Industry spotlight • align magazine
Shashank Sahay — Product Designer, WhatsApp
Behind the scenes of his viral blog posts, his journey from a studio to now designing one of the most influential apps of our times
Can you describe your childhood growing up in Patna? How did your background influence the career choices that followed later on in your life?
I wish there was a good story here. My childhood was spent on a lot of activities that weren’t too important. I was bad at studies and average at sports. I don’t remember having any strong ambitions as a kid, all I wanted to do was have a good day, everyday. Pass a day without getting thrown out of class, watch Pokemon, eat good food.
Towards, 7th-8th I developed some interest in Maths, and I started scoring better only in Maths. The fact that I liked Maths as a subject made things almost effortless. I think when you’re working on something you enjoy, you’re genuinely curious to explore it further. Coming from a middle-class family, the only loosely defined motivation I remember was growing up to be able to make good money. But I also kinda knew that I won’t do great at something I did not genuinely enjoy. I believe that’s why I chose to pursue Design as my first job even though I had the option to join another company as a Java Developer for a higher salary. And I’m glad to say that there’s a company out there, that shall remain unnamed, which dodged a bad Java Developer. ✌️
Do you remember that crucial moment when design ‘clicked’ for you, and you wanted to get involved more heavily?
I think it was when I started exploring design a bit more through YouTube videos. When I had started putting together a basic portfolio in 4th year, I started with the notion of design being limited to screens. Slowly as I explored more, I realized that design could ideally be applied to anything and everything around life, things and processes. As I realized that design went way beyond screens and at its core, it’s basically problem solving, is when it started to appeal to me a lot more. I believe that realization motivated me to pursue the career more heavily.
You went on to pursue engineering. 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?
I believe the internet has played a bigger role in shaping my career than college. I started learning Photoshop from YouTube when I was in 11th. Back then I used to edit profile pictures for random people on Orkut and Facebook via the medium of a group on FB. If I knew filters would be so mainstream today, I’d have invested more in the hobby.
Because I was doing some graphic design for the college events on the side and knew my way around Photoshop, it became easier for me to move to UI/UX Design as the tool barrier was almost non-existent.
Being a computer-science engineering student, I did some fair share of coding in college. As a coder, I found myself more interested in logic and algorithms on the backend, than building the interface on the frontend. I think that experience helps me understand systems a little bit better now as a Product Designer. I definitely do not claim to know everything about it, but it helps me connect the dots.
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?
I wish I had some great moments to list down here, but I can’t recall one that specifically pushed me to become who I am today.
As someone who’s lazy, I recall disliking things and processes that were inefficient, like banks, admissions, depositing the college fees, applying for a hostel room and more. Especially applying for a hostel room. In order to do a simple task, I was supposed to pick up a form from the administrative block, get a demand draft, get a signature from the warden in the hostel on the top of the hill (yeah there was a small hill in the campus), get another signature from the warden in the hostel at the bottom of the hill and submit the form back to the administrative block at the top of the hill. It was a cardio session I didn’t sign up for.
From our education system to applying for the hostel room, I have had a good amount of dislike for inefficient systems, and I guess that might have played a small role in helping me grow into who I am today.
Now, tell us about your professional journey. With a career journey starting with Lollypop, then moving to product giants like Microsoft, Flipkart, and now Whatsapp, tell us how you went about choosing these companies and what kind of work you were and are involved in.
Starting out as a designer, I understood that not having formal education could be a barrier. At my first job, I was the only designer in the team and there was only so much I could learn from the internet. In order to diminish the barrier of no formal education, I figured it might be a good idea to work at a place that had only designers. That’s the reason why I joined Lollypop. Some of my peers here had formal education, and some didn’t. Some had studied HCI from reputed colleges like CMU. In some ways, these peers have helped me replace what formal education might have taught me. There’s plenty I’ve learnt from their guidance and by simply observing them and their work.
Reality check, design studios aren’t the best payers in the industry. Also, you don’t really get a chance to see how the users reacted to the designs once you hand it off to the clients. To fulfil these gaps, it made sense to join a product company. A friend of mine, Adithya Jayan, referred me to Microsoft Teams. It definitely was a dream job moment and I owe a lot to this job in order to set me up on my current career path. About the product, what really excited me was that Teams was an international product with around 125 million DAUs at the time.
I consider Microsoft to be a turning point in my career. As a noob in the industry, most of us don’t really know how we’re supposed to be treated, what’s fair for your employer to demand out of you, and what’s not. Most of the freshers are exploited and I think that’s true for a lot of industries. Microsoft gave me the confidence to draw the line between what’s right and wrong in the workplace setup. It felt great to be working with peers and managers who trusted you.
Moving forward, I wanted to try out my hand at the consumer side of things as the consumer market’s generally more volatile, there’s cut-throat competition and very little loyalty. Flipkart seemed to be the perfect choice for two reasons — their user base, and their interest in the new internet users. I had a great time at Flipkart and I got plenty to learn, through work, and through my peers. I like things to be a little fast, and Flipkart provided me with a good balance of speed, depth and volume of work. I worked on some of my most enjoyable projects at Flipkart.
The opportunity at WhatsApp came to me as an email on my junk email id. A recruiter reached out to me and it was only an accident that I spotted it. WhatsApp has been a dream product of mine for a really long time. The scale, the intentionality behind the product, and the integral part it has become of most of our lives, all that motivated me to join WhatsApp.
Can you tell us a bit more about your current role at Whatsapp? What does your day-to-day look like?
I work as a Product Designer on the Individual Contributor (IC) track at WhatsApp. My days are spent on a bunch of different kinds of work, with some occasional chilling sessions with the team. The different kinds of work right now include, brainstorming with the PM, partnering with Researchers to conduct workshops and enabling them to carry out user studies by building prototypes, my work also includes making design explorations, decks, and presenting them in bigger forums including PMs, Engineers, Researchers and Data Scientists for feedback. Being new to the team, a good chunk of my days are often spent on reading documents, research findings, and going through Figma files, in order to build relevant context.
You’re one of the few folks I know who published great case studies and “guide” blog posts. What was your motivation? Can you get us a sneak-peek on the process? How has those helped you in your career?
Most of my blogs were discussions before they were blogs. Thankfully, I’ve made some great friends along the way who are generally up for such discussions. Discussions help in observing a topic from different perspectives, and that’s kind of essential because you don’t want to be biased when approaching a subject.
With time, I also developed an affinity towards systems and frameworks. And now via most of my articles, I try to deliver an actionable framework that might come in handy to anyone dealing with the problem. The goal is to end up in the reader’s bookmarks.
The process starts with a rough draft. I try to write about the topic to a certain level of completion. Enough for someone to read and understand what I’m trying to achieve with it. I generally take a lot of time to find a good narrative for a topic. Sometimes I take notes as they occur to me, sometimes I iterate on a narrative to refine it. Some of the narratives never make it, as they don’t feel strong enough. A lot of topics don’t reach completion as well. Given below is a deleted part from the recent article I wrote about Search.
It goes through a lot of revisions that I myself do. I highlight areas which I feel are too complex. Getting an additional pair of unbiased eyes (which is Prerna Pradeep most of the time) helps in spotting bad structure, and complex pieces from the draft.
After a few iterations refining the draft, I involve 1–2 more people to review it. This helps in getting an idea on the quality of narrative and spotting the complex parts that still remain.
Then I start working on the visuals. A lot of times when explaining complex topics, visuals relieve the reader’s load of imagining things and carrying the context forward with every step. I also enjoy working on communicating complex topics visually.
Once the article is complete with visuals and revisions, I involve 1–2 more people to take their feedback on the writing and the visuals. I think involving so many people brings forward a lot of perspectives. Some people like skimming through an article, some read it word by word, some look at the structure, some look at the grammar, some look at the visuals. And then publish!
Writing has helped me a lot. I’m not a very structured thinker, as of now. But once I put my thoughts down in a place, it becomes easier for me to structure them. These articles have played a huge role in helping me improve how I think. I believe that I think much more clearly compared to 3 years ago, but there’s definitely a long way ahead. Another thing about writing is that articles have a longer lifetime compared to Dribbble shots or tweet threads. These articles have often led me to connect with like-minded people and also recruiters with relevant opportunities. So that’s definitely helpful.
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 think it’s kind of essential for a designer to be able to wear different hats in any organization. But it’s also essential that as a designer, you’re happy with the things you need to deliver or do. Some level of compromise is good, because otherwise nobody would ever get any work done, but always bending just to satisfy the needs of the company might be asking for too much. After all, it’s a job.
Sometimes it’s okay to stretch yourself a little bit because you need to push a feature out live tomorrow morning and devs need you to help them get the design right. But sometimes it’s also essential to say “no” to unrealistic deadlines. I’d say it’s very context-dependent, and also a very personal matter. As a bachelor, I might be able to stretch myself more than someone who has a family to look after. Personally, if I see learning or growth in stretching myself within a limit to live up to expectations, I don’t mind doing that. But if I feel it’s not really something I’d be happy to be involved in, I try to push back.
I feel staying up-to-date is pretty difficult, both, internally and externally. There’s a ton of information out there to stay up-to-date with and it’s obvious that nobody can cover 100% of the ground. I try to consume information on a need-to-know basis, instead of consuming anything and everything. It works for me both internally and externally. Identifying an area or topics to focus makes it easier to stay up-to-date. I also use the Chrome bookmarks to save the information in a categorized manner that I might need to access, so that helps me find things when I need to.
I know it’s typically a hard one, but any favourite projects that are close to you?
During my time at Flipkart, I worked on Search. Up until now, it’s been my favorite domain. The whole problem space is so volatile. In one of the projects we tried to define a conceptual framework that would define how to pre-emptively solve for problems that might come up in the Search space for Flipkart. Under this conceptual framework were a lot of smaller frameworks that would define how certain parts of the search solutions could manifest. It took me and the PM about 1.5 months to land the first version of the framework. We also tested it with some of the newer problem statements and it worked. The validation that a space so volatile could also be structured was more than enough to make it my favorite project.
Another favorite project of mine is FarmRise. An android app for farmers to aid their production-to-market journey for crops. Worked on it when I was at Lollypop. It led me to explore the domain of designing for new internet users, which was super interesting. The project won a bunch of design awards as well.
How have you grown as a person, as a designer over the last few years? What advice did you find most and least useful along the way?
Oh yes, definitely! But as the popular quote goes, “the more I know, the more I know I don’t know”.
As a person, I’m calmer, more focused and more structured in my thoughts than before. It took a lot of mental training to not jump to solutions the moment I saw a problem. I understood the value and importance of context. I find it much easier to empathize with my peers today than I did earlier, which helps me bring their point of view into my perspective a little more than earlier.
As a designer, my recent work has helped me realize my affinity towards systems and frameworks, which has been one of the biggest additions to my skill set. It helps me take a first-principle’s approach towards most problems. Apart from that, I’ve learned a good amount about the goodness of documentation and presentation. Hoping to learn and grow further in the coming years. 🤞
The most useful advice — Everything you do or touch, will always have your name on it, be it a Figma file, a design deck, or a PRD. You define how you’re perceived.
The least useful advice — You need to get out of your comfort zone in order to grow.
What do you think is the biggest motivation for designers in the current wave of product orgs. to go the extra mile and produce their best work?
I think recognition plays a huge role in motivating designers. Recognition within and outside the organization. Apart from that, the opportunity to do interesting work and learn, better pay, and probably a reach to better opportunities.
How do you balance the pursuit of maximum productivity with the need for creative idleness?
I think it’s a very personal process. I’m one of the most unstructured workers in the circles I know of. Most of my coworkers would call me the least busy person on the floor. That’s because I find myself unable to sit at one place for a long time. I tend to move around, chit chat, take a break, but I don’t let that affect my deliverables or my quality of work (I try my best). It took me time, but slowly I was able to understand my work style, and that could be different for everyone. Some people prefer sitting in the quiet room for hours at a stretch to get their work done, some people can manage a long duration of focused work, unfortunately I can’t (or haven’t been able to yet). I can manage 1 or 1.5 hours of focused work at a time, but during this time I try to get as much done as possible. The reason why I am able to push the work in a shorter amount of time is because even when I’m not working hands-on, I continue to think of it in the back of my head while I carry on with chit-chat and other activities. Once you’ve broken down the problems, scoped out the possibilities, and simulated the scenarios in your head, the execution becomes much easier. The procrastination gives me enough creative idleness to diverge and explore solutions in my head or on paper, and the execution is where I can achieve maximum productivity.
I honestly can’t comment if it’s a good way to go about this or bad, but it’s a hack that works for me. I think understanding one’s work style would be key to defining a process around this.
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 practice and enforce good design practically?
I try and keep my files clean and maintain different pages for iterations. I follow a naming convention for artboards that goes like “A1. Homepage”, “A1.1 Homepage — with X widget”, then “B1. Search & Browse”, “B1.1 Search & Browse — with Filters”… This helps me maintain a good order of the artboards, and if I ever need to insert an artboard in the middle, I can do a “B1.1.1”.
I maintain some key documents for my projects — a running doc for designs and a running doc for M.O.M.s. Overall put together these would help me document the history of the project at any time. Apart from this, I make a final design deck for every project in order to present it in the CRITs for review. It also acts as the single source of truth for everyone involved in the project, PMs, engineers, data scientists. In the long run, I can use this deck with minimal changes as a case study on my portfolio. So that saves a lot of time.
I also tried to bring some structure to note-taking at Flipkart in critiques. On the notes, I would classify every point under #OpenPoint, #ClosedPoint, and #ActionItems, depending on the discussion that followed. Though notes remain in the chronological order, it makes the life of the reader a little easier in finding (cmd/ctrl + F) the things they need to work on.
What’s your take on the Indian product design community? What do you think are the goods and areas for improvement? Since you’ve been part of both Indian and global companies, do you have a point of view on how the communities differ?
The Indian product design community is tightly knit. Almost everyone knows everyone. People often share knowledge and organize events to socialize and catch up, which is great. There are some people who truly believe in sharing knowledge that they’ve learned the hard way, so that others might not have to work as hard.
For an area of improvement, I believe, we as a community need to be more transparent about a few things such as salaries, competencies, and promotions.
Having worked at Indian and global companies, I feel the global communities are a little more open, trusting and transparent, compared to the Indian communities. Especially the lack of transparency leads to bad pay structures in India. The seniors have a bigger role to play here than the juniors.
However, my experience in global communities has only been with some of the giants, which supposedly maintain better standards. I am not as organically in touch with the global community, as I’m with the Indian community. Hence, my experience might be biased and the global communities might also have similar issues.
What skills would you ideally want every product designer to have?
Humility.
What advice would you give a 1–2 years experienced product designer on growing in their career?
Though technical skills are important, they’re easier to learn. Interpersonal skills like convincing your stakeholders, aligning a room to something, persuasion, presentation, empathizing with peers, collaborating with them, respecting them, listening actively, are much more difficult to embody and can take you a long way. The people around you can play a huge role in your career and personal growth. Definitely take time out and hone your skills, but in the long run, your attitude would matter more than your skills.
Also, take some time to understand yourself and your affinities. Products, projects, problems that you’re naturally drawn towards. What works for someone else, might not work for you. Understanding yourself is key to crafting your way towards moving forward.
Switching tracks, I’ve known you for some time now. I know you occasionally get your hands dirty with photography, meet-ups, and more. How did you acquire these interests? Tell us more about them.
I’ve wanted to do a lot of things, but unfortunately haven’t been able to pursue most of them actively.
Organizing meetups is just a way for me to socialize in a manner that’s fruitful to a bigger group, not just me. I try to keep them small enough so everyone can get enough face time with others and the guest. It often sparks interesting discussions, and also helps me learn a little bit from others’ experiences.
I am still trying to learn photography. I’ve tried my hands on landscape and portraits, still a lot to explore and learn there. These days I’m trying my hands on street, architecture and urban photography. I’ve been wanting to learn cinematography for a very long time, hoping I’ll be able to kick that off soon. You can have a look at some of my photographs at https://www.instagram.com/shashanksahay/.
Do you have other side/personal projects that you keep yourself busy with? How do you think they influence your work?
I do have a few side projects. One is the Feature Breakdown series which is a series of blogs, where I breakdown some popular features. Another side project is Indians Who Design, that we’re trying to grow slowly. Trying to figure out my next side project.
They definitely help a lot. These projects allow me to collaborate with people I might not get a chance to collaborate otherwise. They also help build confidence, in the sense of understanding what I can pull off without an organization behind me.
Where are you located now?
London, UKTop bookmarks (websites, etc.)
https://mobbin.design/
https://pttrns.com/
https://lawsofux.com/Favourite mobile apps
OneFootballWhere can one find you online?
Twitter — https://twitter.com/shashanksahayy
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/shashanksahayy/Favourite reads? What are you reading lately?
Harry Potter, the entire series. Not very big on reading. The last book I read was “Psychology of Money”. Great read.Favourite tracks? What are you listening to lately?
Justice League Snyder Cut Soundtracks. Current fav — At the Speed of ForceFavourite accessories/ gadgets?
PlayStation 5Tea or coffee?
Thums Up/Coke
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