Transformative moments that propelled my product design career

In celebration of five years at Zalando, Principal Product Designer Joydeep Sengupta shares some of the influential learnings that made him a go-to team member.

So much can be achieved in five years at a single company. At Zalando, you will likely have experienced different roles and teams, cultivating design expertise, relationships, and business knowledge. Your rich experience will have made you a trusted talent, opening opportunities for you to influence the direction of both the organization and your team members. You’ll look back on multiple milestones: accomplishing ambitious goals, engaging in key collaborations, receiving game-changing advice, solving challenging problems, and developing beneficial new practices or systems.

Joydeep Sengupta’s half-decade at Zalando is full of such moments. “It’s been a roller coaster ride,” he beams, “challenging and a lot of fun.” When he moved to Berlin in 2017, he heard good things about our community, and our engaging interview process confirmed his desire to join us. Joydeep started as a Senior Product Designer in our Purchase and Post-Purchase team, focusing on creating a seamless checkout, payment, delivery, and return experience. In 2020, he moved over to Product & Category Experience, ensuring customers purchase what they love with confidence. A year later, he was promoted to Principal Product Designer in the same team, creating further business impact with his highly data-driven approach.

How did Joydeep become a trusted designer for some of our most important projects? We look back on a few breakthrough moments that shaped his Zalando career.

A matter of perspective

Most projects begin with an element of ambiguity — whether we need to gather more knowledge, find alignment with stakeholders, or test our assumptions. How well we navigate that ambiguity shows product design maturity. To promote clarity in one of his early Zalando projects, Joydeep recognized the power of shifting perspective. “Due to differing views across functions, it was hard for us to reach a decision,” he explains. “Two teammates and I decided we needed to align our goals in order to always act on solid research findings before personal opinion. It ladders up to one of Zalando’s founding principles on customer focus: Put purpose first, ego second.”

Applying findings from previous projects, Joydeep and his colleagues devised six design principles, which became their fail-safe against assumptions. Crucially, this product philosophy helped the team to find faster alignment and make better-informed decisions. “Since the design principles were reviewed and signed off by all the stakeholders, we could find a unified voice on what we wanted to include in the customer experience. Our communication became much clearer; we replaced speculative phrases like ‘we believe’ or ‘we think’ with ‘our design principles say.’”

To establish this approach as a best practice throughout our community, Joydeep presented a deep dive into the design principles in our monthly knowledge-sharing ritual, the Campfire. “In the years since that project, I can’t tell you how many times I have repeated those principles! It has confirmed how essential design principles are in guiding and evaluating our work.”

Deep diving into data

One of the things that makes product design so exciting is that it’s constantly evolving. “Over the course of my 16-year career, design has become much more scientific. My role has evolved accordingly. In the mid-2000s, the focus was on fine detail. Nowadays, the craft of the designer is the big picture.” Research was already informing Joydeep’s work when he joined Zalando, but the highly data-driven area of Purchase & Post-Purchase required him to push his knowledge to the next level.

“Data is a hallmark of a mature product organization. At Zalando, we don’t only design for emotions but also behavior. The best design decisions are based on qualitative and quantitative insights. At the start of my Zalando career, I wasn’t sure whether I should be responsible for data analysis as a designer. After all, many teams have embedded Applied Scientists and User Researchers. My manager helped me to see the value for design: harnessing data helps us to understand the customer better.”

Joydeep started looking at patterns in product analytics data, which helped him to prioritize features and products. “When approaching a brief, I used to start with the ‘why.’ Since familiarizing myself with data, I ask, ‘why and how many customers are facing this problem?’ This mindset helps me to put a value on my design and decide which problems will have the largest customer impact. It has greatly influenced my work, and streamlined collaborations with stakeholders, particularly Product Managers.”

Shooting for Principal

Joydeep is always striving to progress, and the introduction of our Principal Product Designer role presented a great opportunity to further develop his craft. “My first line manager at Zalando had very high standards, so I worked hard to prove my abilities by taking on some Principal responsibilities. Having observed the journey of Clementine Jinhee Declercq, the first product designer to reach the Principal level at Zalando, I understood the paths I needed to grow into that role. When I transitioned to my current team, my new manager immediately recognized the value I was bringing in and helped me work toward a successful promotion. It was a great breakthrough moment.”

Joydeep took the initiative to gather evidence of how he had grown into the role — including project documents, collaborations with Product Managers, and AB testing outcomes. “To make it tangible, I listed the impact I had made in different projects. Many of the esteemed stakeholders I had worked with also presented evidence of my achievements. I proved that I had not only worked at a high level and contributed to our design culture, but also made a significant business impact. With all of this in place, the promotion decision was positive. I could soon start putting the expertise I had built up into higher-level practice, driving key initiatives within my new team.”

Fueled by trust

Joydeep’s proactive approach, data expertise, and close connections to Product Managers made him a great fit for a major project in the Product & Category Experience team. “The beauty sample project was very complex, and involved many stakeholders and teams. Despite being new to the team, my manager trusted me to be the lead designer. From data analysis, we could prioritize or deprioritize features to bring in. I created some new designs to introduce free samples at the checkout. When I proposed them to the Project Managers, they already trusted my expertise and product knowledge — about checkout restrictions, for example. As a result, we required fewer design iterations, and the process was much faster.”

A career culmination

Data-driven design and stakeholder management are the two skill spikes for which Joydeep is known at Zalando. As the product design industry evolves and complexifies, they are also two of the most in-demand skills for designers. Joydeep’s rich experience in these areas made him the go-to talent for a key recent project: Project Omnibus. The challenging brief was to redesign our product cards to reflect the European Union’s new rules on how to disclose price discounts, benefitting both business goals and the customer experience.

“Project Omnibus was where the expertise I had built up over my Zalando career culminated. The greatest challenge, aside from time pressure, was the unprecedented collaboration between the design, legal, and commerce teams. The whole approach was quite different. Instead of optimizing positive business impact — as would usually be the case in collaborations with Product Managers or Engineering Managers — the project aimed to minimize potential negative business impact. Quantitative research was the ideal approach, ruling out any ‘we believe’ statements from our decision-making process. We grounded our negotiations with stakeholders on user behavior rather than guesswork. I can’t emphasize enough how my change to a numbers-driven mindset influenced the success of this project. The data never lies.”

Keen to find out how Joydeep leveraged quantitative research to drive faster design outcomes in Project Omnibus? Click here to read about his learnings.