Ways We Make: Prasanna Venkatesh

Ways We Make

Aug 14

Welcome to a new series from Good Maven where we dig into the minds of designers to discover the secrets of how they learned and hone their craft.

This series is about uplifting our design community: showcasing the thoughts and experiences of a range of great designers in order to develop learning and understanding throughout our sector and highlighting diverse design perspectives.

You can expect:

The inner thoughts of designers.
Surprising truths.
Assumptions to be shattered.
New ways to think about design.

Would you like to be featured? Follow us on LinkedIn and drop us a DM to get started.

Prasanna Venkatesh (call him Prazy)

a man with golden brown skin, neat hair and beard wearing a black turtle neck sweater and a hearing aid — Prazy Venkatesh

Design Leader with a strong bias for emotional design and accessibility

Current role: Director of Product design @Swiggy
Ex-Myntra, Ex-Infosys

Based: Karnataka, India

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prazy/

Portfolio: https://prazy.framer.website/about

1 What’s a belief about design you hold that others might find surprising?

Most people consider design as a career or a job where one is required to solve problems and deliver pixel perfect solutions. But what I’ve learned over the years is that design is nothing but a mindset that cultivates an innate sense of curiosity and wonderment about how the world really works and why people do the things they do with respect to technology, tools and services. A designer is someone who can marry their continuous pursuit of understanding human behaviors and actions with the know-how of providing technological solutions that empower users to live a better life than before.

2 How do you balance intuition and research?

I’ve often noticed that intuition is nothing but years of practiced observations and continuous trial and error with different approaches, enabling one to master the art of anticipating the possible outcomes of different approaches. Research is something that I always tell starting designers (and even senior leaders) to master in order to understand the real world environments that users operate in and reflect on if the product they are designing is making the user’s life easier or adding more friction to the current experience. Research is the designer’s secret to unlocking the best user experiences, while intuition is something that very senior designers rely on to anticipate what can break or work out well in the near future.

3 What's something people misunderstand about your field of design?

There’s a huge misconception about what designers really do in an organization, especially in most corporate setups that function in a hierarchical manner. People only judge the design of a product by its UI and their experience with it, which leads to a general view that designers are folks who only take in product requirements and churn out beautiful and aesthetically pleasing UI. That’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what designers really do. If non-designers were to spend a week shadowing designers, they would come to grasp the quantum of work that needs to get done to solve even the smallest of problems. Designers are expected to do user research to understand the users, understand how product and engineering teams function and accordingly design with tight timelines and technical constraints in mind while balancing the solution with the business needs of the organization, conduct pixel perfection with engineers to ensure the product is shipped in a very good shape to users, actively work with data science and analytics to understand the quantitative metrics of the product they design and follow up with improvement areas based on user insights and data. It’s a whole new set of skills that designers are expected to master and work with different stakeholders!

4 What do you wish someone had told you earlier in your journey?

One thing I wish I had known earlier as a designer is how vital it is for designers to be able to balance the business needs of the company with the specific needs of the customers using the product we design. To be more precise, early stage designers should recognize that business goals will always be the focus of any product we build and that revenue generation and monetization are the key pillars that make or break the company’s decision to keep the product or shut it down. I spent my early years constantly negotiating for the user experience to be prioritized, sometimes at the cost of business goals, and this resulted in a perception of being difficult to work with. I have learnt a lot from my early failures about the importance of stakeholder management and stakeholder relationship, particularly when I want to be able to ship a high impact product in the intended manner while also meeting business goals.

5 What non-design thing makes you a better designer?

Believe it or not, learning to cook and trying to master new cuisines has actually made me better at being more curious and willing to seek new experiences, which has honed my design thinking to the next level. After a kitchen disaster where I tried cooking Thai food the same way I’d do for Indian cuisine, I’ve come to realize that the foundational ingredients and style of preparation are extremely unique to each cuisine and needs to be treated with care and respect. I started researching what the base ingredients are and how the cooking needs to be done for different ingredients, and I’ve become more comfortable at adapting newer dishes and palates now. I’ve applied the same principles to different domains of design. Consumer products and B2B products have their unique foundational domain requirements and approaches - the experience and skills one garners for consumer app experiences are not transferable to the B2B side, and this requires the designer to unlearn a lot and start from scratch to be able to create impact. This is very much like being able to cook Indian food and Italian food by applying wholly new techniques and being able to unlearn and adapt on the fly!

6 What’s one hill you’ll always die on as a designer?

No matter how good design tools are or how AI continues to enhance our ability to fast track design processes, your ability as a designer is decided by how well you understand the problem space and find the right problem to solve, and pair it with an obsession with craft and pixels in your finished product, that creates a beautiful and meaningful experience for users of your product. The human brain’s capability to understand users and analyze behaviors and motivations is astonishing and can never be replicated by technology. As designers, we are in a unique place to understand how the mind works and what motivates certain actions, and apply this knowledge to drive the next change of behaviors and be able to provide for a more equitable and accessible future for humans.

7 Finally, we’d love to understand how your disability has impacted on your career

Born deaf, I’ve experienced first hand the exclusions people with disabilities face in everyday life. These challenges shaped my passion for creating a more equitable world—one where people like me have the space and support to thrive. The internet opened new ways for me to communicate through chat and email, and my first mobile phone gave me the independence to navigate college life on my own. These experiences sparked my passion for technology and inspired me to build things that empower others and paved the way for me to evangelize accessibility at work.