Satyam Kantamneni
Leveraging the Business Value of Design
In this episode of Brave UX, Satyam Kantamneni shares how he articulates the value of design 💸, why design is a profession and not a skill 👩🏾💻, and why there’s no such thing as a UX/UI designer 🦄.
Highlights include:
- Why does the profession of design find itself in crisis?
- What surprises you about design leaders’ understanding of business value?
- What is the difference between design as a skill and design as a profession?
- Why do you want to be in the pain killer and not vitamin business?
- How do you encourage senior leaders to separate fact from assumption?
Who is Satyam Kantamneni?
Satyam is the Managing Partner and Chief eXperience Officer at UXReactor, the fastest growing specialised UX design firm in the United States 📈, where he leads a global team that helps large and complex B2B enterprises to become truly user-centred innovators.
Before co-founding UXReactor in 2015, Satyam was the managing director of user experience and design at Citrix. In his six years there, Satyam went from being the first designer, to growing and leading a UX and design team of over 50 people 🚀.
Satyam has also previously been a user experience manager at PayPal, where he managed a global team and was responsible for establishing the company’s India Design Centre 🇮🇳, which grew to over 30 people by the time he left.
The author of “User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth” 📘, published in 2022 by Wiley, Satyam is on a mission to raise the profile, depth of understanding and appreciation that business people have for design.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Satyam Kantamneni. Satyam is the managing partner and chief experience officer at UX Reactor, the fastest growing specialized UX design firm in the United States.
- At UX Reactor, Satyam leads a global team that helps large and complex B2B enterprises to become truly user-centered innovators through design partnership.
- Before co-founding UX reactor in 2015, Satyam was the managing director of user experience and design at Citrix. In his six years there, Satyam went from being the first designer to growing and leading a UX and design team of over 50 people.
- Satyam has also previously been a user experience manager at PayPal where he managed a global team and was responsible for establishing the company's India design center, which grew to over 30 people by the time he left Cisco.
- The author of User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth, published in 2022 by Wiley, Satyam is on a mission to raise the profile depth of understanding and appreciation that business people have for design.
- Satyam is one of those rare people who can actually do that with over 15 years of experience working and managing corporate design teams supported by degrees in electrical engineering and human factors, and also an executive MBA from Harvard.
- It's this combination that undoubtedly gives Satyam a multifaceted and widely relatable perspective on the value of design. One that has been sought out and shared on stages provided by organizations like Google Design, the Silicon Valley Product Management Association and UXPA International.
- And now, Satyam is here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Satyam, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Thank you Brendan. It's a privilege being here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's wonderful to have you here Satyam, and one of the things that I learned about you when I was preparing for today is that you grew up in India and you grew up as a self-described military kid, and this I believe has shaped some of your thinking, undoubtedly on life but also on design. But before we get into design, just set the scene for me. What did the life of a military kid look like?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think it was fascinating and I think in hindsight probably has defined a lot of who I am. If you really look at the persona of a military kid, they move every three years from a school, a state, a location. They leave friends behind, they are adapting to new cultures, new languages. So those of you who haven't been to India, every state can have a new language. Every state can have its own style and culture and they are 30 or at little less than 30 states right now. So it was fascinating. I think every three years was the adaptable team was built in making new friends, was built in understanding new cultures, was built in learning, new languages was built in. So there was a lot of those things that came together While the one thing that was very common was the ethos of a common purpose and a mission for all military officers or soldiers that had, and then you see a lot of different diversity coming in.
- So I've always been a fan of sports teams and military science as if I call it, where you see a lot of disparate people from different backgrounds come together with a common purpose and then achieved a great heights. Again, that's kind of shaped a lot of who I am. Grew up studying a lot of military history and now a big student of military science. And interestingly, my whole aim in my life was to become an army officer in the Indian military where I had my dad and two uncles all as officers. And so I would've been a second generation officer, but I was colorblind. So I picked the profession where color blind people goes. I picked design, I say that with the tongue in cheek, but it's fascinating and then changed my path and I learned to pivot as always and then make a different path.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That realization or the assessment. When you sounded like you were looking to join the military and found out that you were colorblind, just how confronting was that moment for you? Was this a path that you were a hundred percent heart set on and it was a wild shock to the system or were you able to roll fairly easily with that bad news?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think it was the closest to a wild shark I would say, because as a young kid, that's all you prepare for. That's what you learn, that's what you read. Yeah. And in fact, I used to compete in shooting, so in my specific division, I actually grew, took a all India gold medal in shooting. So I actually was so prepped in the ethos of, so I joined the junior R O T C, I was actually all in the process, so those of you don't know that and the Indian, it's called the National C Corps. So you join military training early on in your schooling. And so it was fascinating in a lot of that space. But then it seemed like I just hit a wall because all my friends were planning for that and my environment was that. And so it took a little bit to kind of readjust, I would say. And a good friend helped me of mine who actually did as a very successful Air Force pilot now shared something. He said, Hey, it's a mindset more than it's a service. And I kind of kept true to that. And I said, it's a mindset of being a soldier, of taking a purpose and doing everything you can do to on that purpose. And I've always treated it that way. And then that has advised has stood by me til date.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And just for some edited context for me, just how old were you when you found this out?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I probably was 16 years old, so right around my family years of high school and normally in 18 is when you joined the academy. And so that kind of was where you had to readjust and I said, what am I going to do? So I said, okay, I'm going to go into a professional degree and then studied engineering and which also was a very interesting journey for me because the pivot wasn't completely done in my mind and I was like, why am I doing engineering? I never wanted to do engineering and both graduated bottom of my class. So that's basically was where engineering left me and I realized that as an electronics engineer, somebody put a gun to my head and said, would you design a chip? Said, I would say, shoot me. That's okay. But that's kind of when I realized that hey, I appreciated more human-centric practices.
- Theory wasn't what it was. And that's kind of one thing in the military, they always say, you know, need the field is what teaches you the service, how to be a leader, how to be a, and that's kind of where I came into the field and I was very, very, very fortunate enough to have both of those, my military background as well as my intention to do something more humane or human, actually not probably the right word. When I got to my grad school program where actually was working on a project by the A Force research laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, and I was doing human factors research, so it kind of both those worlds collided and I obviously graduated top of my class there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what a remarkable difference it makes when people are invested in what it is that they're doing and they can truly connect with it. Clearly the difference between graduating last and engineering and first and human factors is illustrated by that. For you, Satyam of your move to the US happened I believe, not long after you finished your engineering degree in Haida aba and as you were talking about there, you studied human factors. Obviously coming to the US didn't sound like it was always part of the plan, but it became quite an important part of your story. How did the conversation go with your parents when you wanted to move literally halfway around the world? Was this something that they really encouraged you to do or was there some hesitation there from them?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think they were very supportive of it and I think partially because my brother was already here and then he actually is a co-founder of UX Reactor. He's a researcher about training. He's the one who actually did double majors in computer science and human factors. So he's the one who shared about human factors and I had no idea what human factors was or the difference between human factors and human resources was. But then when I came in here and I started exploring the line of that work, so that obviously was a very different story for me, I would say an environment is such a crucial part for anyone's success. And I say that even in the context of organizations that are trying to be user-centric, but in my case, educational environment in the United States is so much more forgiving if people kind of adjust their line of research majors, et cetera.
- So fortunately India was, Indian education system is not as forgiving in that way. So again, coming to America from where I was and studying in a university where it was a multidisciplinary program which allowed an electronics engineer to kind of transition into a HCI pro human factors program and kind of do these things that are much more multidisciplinary. I took courses in computer science psychology, I took courses in design and innovation. So there was just fascinating on how that all kind of connected and that also kind of defined who I am and how I look at building teams today I'm a big fan of the philosophy of being a polymath and where you start connecting dots from different places. But again, to your question, for me to make that shift was probably the only viable option. And again, remember when I came here, it was.com boom, I landed here and then a year later of the.com bust and there was no real UX jobs then there was was human factors job, which was predominantly military. And then as a non and US citizen, the military jobs were all gone. You couldn't apply to them. But again, it was just keeping true to hey, you only need one job and you need to kind of adjust to that. I still remember I sent out 900 resumes in 30 days. I had run it like a system and I got my first job and then have never seen behind after that or looked behind
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Bit of military precision applied to that quest of getting a job. It sounds like you mentioned that your brother is a co-founder of UX Reactor and I believe his prad. That's
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. So Prad, he and you obviously work very closely together, literally you're in business together, you're also brothers that perhaps comes with its own set of things to navigate in a commercial setting. But I'm curious about him because you mentioned that he had come to the US and he was already engaged in Compsci and he was studying human factors. Now it seems to me from the outside looking in that this is not really a coincidence and perhaps that you have quite a close relationship and you're of a similar mind. Is that a fair and unfair way to characterize your relationship?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think it's a very fair way of doing it and both of us, in fact, one of the things is actually fascinating. So we both agreed on a lot of things. We both saw the world a lot of similar ways. But again, the thing is we are still two different people. There's two different intentions and two different perspectives that each one gets excited about. So he today runs our academy and one of the things is again, coming back to the military world, when I started UX reactor, I said the philosophy of looking for a polymath, the philosophy of looking for people that are multidisciplinary today, for example at UX Reactor across all our teammates, we have 21 different educational backgrounds. We have fashion designers, electronics engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial engineer, industrial designers. So there's a lot of different backgrounds to just name a few accounting majors.
- But then the philosophy that came comes in as they all come together with a common human-centered mindset and then we groom them and they have to be selected to a process of selection. They have to be groomed. So Prad actually was the guy who actually really get excited about talent and grooming. So he did two years of stint and rural innovation in India where he left. He was here in the valley for the longest while then while he studied that, he said there's a way to groom, pick and groom the right people. Now if you look at militaries, they always look for people with aptitude and attitude and give them the skills and when they drill them enough that they actually can be a fighting force. And that's the same philosophy that we brought together. He ran the academy, I ran the consulting side and obviously it is where it is today. But then we realized that we are only building a small design team for just UX reactor. That's about eight to 10 people a year, but the world needs way more. So then we said, Hey, how about generating a thousand designers a year? And that's what prats now focused on with his end of work called college. So we both are very intertwined. In fact, he's right now going through his EEC M B A program at Harvard too as we speak. So it's all a parts are connecting in a lot of different ways.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's go into that program or let's actually set the stage a little earlier on than that. Let's go back to 2013. And you found yourself, I believe working at Citrix and wondering after spending eight years in design management, just what was next for you? What was the next challenge you were going to get yourself into? And you had, I believe you were tossing up general management at that stage and wondering if that might be the right thing for you if you cast your mind back to that period in time, what was it eight years into design management in a leadership position there? What was it that wasn't quite sitting right for you?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think there was a few things that were not sitting right for me. And as I look back at it, I had 10 years, four years at PayPal and six years at Citrix where had a lot to show from a vanity perspective, titles, money, team sizes, but very little to show as impact. So I call it my lost decade. So right around that final that the three years before or two years before it was truly lost as I call it. I was thinking what next? This is not fulfilling and fulfilling in a lot of ways because I'll give you an example. I was running the centralized design group at Citrix, five different general managers that I was supporting all the way from product lines that are multi-billion dollars in revenue to product lines, which were just about starting. The largest product line that I was supporting at that point in the six years was there had four different general managers.
- Every general manager that came in was design, enlightened but not designed, prioritized. And what I say is they got design, they understood, hey, design is big. If you see apples, you see the impact of, but they're not really prioritizing that in their impact. In fact, one of the general managers had told me sat, why would I invest in design when I can get a dollar in sales will give me $10 back? And he said, so his literal question was like, I can put in more in sales and I'll get 10 back. And I couldn't really articulate back to him that design would give him a hundred or 50 or even $2 as a matter of fact. So for me it was like what the heck? I mean I'm just sitting here and those who want to get design will do design those who don't. And then I look back internally, again, no offense meant to the team, but the team itself was very happy kind of delivering on a roadmap.
- Product managers would define the roadmap and designers would design around it. Everybody seemed to be happy where they are except for me. And then that's when I also went to business school and I said, okay, maybe design is not what it is. I aspire to be a CEO E o, so I want to go on the product path. I want to lead. I see more product managers being CEOs and then fewer design leaders being CEOs. So I'm in a business school saying that go let me learn other skills than the functional skills of leading design. And that was a fascinating experience because I was sitting with our a hundred plus execs from different companies. Some had maybe a few hundred dollars and budgets to a few who had multi-billion dollars in annual budgets. And you're sitting down with them and you're talking to them and you see the problems that they're discussing are all design problems.
- They don't know where to invest, they don't know how to experiment. They want to innovate. They look at digitization as a big cornerstone for moving things forward, but they just don't think about what we do as understanding our human-centered design as a technique or a method because they don't even know who to call because there's no degree in human-centered program design. So I came back like saying, Hey, there's a lot of business problems out there that need design as a accelerator. And I said, I want to double down on design. I'm not going to go into any other field than the field that I have spent so much time in. And then I traded a couple more years at Citrix before I decided that maybe the shift has to be from outside. And then UX reactor was my experiment to go at that problem.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand that when you first got back after finishing the Harvard program that you had a series of conversations with other senior design leaders about whether or not they had p and l responsibility and the conversation that came back from them surprised you somewhat. What was it about their responses that surprised you? See, I
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Think, and this is true with even today, so I ask a lot of design leaders and in fact even business leaders, I ask design leaders the question, Hey, what impact are you driving in your organization? And the most important or the most frequent answer that I get is, Hey, I delivered on time and I delivered all these releases and we are be designed on these releases. And my point is, good, you did that, but can you ever tell me how have you improved the experience of a certain user? How have you improved the business of a certain division? And they say, I don't control that because the PMs tell me what to do. And I'm like, who chose the factor that the PMs tell you what to do? And then the answer is, many times on this other side, I look at business leaders and I say, why don't you have design in this conversation?
- And they're like, I don't know how, I mean they are very T they in their mind it's like hiring architect to build a building versus hiring a painter to paint that building. Unfortunately the profession has become the painter more so than actually the architect. The architects are still engineers in a technology world, the architects still are product managers, the architects still are the senior leaders. And unfortunately because you are being painted into that painter, no pun intended, coroner, it's very hard for people to walk out and saying, Hey, I I'm painting for nothing. I actually should not even paint this room. Shouldn't even be here. But then to ask those questions, you need the right team around you. You need the right processor around you. And then when you don't have the team or the process, you kind of end up at the same place, which is like, hey, you just don't have the weapons to fight this war, so might as well not fight it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost as of what you are articulating there. There's likely, there's more complexity to what I'm about to say in reality, but it's almost as if what you're saying is that our gays, our perspective, our belief in ourselves, our acceptance of certain constraints is actually putting our field into somewhat of a crisis where other areas of businesses aren't really seeing us at the level of that architect. They're only seeing us as those painters.
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Absolutely, absolutely. Again, think about a bootcamp I'll just give you, and this is something I talk about a lot, go look at any product management group bootcamp out there, and these are camps. Again, there's a different topic all about boot camps and how good or bad they are. But someone says that I can make you a product manager and I'm going to teach you user research, I'm going to teach you wireframing, I'm going to teach a high level usability testing or user research and that's it. So basically you know, have disempowered suddenly taken skills which are typically defined for a designer is now defined for a product manager. On the flip side, you look at an front-end engineer, they actually are defining the css, they're defining the design system, they are defining a lot of the new nuances there. So you're again taking away power.
- So this is a profession that on a craft level is getting impacted on both sides. Now that's kind of what's happening on the ground, but let's forget all that. I'll give you paint a different picture for you right now. And the picture is who in the organization can talk to users, define the problem or frame the problem, prototype that solution, and then take it back to users? And oftentimes it's when you start looking at these skills, it's actually ends up at someone who's in a design line, a free area of work. You can run rapid experiments, you can prototype a lot of things. But when you start looking at that, if I'd asked that same question about a hundred years back, that's the definition of an innovative is design teams becoming innovators? Absolutely not. Right? Is design team has become crafts peoples. I call the small D design in my book, but the big D design is what the orgs are actually willing to pay for.
- They are looking and talking about how do we experiment, how do we evolve, what do we adjust? What are the pain points? And then you start looking at the other side. I talk about this, let's be more tactically, and I say this in the organization, design of a culture. Like pick any five people in a company randomly and then ask them these four questions. Who's the top users for that? The company cares about what are the top pain points? What are you doing about those pain points and how do you know you're going to measure that you're made an impact? Ask those five people and then you'll see that if all five say the same thing and they're consistent and they're accurate, you have a highly user-centered organization. Now what happens is most people would say different things. Now who owns that data? The design team, the researchers are the ones who own that data.
- They're giving that data, they're the ones who need to propagate and project that in the whole organization. So the empathy of the organization increases. This is where you start seeing the misfires of the process and the leadership. Every leader out there, every business leader out there wants to grow. They and how do you grow? You grow by knowing your customer. You're increasing your adoption, your attention, your satisfaction, the efficiency engagement. These are the metrics that business leaders care about. They want to go off the new markets. I mean as a user researcher, you can study all the unintended ways your product is being used and you can discuss three or four different markets that you can go after. All right? And these are nuances that kind of are lost in this line of work and therefore we just don't get to that achievement where I talked about, hey, multi multibillion dollars of investment just goes down the drain.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There are so many different pathways that we could go down here. I want to go down this pathway you've spoken of in the past that in Silicon Valley there's a bit of a bubble as far as the understanding of an appreciation of design and that outside of the valley many business leaders are still trying to figure out exactly what design is and how design can be applied and who the right people are to bring into their organizations to help them to do that. So how for the people that are outside of the valley, so the people that are listening to this that don't necessarily work in a really mature design organization, how does that reality change the nature of the type of conversation that they need to have with other leaders in their businesses in order to help those leaders to understand the untapped potential that exists in the building currently? See,
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think I have a fundamental philosophy there and the philosophy is we can try to explain what we do as much as we want. People won't get it, we need to show it to them. And I think the show comes from a lot of angles and as I teach the next generation of designers and researchers, I often say there's an awesome Hollywood movie called zero 30. Again, it's a military movie. It talks about how it's a movie. I would call that around how they took down Osama Bin Laden in as a military ops. And I say the person in that movie that actually gets the least amount. Everyone talks about how they went into a foreign country and how they kind of ran an operation and came out fairly successful. But the person in there who actually gets the least amount in comparison of a visibility is the intelligence analyst.
- It's a lady in this case, somebody who actually was much more junior, looks at the data, says that there's something going on here and then is willing to put her neck out there and say there's something going on here. And then finally it kind of moves up the chain of command and then some people realize there is something going on there. A lot of times designers and researchers are very similar in a profession that we have to stick our neck out there. And it only comes when you truly are committed to the vision of like, Hey, I'm going to make people's life easier. Every user has pain points and has opportunities. Now what do you do about it? How do you track it? If you're being user-centered, that means you're talking to them, you're empathizing with them, you're observing them, you understand where the pain points are.
- And once the pain points then you can rapidly iterate on it. The prototyping tools are dime a dozen. You can then take it up the chain of command and talk to people. Now again, it also needs an environment that allows for an organization that people are willing to experiment. The salesperson can equally have an idea, the finance person can equally have an idea, but you need to bring an organization that our kind of leverages that. Now to your question, whether it's Silicon Valley or outside, most times we'd have the data, we have the power, we just have to take it in a format and talk about it. And the urban myth is when Steve Jobs came in a second coming at Apple, the iPhone prototype was already in place somewhere. It wasn't that he came in and said, let's build an iPhone. He actually sponsored it and made sure that it fines, it got better and then so on and so forth.
- Till date, it's the most successful product that they've built. And that's often what happens to the innovation in a lot of organization. When somebody has that insight, somebody is seeing that data, it's just that they're not able to leverage it and build it. Now when you have a powerful, it just takes one person to kind of drive that. When you have a powerful environment, it actually drives that forward. But again, the smaller organization, the faster it is. So I don't think lot often think it's the people that are their biggest enemy because of the people are right, the process, the environment, the mindsets all automatically follow along and small or large in the valley or outside the valley, a successful company is defined by the people that it has. And that's kind of where we've been focusing a lot of energy. And once the people are aligned in that mindset, everything else follows.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay, so following that thread along and holding a mind mindset, I've heard you previously say something and I'll quote you now, you've said everything starts from understanding the user and their experience and then looking at the design and technology, which unfortunately is the other way around as most companies start with technology first and they go into design and then how the users will use it. So you come from a mixed perspective in the sense that you have engineering human factors and business languages that you can speak. So if you were speaking to, and you might have a real example probably do of a C E O or a C-suite here and you're trying to help them to see a better way that way of starting with the user that they could be approaching the solving of their business problems and their way that they create product, how would you help them to understand that better way?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think Simon Cenex says this really well. He says start with the why, right? And why in a lot of the cases is because, and I would say if you remove the why and start with the user, it's again very similar. I'm having conversations right now with leaders in fact in the last 24 hours and they're like, Hey, our product has all the capabilities. This is exactly, I'm quoting exactly as I've had a conversation. Our product has all the capabilities, is all the features, it just needs a good design. And I'm like, okay, so what does that mean? It's like, oh, I need to sell. I've been told my competition is much more better experience, so let's kind of build a better design. So again, it's the fact that they have a technology now, they want the design on top of it. And while we are having the conversation on the design, we are actually having conversation around the user.
- Now what's the likelihood of that succeeding? I would say maybe 10%. It'll get them UI design, but then they will come back, their competition will do something else and they will be again, back into the same situation. On the flip side, if they knew, hey, this is the user I'm building for, these are the pain points that they have, this is where the competition is kind of doing better or worse and I want to nail it on this point of view and then I want to build a good experience around it, then I want to build a design that kind of drives that experience and then I'm going to go find the technology that's going to kind of make that happen. It makes it so much more peaceful in everyone's life. Now what's happening is that most of the tech companies unfortunately are led by tech leaders because it's tech and tech leaders, their strength and their superpower is tech.
- So unfortunately you build the tech and then you kind of start dealing with the other issues. You can build a great technology that gives you great analytics, but if you haven't thought about the migration experience from moving from your competition to you, there you go. You're not going to get those customers because they've spent a lot of time and money to kind of build that. So again, there's all these new answers that kind of come into the picture, but if you know your user, why you're doing it and the plan of attack, and I always say this and it's in the research world, it's what insight do you want to invest your money on? And again, every product out there, okay, let me actually before that I'll say something else. A good mentor of mine said this. He said so because I would say, Hey, somebody else is already doing this when they're looking at a product.
- And he said, Sathi, as long as the problem is there, no matter how many people do it, it's still a problem. And I think that was a very strong thing. So that's why when I come back to it doesn't matter how many people in the world are building a, let's say an online travel site or online travel booking site. As long as you see that they're pain points for the guests as well as the hoteliers or whoever it is in that ecosystem, you can go build another product and get a shot at it. And that's true with so many products. But again, that only is if you start with the user and then the experience. But again, if you go back to our whole profession as it's defined as UX design in that semantics itself, you start with the user before you even go to the experience and then you go to the design.
- Somewhere in this process the UX went away and design came in. And I also blame this to a lot of what I call a lot of designers wanting to call themselves UX. In fact, I hate it. I hate it when everyone says I'm a UI UX designer. It's like since when it's like, are you, it's like somebody saying, I'm a constable and I'm an inspector. I mean, are you a constable or you inspector? Because they're two different mindsets. Which one are you UI designer or are you a UX designer or I'm a hybrid, or whichever way it is, then you're a product designer. But then when people start mixing that because UX pays more than ui, you are doing a disservice to yourself, you're doing a disservice to the profession. And then you see the company's also going and asking for one of UI UX designer and I'm like, man, this is kind of becoming a complete free for all and it's a mad house at this point.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There are certainly some issues as the field continues to grow and scale and the wine variety of backgrounds that people come into the field, it seems that it has become more murky as to how we define what it is that we do and the value that creates. And there are many, many different perspectives there. What is it that for you, what is it that the inherent value of a UX designer represents? What is it that if you are drawing a line between UX and design, what is that boundary? How does that boundary look?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- See, I think that I, I'll define it in a different frame. I'll define it in the book. I call it the experience value chain, the three levels of value that you can create and using the power of UX you can create on a screen level, you can create on a product level, you can create an organization level. When you create on a screen level, it could be called UI design. When you create it on a product level, that's where you're starting to look at product experience. You start look at ecosystem. One of the strategies that I say from a business standpoint that I in fact coach a lot of my clients, I say go the leverage the encirclement strategy. And what's the encirclement strategy Again, there's a little bit of military coming in, strategy coming in. A design encirclement strategy in our world is not only identify the core user of your product, find three or four other users around them and encircle that user because if they have to cancel there to ask three more people to cancel.
- So for example, if I'm building it for a patient, I need to talk about the caregiver. If I'm talking about if you're doing online travel booking, if you're talking about a certain guest, you need to talk about the guest friends who are going with them. So you start now encircling the other users and solving their pain points in a way that it's kind of much more sticky. It's not net new, it's what Apple does so well, which is why they are 10 times more valuable than a Samsung that makes every product that Apple does and more. It's because you just see the stickiness that comes together. And that's kind of what I mean by when start looking at these new nuances of focusing on the user and then driving that. But a lot of people forget it because in the pursuit of getting screens and timelines and so on so forth, the screens is kind of taking more priority over the product and the organization and therefore it kind of gets messed up.
- And I would say 80% all practitioners are still working on a screen level and then the remaining are very, it trickles up org level. They're very few people who are saying the whole org will be built into a user-centered organization. So I think there's so much more opp opportunity and I call it an experientially transformed org. So there's so much opportunity I think as is I much as I think that there are weaknesses in how we are operating, the opportunity is huge. The world is rapidly digitizing, the world is becoming mean. Everybody has at least a dozen different products that they, digital products they interact with. There's so many more ways of making it better. Technology is getting more and more commoditized and powerful. So I think it's just up to us designers to now bring this world together and then it's just fascinating on how things will evolve.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you talk about opportunities before and you've made a delineation between what you consider to be design problems, which are how might Wes of this world and you consider those to be the table stakes of design. And perhaps I'm not drawing too much of a long bow here, but I get the sense that you feel that a lot of our screen focused or product level focused activity is revolving around those how might we, those design problems, and it's in your way of framing it. It's actually the design opportunities, which you've called the what ifs, where the real value lies. So what's an example of the kind of design opportunity that you've been speaking about previously? So
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I can give you an example of a product that we designed and this is a product that came to us early on and today is the fastest growing in their line of work. When they were working with us, they were double digit million dollar in valuation. Today they are a decon means 10 million or 10 billion or higher in valuation design problem. I'll just define the thanks and how I've defined a design a problem or a pain point is something that the user is dealing with and they can articulate it in a good way or a bad way, but they're seeing the pain opportunity is where a user is seeing the pain but they don't see that as a pain. So for example, if everybody agrees, everybody puts a username and password and they forget the password, they see that as, oh yeah, this is me forgetting the password.
- It is, it's not a problem. And the technology, it's just that I forgot the password. The opportunity is how might we, if 50 in PayPal forgot password was a big deal, there was a lot of people there forgetting the password. So if that is the problem and we make that problem go away, that's an opportunity for us to make that problem go away. So that's how we define problems and opportunities. Now I'll give you an example of how we work with this one company that's doing really well. We were looking at building the sales experience for that particular product. And so automotive sales and the problem is like, hey, how fast can I put a deal sheet? How can the deal sheet is something like if you are a customer and you want to buy a car and you have some variables you're playing with, what's your monthly interest going to be?
- What's or your interest going to be? How much, what's your monthly payment going to be? How much I'm going to down payment? Am I trading and not trading? It's all those variables are thought through and I give you a deal sheet saying that for this vehicle I'm willing to give you this offer. That process is about three hour process. There's a sales manager sitting in one room who's trying to figure out what should I do, what can I give, what cannot give? It's basically a whole process of going back and forth and negotiating. What we said is okay, we can make that much more digital. That's a pain point, let's go make that work. But then what we saw as an opportunity is what if we took all of that data and then we identified we know what other people have paid so far. So we know the propensity of payment is based on the other people that have bought the same car.
- We know what our inventory is coming in from tomorrow. So because in their mind they're looking at, hey, if I have 10 cars here and I'm getting a hundred more tomorrow, might as well get this inventory out. But if I have 10 cars today and I have no more coming for the next six months, this is prime commodity. So I think there's all these new answers. So we built a heat map of saying what's the likelihood that this person will so have the variable of the person that's buying the car, the variable of who other people that have bought that car variable of what other inventory is actually in there, variable of what other things has this person purchased? Now I'm now talking an architect, remember that I'm not talking like a designer now I'm talking. So you start thinking about how the person is framing it and now we came back and said, this is an algorithm that needs to be written up and we need to define a heat map that can be shown to the sales manager and let's kind of perfect that system so we can now make that three year process into a 30 minute process.
- If you are doing your services with the dealership and you're paying about $10,000 in your per car or your lifetime of your car, I'm okay giving you a finer dollar discount today to kind of buy a car, which no one else will get because my data tells me that. And that's a design opportunity where you start looking at hey, what can we do and solve the problem? And that was patented. That has been now built. And when you start adding small, small, small things and every part of every user's journey, that's when a company becomes hyper successful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've taught a little bit earlier on about mindsets that the business leaders take towards design, but here it sounds like you are touching on the mindset that designers take to the work of realizing the value of design. Is this a evolution of mindset? Is this something that can be process driven so that while we are doing the day-to-day of what we're we've come used to doing, we can add on something else to our practice so that we can explore these what ifs? Like how do you make this perhaps a UX reactor? How do you make this a real part of what it means to do design at UX reactor?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think it's a environment that constantly asks why are you doing something and how are you going to measure that you've done it. If people can articulate those two things and anything they do in their life as a matter of fact, it actually makes it so much more clear and objective. Are you getting there or not? If as someone says, I'm designing five screens, but what's, what are those five screens, what I impact will it make? How are you going to measure that when you build those screens? That's okay, that's still UI design that'll deliver value. But that mindset of like, Hey, is this the best I can do or can I do something else? Is there a bigger problem I can go at And same thing as I would. So I think that foundational mindset of saying what outcome am I trying to achieve?
- What measure am I going to make that and can I make that a bigger measure? How can I make it a bigger measure? Often a question I ask anybody, as a matter of fact, not only designers, I say don't ask for higher salary if you cannot articulate how you're making 10 times that for the company. And in our case, don't ask for higher bill rate if you cannot articulate how you're delivering 10 times the value to the organization that's leveraging you. Because if you can't do that, everything else is just like fuzziness, I should be paid more. Why? Because Joe Schmo of our neighbor is kind of getting paid more. No one cares. But if you can articulate that, hey, I'm doing this and I get me to paid more because I'm generating, I want to get paid a hundred K because I'm generating a million dollars of value and this is how I generated the value, everybody wants to pay you more.
- It's a win-win for everyone. So I think that's the nuances that gets missed out. A lot of times we define the skill and the method more important as the outcome we achieve. And that mindset, that's one small mindset shifts everything because it's unfortunate that today in the tech industry as it's kind of going through a contraction, I'm seeing a lot of designers being let go. I'm seeing a lot of researchers being let go and I'm like, man, it takes a ton of time to get a researcher up and running to understand the market, understand the company and so on and so forth. That means business leaders don't get it, neither do the practitioners get it. So it's kind of a free for all at this point and it's unfortunate, but I think it'll a matter of time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's touch on the layoffs now seeing as you've brought them up recently, as you've just mentioned, there have been a lot of UXs that have been let go across research and design and that's a really unfortunate situation for the people that have found themselves in those positions. You've previously said, building the right people, the right process around user experience, the right environment and the right mindset. All four of these have to be well curated. It's a profession, it's not a skill. Leaders have to approach it that way just like they would building the marketing profession. And I think the context that you were speaking of leaders there was in terms of the wider business leaders, but I might be wrong, so correct me if I am. So my question is what is the distinction that you are drawing between a skill and a profession and do you believe that our inability, and maybe I'm shouldering too much of the responsibility here on the profession of UX, but do you believe that it's had any bearing our ability to paint ourselves as a profession on how design and research has been impacted by these layoffs?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think that's a loaded question, but I'll try to and answer that. And from my perspective, and I'll give you a story, I was flying to a destination and I was sitting and next to me was the c o of another company, a successful eCommerce company. And then he asked me obviously with Kurti, like What do you do? I said, I do proud design. I run a firm that does UX design. He's like, oh, UX, I have a few UXs on my team. And I didn't know how to react to that. And partially because he commoditized, I have a few UXers on my team and I'm like, Hey, is that how he would define marketing? Is that how we would define finance? I have a few finance people on my team. So it just seemed like suddenly the whole skill was commoditized. Hey, I'm going to go find.
- And then you have companies out there that are willing to give you a designer in anywhere in the world. And I'm like, design is such a critical mindset. It's like we commoditized it for $5, you can get a logo on fiber. So that's why I'm saying it's getting hyper commoditized. So people are like, yeah, I have four people, I have three people who do that thing. Do I mean that thing can actually define your company and then make you a billionaire or a bankrupt person. That thing is so important. But that's kind of what I mean by a skill versus a profession. A profession has a career, a profession has leaders, a profession has a focus, a profession has a lot of different skills that need to come together. That's what I mean by profession. And I think marketing is a profession. It's taught in business schools same way as engineering, as a profession at start and in schools, but design or experience design or user experience, design is still a profession that is coming together as a amalgamation of people and skills.
- That's where I am drawing up a line saying that the next decade it has to be a profession and experience. As I say in my book, I say it needs to be led by just like a chief marketing officer. Leads marketing experience needs to be led by a chief experience officer reporting to the c e of a company. And why is that the case? Because one of the biggest killers of great experiences is siloing in an organization when professional services doesn't want to talk to customer success, doesn't want to talk to product, doesn't want to talk to sales, or if they talk about their silos of their roadmaps, but who together is kind of saying that from a customer perspective, they really don't care whether don't ship your ag structure to them and say, Hey, professional services go for this or go to customer service for this and go to self-service product for this.
- They really don't care. They want the same experience and the same level of quality and thought process and all of them. And that's kind of where it gets screwed up a lot of times. And that's why you need a single person that drives it across the whole organization. And that's kind of the third level, as I saying, which is the organizational level value creation. Unfortunately, the only person that sees that is the c e o. And as the c e is A comes from a non-design or non-experienced background. Again, as I called out earlier in a conversation that they are experience enlightened but not experienced, prioritized because they don't even know how to prioritize, what to prioritize, which people to hire, which processes to put together, et cetera. In fact, if you study military, cos in most world the first thing they do is they bring intel into their purview because they want to know what the intel is or intelligence to kind of say, what are people saying in me saying, what are your detractors saying?
- So because that's the first thing to keep control of your system. But whereas when you're letting go of all your researchers, that means you don't think of them as intel. And that's all of the researchers are not stepping up to be the analyst that I kind of called out in the example of the zero doc 30. So again, it could be a two-way process there, but that is where the unfortunate thing works. But again, when this whole system comes together, that's magic. And that's the hypothesis that we started UX reactor in. And as we work with companies and we see that magic come together in places, it automatically kind of works itself out in a good way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned that my previous question was loaded. So here's another loaded or intentionally provocative question then, which is following on from this school of thought that we are being seen as surplus to requirements. The intel isn't being valued and that's why we are being let go. And the question is, if we were producing the level of value that we like to talk about and design that we are capable of doing, would we be let go in the way that we've been let go?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- So I'll answer that in two ways and I think I probably will take one step back. I don't think people are targeting research or design itself. They're letting go of divisions, they're letting go of areas of focus and through that you're letting go of the whole group that works on it, which typically is design, engineering, product, et cetera. So the whole group is being let go. But what I am saying as improv proative manner is if that group was being user centered, they would've figured out either to do it really well or to kind of shut that thing way back then, right? Because even going back to your leaders and say, there's nothing here to kind of focus on or they No, they're there. That's okay. That's also what research tells you. Don't waste your money. But the point is you should not be at someone else's wims and fancy of saying this should be done or not done right.
- For example, what problem was metaverse to solve if the whole metaverse division was being cut? Then with that goes a lot of people, but I would actually put it back to the great smart product people and this great smart research and design people that you should have run experiments, you should have run and quickly figured out that this is not working. Now again, if it's someone's wims and fancy that I'm going to build a net new thing that is my purview, which I call it the leaders privilege, then okay, that's what it is. And I think unfortunately people are caught up in that circle, but I'm still seeing a lot of people that are design team as being seen as a support arm and then with that investment goes the support arm. So I think that's kind of where the unfortunate part is, but I would actually would challenge that.
- Again, there's so many people out there who are designers and researchers, researchers have insights, designers have prototyping skills. If those two get together, in fact, if they are the same person, that can actually be a much more, that's innovation have waiting to happen. That's a net new business model that can happen. So I would say this is actually maybe an opportunity for some of those enlightened ones that were not given the right environment to go and do and make your own business because the cost of entrepreneurship today is zero to start anything. So might as well go and do it if you believe strongly and you have that insights around the users that you are, you've been studying all this while before you were let go,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like what you are saying is while we don't bear all of the responsibility of the decisions that have been going on, for example, you mentioned Metaverse, that might be the leadership's privilege or fancy to create something around that we can still get out in front of some of the insights or lack of insights that we see in a particular problem space and help to guide the company's decision making by being real about what it is that we're seeing and not being, and this is my own intentionally provocative language, but not being asleep at the wheel and just taking the paycheck and not thinking critically about how the activity that we're doing in the day-to-day is actually laddering back up to some sort of longer term meaningful, sustainable business goal. Absolutely.
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Absolutely. In fact, I would say Metaverse is a technology if you had come to that conclusion from talking to the user, then the experience and then the design and then Metaverse came to it, go absolutely that It's a matter of time that if that have been resolved. I still think Metaverse as a construct can help communities of people getting educated together while they are disparately or in this different parts of the world. Now that's a problem where users have, when pandemic people were all isolated studying on Zoom. Now if you actually had an T avatar and you were studying in a classroom and you were getting the same experience, but again, how does the teacher know whether you're paying attention or not? Those are all new answers that other user problems that are there. But I think the longer story is if you follow the user and you kind of go through that cycle, innovation becomes easy. Your clarity becomes easy. Your purpose becomes easy. But when you go the other way of saying, Hey, someone said I'm in Metaverse team, or I'm in Sadat team or this team and now I'm going to figure out how to figure out what value I can add, that's always finding it the other way around, which is much harder.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's go into disconnects, which you've been touching on there. And I listened to something that someone else once asked you and it was for your thoughts on why I think they were a researcher, why they were having trouble convincing their business to invest in a design initiative that would save their company money. Now I felt what you told them was deeply insightful and what it is that you suggested to them to do was to take things back to first principles and you spoke with to them about needing to understand whether the company they were working at is cost focused or profit focused. So why is it important for us to understand when we peel back everything that our companies are doing, whether or not they're cost focused or profit focused?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- So I think a company that is cares about every dollar that is spent, you go and tell them, I can save you a dollar. They would love to listen to it. And this is again, I'll share a different construct in that con and then companies that are focused around top line, which is like I want to get more revenue in. You go and say, Hey, I have a new business model that actually can open up a new thing. And this is again as a, I'll give you an example. If a business leader wants to know which markets to go into, they just need to call their researcher and say, can you tell me all the unintended ways that our product is being used? And if the researcher not able to answer that, shame on the researcher, but of it's a good researcher, no start, they get that data and say, these are the five or six different ways that a product is getting used in unintended ways.
- Now all you need to do is run five experiments and see which one can you build it out. This is Zoom identifying that doctors are using or go to meeting as when I was at Citrix saying that doctors are using their web conferencing product for patient collaboration. Honestly it's not HIPAA compliant, but now suddenly if you make it a HIPAA compliant, which is privacy and data sharing and so on so forth, that could be a billion dollar product right there. And so those, that's kind of where opportunities come in. And so when you actually work in tandem and kind of magic starts kind of coming together, the thing I often have now started to believe, and I often share it as you want to be in the business of painkillers, not vitamins. If somebody has a pain and there could be an organization, it could be a business, it could be whoever you want to kind of talk in that language.
- If you tell somebody it's good to talk to users, it's good to kind of understand what is. No one's going to listen to you because vitamins, everyone agrees, but it's a problem that's later when you deal with the pain, we'll deal with it. But certainly if you're dealing with that pain right now, if you have a bad toothache that Tylenol, you're willing to spend $30 on it right now, even if it is like a dollar a piece. And because that's how important a painkiller is. Now if you are able to articulate into your organization what is the user problem? Is it a adoption problem that is it a retention problem? Is it a productivity or efficiency problem? Is it a satisfaction problem if you know what that problem is because every business has users and you need to just articulate what is that pain point that they have.
- And then you just need to say, okay, how can I increase and make that better or more effective? And then suddenly we are talking that language, we are more effective. So again, whether it is cost focus or top line focused or you're talking about adoption, if you're top line focused, you're worried about adoption. If you are cost focused, you are worried about how can I do more with less? And so these are all things that come into picture because every organization is grappling with that. And if anything I learned in business school is that every business leader is trying to find that secret sauce to kind of be better than the competition and then be the loud one for their competition, sorry for their use customers. And a lot of that data comes from this team of people, especially in the product led growth world and which is why I'm like, Hey, we just need to step up a little bit and then there's a lot more to take.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So follow me along here, and this is me just playing back for you what I'm hearing in some of the dots that I believe are joining in my own head about some of the things that you've said. So understanding whether it's cost focused or profit or top line focused helps you to decide which one of those business objectives your design activities or research activities should align with. So you talked about adoption, retention, satisfaction, engagement, and I think efficiency as well. And the next level there, which is once you are clear on what those are is that framing the way that you frame your language in terms of the articulating those problems is one around painkillers as opposed to vitamins. So you need to be able to really put your finger into that saw point and tell a story of how making that saw point go away and delivering on that business objectives, which has been laddered up by the core purpose of the organization or their core focus is going to work. And that those things should create a compelling picture for people to at least listen more openly to what it is that you have to say.
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Absolutely very well articulated. Pardon? Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, it's good because I was going to ask you, because you've said you previously had said something to the effect of focus designers need to focus on creating the right value for the right opportunities. But having listened to you articulate all of those things, everything has fallen into place for me there, which is really great. I'm mindful of time and I do want to come to something that I thought was really brave that you had spoken about in your practice at UX Reactor, and that is to do with the opinions of senior leaders. And you've previously said in relation to your engagements at you at UX Reactor, and I'll quote you again now, you've said most times the company has a person with a senior rank who actually has an opinion. And one of the things we do when we run workshops is we say, keep your opinions aside or if you have an opinion, state it as an opinion, state your assumptions as an assumption. So when you are talking with senior leaders who are involved in these workshops, whether they're the C-suite or VPs or whatever it may be, are you that candid when you tell them this?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- We are candid but respectful because if someone says, users want this, and I say, is that a fact or is assumption? And again, I don't ask them right then. Actually every workshop we do in a discovery level, we say there'll be a lot of things discussed here. And then when we discuss these things, the one thing that we will have our filters on, is that a fact or is that assumption right? And if it's an assumption, it could be an opinion or it could be assumption as a hypothesis, which is fine. Hypothesis are completely fine. That's what that feeds a lot of innovation. However, a hypothesis need to be tested. And so now as a researcher I would say that becomes an rq, a research question. And so that gets fed into that sheet and then we kind of track that as an opinion. What you don't want is like, Hey, Joe, who's the CEO of the company, said this.
- He knows it better because he's been there for a while and let's treat that as a fact and that's the fastest way to kind of go in the wrong direction and eventually kind of make the thing. Now oftentimes leaders don't throw their opinion as they generally believe in it, but the question is when you ask them the question, is that an assumption or is that a fact? If it's a fact, give evidence and then we will take that if. And so most times that makes them think, who told me this? Where did I pick this up? Did I read it up? Did I listen to it? Did I observe this? And that just brings a level of deeper thinking because oftentimes this is what unfortunately biases and lies, how it messes with our capabilities. If you say a light a hundred times to everyone, you start believing the truth.
- And that's the same thing is most founders who come to us, they already have been saying that in their echo chamber. So they've been believing that, yeah, I mean confirmation bias happens and then you're like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is a way to do it. The last thing we want is they spend a few million dollars and then go nowhere. You don't want to build a product that actually is beautiful but has no, you haven't thought through the other side, as I said, the encirclement, why would someone else come in? So again, I do have that conversation very clearly and we have the conversation and sometimes it becomes a joke that when you're having the drinks at the end of the day, every once now starting assumption or is the fact it kind of becomes a joke of the night when you're kind of talking.
- But that's good because that now is the mindset that we want to apply. Because in fact, in larger organizations, if a VP somewhere with a VP title or anything higher, if they say something, it suddenly becomes so much more important. One of the things in military that you learn is rank has its privileges, but doesn't mean that rank is the only one of the senior most person is the most creative person. We are in a creative profession. So I think at that point you're keep the rank on the, you know, check the rank and the door. But the fact is that creativity can come from anyone, whoever kind of sees something, which is why you see entrepreneurship can happen at any age, at any time, and it has nothing to do with your seniority, nothing to do with your titles. And I think we need to make sure that we understand that and then we leverage that. But yes, we are candid about it because if it's an assumption we put there, but if somebody, no one is trying to screw themselves and screw a company by saying outright lie. So they often say, yeah, I think that's a hypothesis, and that's okay. We take that, we write down the list and we move on. So hypothesis are fine, but don't state a hypothesis as a fact.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well I imagine what you're actually trying to help them to do is solve a major pain point pro probably the largest pain point that any founder could face, which is investing or betting the company on a uninformed or an assumed direction. Absolutely. So the way that you contextualize that challenge and that it leads to, like you said, often it will lead to some laughs at the end of the day when you're sharing a drink together, I think that means that you've really hit the right note in terms of the respectful approach to helping people to see that a lot of what we think about is coming from a place of assumption and requires further investigation.
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Absolutely. And again, if some there very, very few rare chances if somebody is stuck up on the fact that I can only be right, there's nothing for us to do with them at all, then if somebody believes that there's only one way of doing it, then go ahead and do it. Why do you even need someone like us?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A hundred percent asat, there's been a lot of change lately and we talked about earlier on a little bit about the layoffs, but there's also been the rise of ai. There's a bunch of things that have gone on in the world recently that are continuing to go on the economy. We've got trouble in Europe. All these things are starting to play on people's minds and I get the sense in terms of the economic brunt that most of this has been centered in the United States as of late in terms of the impact on designers and product people. But that is also as evidenced by layoffs here in New Zealand for example, with Xero and some other companies that's starting to be felt more broadly across the world as companies start to reevaluate how they staff their organizations and what they're focusing on. So given what's going on, what do you feel is an important question or questions that we should be asking ourselves in this moment in time as a field?
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- I think I had a different answer before AI kind of became so front and common. I would say the answer I would give last year this time I would say, or my perspective last year this time was the next decade is all about digitization. One thing that the pandemic did was put it front and center for all of us and say, Hey, how is education going to be digitized? How is legal going to be digitized? How is healthcare going to be digitized? And then you start now today a telehealth call, people are more, come much more comfortable with it. I still think education and legal are behind and that same way agriculture, there's so many domains that have, so I think digital was going to be the forte and therefore our profession was going to still continue to be an awesome profession for the next decade.
- With ai, I think a lot has adjusted now. I think what we need to do is at the insight I shared early on that our profession is getting hyper commoditized and I think AI is going to accelerate that like the heck, right? I mean literally again, there is crappy experiences today, but AI is the synthetic user data. But I can just ask AI like, hey, what does somebody who's 30 years old or 40 years old living in a certain area in a certain demographic, what are some of the biggest pain points? And synthetic AI can come back to me with insights Now in a brainstorming session I have, and we call it chatty chat, G P T is now a variable that we can ask a question and say, Hey, what ideas do you have for this particular, how might be or what if? And I'll get few ideas anytime of the day at any perspective I want.
- So there's a lot of power that's kind of coming together, smart system that is available right now with this. We need to make sure that again, we work and I would treat AI as a technology. I would not treat it like something that's, and this technology is powerful as here, people are using it, but if we keep focusing on the user, their pain points, their experiences, and then their design and AI becomes one part of it, it actually will open up a lot of more opportunities for all of us. And we are designers of businesses, especially if as we are starting to look into the technology industry right now, then actually designers of a screen, as I said, the screen level, another give, give or take another few years that'll actually be all taken over by the commoditized AI that'll come back to you. In fact, Prad, my brother actually is running some very aggressive experiments right now in terms of taking user and their needs and then G feeding it into an AI system.
- Unfortunately it's broken right now and then and mid journey giving you screens for a landing page for them. So there's a lot of those new answers that are kick kicking in. But again, we'll treat AI and everything else that's happening and the technology world has a technology issue and then it still has a lot more option if you know your users, the pain points and talking about the whole world at this point. There's a lot of lifestyle problems that we are all solving. I think we should get away from the lifestyle problems and get to life problems. And poverty is still an issue, inequality is still an issue, education is still an issue. Why do people fight when they think that it's us versus them? When you start bringing us all together in a common purpose and common conversation and everything else, that's kind of where technology and the system and users have pain points that way.
- So again, the world is much more flatter than it is. And then I think design and on and be as innovators, as I said, can look at all of those opportunities and then we can now leverage the part of technology and get there. And if somebody can literally take and picture of a scar on a skin and then quickly get adjusted and say whether that is or quickly get diagnosed, whether that's a issue they should worry about and they should not worry about, that's a life problem that I think we should solve. And there's a lot of a whole design to that. How do you do that? There's still about 6 billion people that are not living in the western hemisphere and those people are willing to spend the time for their life problems. And I think there's a lot of opportunity, and I still think digital and these advent of these new technologies will only make it better if we know what we are doing and what problems we're solving.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Satyam there's some important, some big thoughts, some challenging thoughts for us to think about. I've really enjoyed today's conversation. It's been really important to discuss how design business and technology intersect. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Satyam Kantamneni:
- Likewise, Brendan. It was awesome conversation and I hope this at least changes a few has a butterfly effect somewhere in the process, but I'm looking forward to it and if anyone ever wants to connect with me, they can always reach out to me on LinkedIn or just send me an email.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thank you Satyam, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great to have you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Satyam in all of the things that we've spoken about.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review. Those are really helpful. Subscribe. So the podcast turns up every two weeks and tell someone else about the show if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes or just type in Brendan Jarvis to LinkedIn and you'll find me there. Or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz, that's the spaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.