amount of attention to detail and reflection of realism that went into these renderings, such as Sully’s fur was the most talked about rendered magic. And as far as games go, I loved playing Project IGI and NFS on our home computer that I used to share with my elder brother, and he would source all these games from his friends, and when he was away I would play these games. The game playing was definitely an interest of mine, but more than that I was more into the nuances of game design. Sometimes I would just roam around without fulfilling my FPS or racing duties in these kinds of games, and observe the finer and thoughtful details. This was the driving force behind me wanting to pursue animation and design.

Milestone II (2011): It was my first & part-time job at a design agency where I was working on the end-to-end experience for the Microsoft Imagine cup website which was my design degree project, and the agency was one of the contenders for getting the tender for that website project that year. That was my first serious UX project. I suddenly went from designing cute and funky websites to designing full-fledged user experience and even though we managed to get many things right, there were innumerable mistakes, that bothered me. I knew some approaches that we took were not the right ones, and that’s what made me curious to dig deeper into the world of user experience and learn about it more.

Trivia #3:
Once drove 320+ kms to eat authentic Ambur Biryani

You went on to study Fashion Communication. How did your experience at college align with aspirations you had before joining college and how did college shape you up for your to-be future endeavours?

Even though I took admission for Fashion Communication because I loved the curriculums it consisted of, I was hoping to switch at the time of counselling in 2nd year to Communication Design programme to study animation. But by 2nd year I realised that I had zero live-sketching talent, I wish I had taken those drawing lessons seriously in my childhood. I could draw from memory, duplicate my favourite Manga/Chibi characters, but anatomy drawing was getting physically difficult. For outdoor drawing classes I preferred to be bitten by ants than draw trees sitting in a park.

So as fate would have it, I stayed with Fashion Communication, it was the most fun and versatile programme one can be in. You are taught Graphic Design, Styling, Photography, Publication Design, Draping, Website Design, Visual Merchandising and so many more random things. I always stuck to graphic design as my main skillset, I was the dedicated GD for every group project. In my 3rd year of college, I had also taken up a part-time job where I was working at an agency on branding and website design because I wanted to maximise my learning, get industry experience and earn some bucks as I wanted to stop looting the parents.

By the end of 3rd year I knew I had to take it up a notch and find something meaningful for my degree project. And incidentally my agency landed with the “Imagine Cup” project which became my bumpy ride to learn UX.

I am not sure today if college aligned with my aspirations, because the 4 years I spent in trance. I was clueless, intimidated by the talent around me and the abundance of wealth and swearing! It was a huge change for me. But looking back if I have to answer this, then yes, this individual that I am today is because of the tangible and intangible things my college enabled me with, the kind of people I met and the kind of exposure I got. And as far as aspirations go, I simply did not want to do something mainstream and did not want a life predicted for me. So I guess I owe all of it to the 17 year old girl who made this happen.

Trivia #4:
Advocates for mental wellness

Looking back, can you put a pin on your experiences from school or college specifically that might have helped you become the designer that you are today?

Well it would be a very long list of life lessons that I learnt in my college days. But the most glaring one was how I was treated as an inferior talent by my faculties and with apathy, because I was very introverted and analytical, unlike the extroverted creative students that had a lot of potential in the shiny world of Fashion. That initially made me anxious about my future, I became even more aloof, took up an internship even before I was meant to as per college curriculum because I wanted to learn things on my own, I would go up to other programme faculties for mentorship with the hope of being treated without judgement. This taught me to put my head down, believe in myself, commit to the inner voice, and find my own mentors.

Being an introvert throughout my teens and early twenties, taught me to observe and practise empathy.

Trivia #5:
Allergic to patriarchy

Now, tell us about your professional journey. Almost a decade of experience across some of the well-known and credible companies — Fab.com, Cleartrip.com, Flipkart, Swiggy. Tell us how you went about choosing these companies and what kind of work you were involved in.

It all started with Fab, I was hired for Hem though (a premium furniture company based in the EU). I worked in a niche product team before this, where I worked on a HRMS system, and that was my first big product exposure. And soon I learnt the way of product companies, and made it a point to explore product companies more than service companies.

In 2014, I reached out to the HR of Fab after seeing a senior from my college had posted about a job opening. A few weeks later, I was hired and I worked almost 2 years for Fab and Hem collectively. In the beginning it was like a dream, I got to work with so many bright minded individuals, got to work with an amazing manager (Cody Winn, this is for you), and I made some lifelong friends and found my sense of belonging. The most fun projects at Hem that I worked on were the furniture customiser for Alphabeta Lamps and Nendo Shelves and later on I went on to work on Augmented Reality visualiser for Art prints and loyalty programme for Fab. These were nothing like the projects I have worked on!

But soon it was time to move on as both the companies weren’t doing well financially. Pune did not have anything more to offer me in terms of the kind of work and company I wanted to be associated with. Having worked on US and EU based products, I had no idea of the Indian users and product market, so I decided it was time to explore Indian product ecosystem and to know my own demographic better.

So when Cleartrip came along, I was very proactive in reaching out to get a chance to work with them. And within a month I was packing up my life in Pune to move to Bangalore. At Cleartrip I lead the design for the product Local, and briefly dabbled into the product Hotels. I got to work with some awe-inspiring people here, whom I secretly looked upto as mentors.

After 2 years at Cleartrip I decided I could move on to learn about newer domains, and that is how Flipkart and Swiggy both happened at the same time. I chose to go ahead with Flipkart because of the scale and in the hope of knowing about the NBU psychology. In my very short stint at Flipkart (of just 4 months) I briefly got to work on the loyalty programme, Flipkart Plus.
But life had other plans.

At this point of my life and career I was having epiphanies and still getting to know about myself. I was burnt out from working continuously since the age of 21 and I understood what kind of work environment I really thrived in.

So I quit my job at Flipkart to stay unemployed for 3 months to reflect and introspect, and then I again got approached by Swiggy, and this time I whole-heartedly accepted. At Swiggy I get to work with genuine and talented peers in a fun environment, with great mentors. I have gained so much learning as an Individual contributor while building the framework for Search and Pricing & Promotions constructs at Swiggy.

I switched from the restaurant ecosystem to Instamart team last July, and it has been a different hustle. It’s like working for a startup within a big company. I can see reflection of all manifested learning in each project and gain knowledge which I sometimes can’t keep up with.

Swiggy has helped me with my maturity as a designer and individual, given me the voice and confidence, teaches me more about empathy and responsibilities as a designer.

Trivia #6:
Takes interest in architecture and palaces

Can you tell us a bit more about your current role at Swiggy? What does your day-to-day look like?

Currently I am working on Instamart, I look after all product and design interventions that it requires, along with 2 design peers and 3 product stakeholders. We are a small team, always have our hands full. This is the first time where I have seen so many of us involved day in and day out beyond professional boundaries to make things work, and that is contagious.

I have been mostly instrumental in creating frameworks, giving shape to user journeys, helping define logic, designing guidelines, consulting about strategies, collaborating in vision building, mentor new additions to the team, doing quality checks for tech implementations & creative assets, and always cater to scope for improvements.

I usually have multiple projects going on with new projects coming in, dabbling with multiple product stakeholders and understanding their/business requirements. We practise early collaborations, such as defining objectives, customer beliefs. One good chunk of time goes in talking to the engineering stakeholders and extending my support for the projects in development. We as a team, are also very involved in the off-app customer experience, product quality & assortment, business updates.

Trivia #7:
Often used words at work are: quantify, wholesome and scalable.

Tech companies tend to grow quickly and the demand of expectations from a designer changes with every project. How does that impact you personally? How do you keep up with new learnings, staying up-to-date both internally, and externally? Do you lose your shit too, like the rest of us? And how do you manage that?

I am glad you asked this question. If I reflect back on my career, at least the last 4 years, I can say one thing for sure, that changing demands & expectations of me, happened to me very seamlessly and organically. With each role and product I have worked with, it never felt like expectations changed over night, the responsibilities crept up slowly. Initially it definitely affected my work, deliverables, deadlines and quality. I would be actually pretty clueless about the reason why I was overwhelmed. The more you can’t focus, the more you can’t work, the more you can’t work, the more you cant focus. It’s a vicious cycle. I have lost my shit manier times than I would like to admit. But it often has led me to burn out. So I make sure I take time off. Stress is an occupational hazard, but shit hits the fan when the quality of my work starts to deteriorate.

So the key to managing expectations is to know them, and to have a good control over time management, often retrospect and take cues from the mistakes that I made. I have learnt to be very possessive about my time, I not only have a good work-life balance, but also try to achieve a good balance between my meetings and my working sessions. I have found out that If I make enough time to do my hands-on work, I have the sanity to go to battle for other things.

I still make mistakes and I still become petrified when I learn that I have made those mistakes, it’s a hard pill to swallow. But I have owned up and rectified each time I am in those situations.

Internally I have multiple channels to keep streaming the new learnings. They aint very conventional, but they are the best teachers, called mistakes and data! And apart from them I learn so much from Srinath (our VP of design), leadership brawls, business updates and my colleagues.

Externally there are conventional ways of learning; books, small-manageable online courses, case studies, podcasts and sometimes Twitter (actually Twitter should win the learning aggregator platform award.) I have my spree of picking topics to learn, which seemingly irrelevant to my career but can become relevant if applied in context. The topics may range from human psychology to quantum physics. But it’d be delusional of me to say that I manage to do all this every day or week, I struggle with concentration, anxiety and just mental exhaustion.

Trivia #8:
A Bengali who does not have a sweet tooth

I know it’s typically a hard one, but any favourite projects that are close to you?

This is indeed a hard one. I would like to outline it differently. Let me pick 5 projects that taught me completely new things at various stages in my career and allowed me to practise manifestation of learnings.

1. HRMS: I worked with Searce Inc in a niche product team for a HRMS product called HappierHR.
2. Customiser: Worked on alphabeta lamp customiser for Hem, which can have thousands of permutations and combinations.
3. AR for art: Worked on a relatively low-fidelity augmented reality project for art visualisation for Fab.
4. Ed-tech: Worked with one of my ex-colleague for his early stage startup InterviewBit, where I designed user journeys and pitches.
5. Search framework: Defined framework for food search 2.0 for Swiggy.

Trivia #9:
Only drinks beer if it is Stout

How have you grown as a person, as a designer in the last 2+ years at Swiggy? What advice did you find most and least useful along the way?

I think career growth is only inevitable in an opportunity like this, but the real perks lie in personal development. I learnt that I could argue with the leadership about something that I care about personally and as a responsible designer. There’s so much attention on you being a designer of a multi-million user product, that it forces you to think about usability very carefully and with all seriousness. As a designer I think I have grown to think about the uncomfortable edge cases more than the happy cases, and also I care about the off-app experience as much as I care about the in-app experience.

The most useful advice has been lately is to question the intent aka to practise the power of asking. I started practising this so widely that it became an intrinsic value. I not only have practised it in my professional life, but personal as well. The worst possible thing that can happen is rejection, but it is always better to know than wonder.

The least useful is when people have said move fast and break things. I know it is the mantra of many organizations out there and they are working high on redbull to push things. But it pushes one to wander off without much chance of learning, wholesome planning. One might argue that failing is the best way to learn, I would not disagree. My point is that it is not a sustainable way for an individual to learn, grow and execute.

Trivia #10:
Started learning singing when was 4 year old

What do you think is the biggest motivation for designers in an organization as big as Swiggy to go the extra mile and produce their best work?

The sheer peer pressure. Everyone in your team is creating and putting their best foot forward, and setting a benchmark. I realised when people expect the best from you, you always strive to be the best version of yourself. The guiding light is and will always be the bossman, whose passion and vision is infectious. The obvious answer would be that millions of users will be using the product, so you are always motivated and on the edge to do your best.

How do you balance the pursuit of maximum productivity with the need for creative idleness?

The key is to work for less time, but with high concentration and in a flow.

There is a huge pressure of being productive, but I feel not every productivity is productive. For me resting is productive sometimes, and sometimes I have the energy of a puppy to sniff out all the goods, and oftentimes I push myself to do things just because FOMO.

I don’t like to procrastinate, and I have seen that helps in my case. If I have not finished my task at hand, I can’t be at peace, it causes me anxiety and keeps me distracted thinking about that task. So I usually try to outline my goals or milestones of a task, and when I reach that milestone, I take a break. Taking a break is not a reward, it is a necessity, very important to recharge, go back to your real life and come back to the task with more enthusiasm.

And I usually don’t talk shop after I am done for the day with work, I keep notifications switched off for slack, but allow myself to check emails for emergencies. And I try to respect other people’s time and expect the same out of people. In WFH culture, it can become intrusive.

I follow a routine for my daily activities, but I don’t like it to be rigid. And give myself enough liberty to take rest, and not feel guilty about it.

We love to highlight and talk about good design. This is applied so broadly that it kind of means everything, and nothing. At work, how do you practise and enforce good design practically?

• First step is undeniably knowing the users. In my case it is through talking to the user research team or looking into research papers already available for the product/feature I am working for.
• Understand data in context and figuring out what data points will help me and ask for those to make informed decisions.
• To be present. If I can’t focus, I can’t design.
• Always obsess about scalability of a feature and how it would affect others.
• I believe in validation of ideation, always striving to seek feedback at an early stage. This also helps other non-design stakeholders visualise the solution and give necessary inputs.
• Share my work among my peers and ask for their thoughts.
• Where I am doubtful about tech capability, I always ask for them to get involved sooner than later. And this often works out for the best, I also get insights from different perspectives about the approach of the problem that needs solving.
• Storytelling is everything, at what point should I communicate something in order to make sense and seem contextual for the user.
• It’s sad but true, but we do have to fight manier times for usability because of tech bandwidth crunch or business inputs. So I try to put my foot down, and I demand to be convinced why usability should be compromised.
• Last but not the least, practising empathy goes a long way, beyond your career. I was once told by a certain leadership individual, that I have too much empathy.

What’s your take on the Indian product design community? What do you think are the good and areas for improvement?

I happened to attend my first design conference in the year 2015, which took place in Bangalore. It was my first time encountering part of the community and realising the vastness of it, and it has only grown exponentially and so dynamically. I admire the pioneers who have made this happen.

The good part is that how everyone is so inter-connected, it feels like a very small world. This closeness provides us to learn and grow together, and provide each other with opportunities.

Areas of improvement would be inclusivity, and not building a nepotist culture amongst us which we have somehow managed to build. There’s a lot of bhaichara in this community, just because people know each other, they would defend a wrong view or action of someone just because of bhaichara. And yes not just in India, but globally we need to stop referring to the designers who happen to be women as female designers, we are just designers! I would like to see more women in the position of design leadership.

What skills would you ideally want every product designer to have?

I don’t think I need to talk about the hard skills that we need in this industry, it also depends upon what interests you and what you want to position yourself as. But I will definitely talk about the soft skills one should have.

1. Listening skills is a life skill. It fuels your curiosity, let’s you ask the right questions when the time comes. It imprints on you in a far superior way when you listen with intent of listening, than when you listen with the intent of just speaking.
2. Decision making is the most difficult, stomach churning job. But don’t NOT take decisions thinking if something goes wrong then it will be your fault. If you are not confident, ask for validation, think over it, but do learn to be decisive.
3. Communication is everything. Not just to articulate your design, but to also vouch for your design and stand up for yourself and the users. And you may be an introvert or non-confrontational, but when it comes to your professional self, you ought to have that work-voice!
4. Learn how to interpret data, and most importantly understanding what data will help you with clarity for the problem in hand. Because you will be presented with data and the solution might not be linear always looking at a dataset, take it with a pinch of salt and ask for more data points after evaluating.
5. Collaboration skills are a must. There is no ego in asking for help and wanting to know about other’s perspectives. It helps with confirmation bias.
6. You will often find yourself thinking about business first, always take a step back and remind yourself to think of customers first, practise empathy.
7. Learn how to design for users to have a soft landing. Introduce new changes incrementally, like how you would do it for the new fish in a plastic bag in the aquarium to get acquainted with the temperature of the water.

What advice would you give a 2–3 years experienced product designer to grow in their career?

1. Take ownership. Learn this early, learn this well. You should be able to own what you are working on. It’s important to have a manager to shield you from the people who will exploit your naivete and inexperience, but it is utmost important that you own, present, you fail and learn, or you pass and take pride.
2. Find mentors, at or outside work. They will be able to give you feedback, impart wisdom, lead by example and experience, provide you with the right tool, prep you for the tough decisions, enable you to make better decisions and teach autonomy, and help in your growth. And it need not be ONE person. It can be your manager, design director, your colleague, your peer, a self-help book author, your family & friends, and sometimes yourself.
3. Psychology is an eye opening subject. Invest time in learning about human psychology to go far to understand user psychology as well.
4. Be problem focused. I can’t emphasise on this enough, but always be problem focused. Being solution focused will rob you off a great deal of learning, and the organic discovery of solutions.
5. Iterate exhaustively, even bad. Be a little extra when it comes to iteration, even if they are bad. Keep a design diary, writing ideas out gives you more clarity.
6. Define your design principles early on. They are a good reminder for the people we are designing for, and not just merely solving the problem. It might be our day job, but our involvement or lack of it can be anxiety inducing or alleviating.
7. Build interpersonal relationships with your peers and the stakeholders that you work with. This will go a long way, and collaboration is the greatest way to work.
8. Express curiosity but not at the cost of hijacking conversation. Listening is the half of the problem solutioned, just kidding! But do listen, ask questions. 10 second rule, before you talk or ask a question or interrupt somebody. Give yourself at least 10 seconds to think about the approach someone is presenting, to give yourself time to run that in your head, and see how you will approach it differently or not.
9. Welcome critique. Always circle back to know about what impact your work makes.
10. Know yourself first. Aim to become a better human, which will help become a better designer.
11. Be proactive and not reactive. Not all user problems find place in those product roadmaps!
12. Know when to stop. Above all, save and protect your energy.

Switching tracks, I’ve known you for years now and you’re one of the people I absolutely admire for home decor. You also have an Instagram profile for celebrating Sarees. How did you acquire these interests? Tell us more about them.

Home decor happened in the pursuit of “calling it home” when I landed in Bangalore, and found myself getting a beautiful 2 BHK flat for myself, so in a city where I hardly knew anyone I wanted to make it feel like home. I felt it was the right time and the pocket depth for me to start thinking (read indulge) in home decor. And it all comes down to from the manifestations of wishes and desires I had as a teenager and the girl with little income in her early twenties.

GargiDrapes, my saree Instagram account, originated from the sheer boredom from staying at home, having nowhere to go, lacking the opportunities and occasions to flaunt my sarees or the sarees that I inherit from my mother. My mother had been an avid saree collector, and these I consider as real legacy and my kind of inheritance. After she passed away, I felt close to her by celebrating her by wearing her sarees that she left behind. I consciously make an effort to buy sarees that are handloom, and represent the hardworking craft communities of India. Also this fun exercise of acquiring and wearing different kinds of sarees help me gain knowledge about the crafts and handloom all around India, it has been quite insightful and I hope to learn more. And if you are curious, Gargi happens to be my other name, lovingly named by my Dadu.

Do you have other side/personal projects that you keep yourself busy with? Tell us about them and Pillow. How do you think they influence your work ?

I have a couple pet projects that I still have in the ideation phase and in my free time I consult as a design strategist. But in pursuit of creative idleness after a whole week of work, I mostly give myself a break from the screen over the weekend. I catch up on other activities that keep me creatively stimulated.

Pillow is my furry child, she’s a 2.5 yr old Golden Retriever. Pillow is the reason I am more efficient with my time management and priorities, and often reminded to take breaks to go out to take a walk and have play time to unwind.

Having Pillow in my life also allows me to unlock use cases that I would not be aware of if I weren’t a pet parent.

Any plugs you want to put in?

If you want another dog account to follow in life, you can follow Pillow’s shenanigans on Instagram @talkwithpillow

Where are you located now?
Bangalore, I live in the epicentre of all the startups, Koramangala.
Top bookmarks (websites, etc.)
10+ articles from The Ken that I am yet to catch up with, fs.blog. I don’t usually have any websites that I visit apart from blogs/news.
Favourite mobile apps
Google map, I am still in awe of how accessible it has made to travel.
Headspace, love their quality production and those soothing narrations.
Shazam, it lets me quickly find a song that I like. Especially in movies (previously it used to be Pubs and restaurants), and how it is directly connected to Apple music now.
Apple music, for the assortment and availability of music, embedded lyrics, and how well it knows my music taste through machine learning.
Paytm money + INDmoney. I found these apps very useful in investing in mutual funds, keeping a tab on my wealth, and reaching out to professionals like CA, research analysts who can help me with all the noob questions I have.
Where can one find you online?
Twitter: @GangulyAmrita
Favourite reads? What are you reading lately?
Current: Psychology of money
Favourite tracks? What are you listening to lately?
My favourites are anything that A.R. Rahman has touched and Old School Rock, Ramin Djawadi.
And currently (read since last year) have been listening to a lot of regional music, especially Tamil.
Favourite accessories/ gadgets?
Favorite accessories are my simpleton, vintage and vintage-looking watches.
Favourite gadgets would be my iPad and PS4.
Tea or coffee?
Coffee!

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