Design x Arun Venkatesan
Co-founder & Product Designer @ Carrot
Interview conducted by Lewis Ngugi on December 2, 2021
To kick things off, tell me a bit about yourself.
My name is Arun. I'm currently a co-founder and product designer at Carrot Fertility. We provide fertility benefits to companies to offer their employees. Essentially, it covers things like in vitro fertilization, fertility preservation, adoption, and gestational carrier services. I've been doing that for about five years at this point. Before that, I was a freelancer. I got connected to Carrot doing some freelance design and development work. I have a background in development, I used to be an engineer, but I've always had an interest in design for most of my life.
Walk me through your time at Anuta Networks as the first Engineer, and eventually getting into design. Did you know you would end up in design?
I studied Electrical Engineering. I thought that I wanted to get into consumer products through engineering. Then I realized when I was pretty much done with my degree that there was too much math. It was boring. The iteration cycles are too slow for hardware and that made me not interested in it anymore. I ended up at Anuta Networks because I found it through my network. There are a lot of learnings that I and the team stumbled on there and one of them was about what not to do in a startup. During that time, I realized that what I cared most about was how we made decisions on what the user experience was going to be like and the way that our brand manifested through the different things that we created. In the networking world, design is not valued very much. It's largely run by a lot of very low-level engineering people, even though design does have a big impact on that industry. That's when I realized I wanted to do some freelance work with a different company as a way to explore and see what I was interested in and that's how I ended up as a designer.
How has your course in East Asian Culture impacted your perspective as a designer and the design decisions that you make now at Carrot and with your projects?
I spent a lot of time studying Chinese, Korean and Japanese cultures and a lot of those things became part of me. I became interested in culture and visited the countries to spend a lot of time there. One example where it's more material is when we are doing localization work and obviously the Chinese language is really terse so if you write something in English, Chinese is probably half the size. Korean is similar to English, it can be long too. So the impact of the East Asian Culture course shows up in these ways.
“It's our job to try to tell people what the value of design is by figuring out ways to speak in other people's languages so that they understand what the value is.”
In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers to achieving great design in the industry? What are we not doing to approach this correctly?
Often we are the barriers. Especially designers, we love to obsess about the way things look and the tools we use. Ultimately, the most important things are the people that we're working with, how we are organized, how we communicate and the stories we tell. It's our job to try to tell people what the value of design is by figuring out ways to speak in other people's languages so that they understand what the value is. A lot of times it is like putting a fresh coat of paint on something and making it look pretty but most of the time it's not. In my experience, at least, often there's like a culture clash or a big gulf in understanding with other teams, which may have a lot more clout in an organization like engineering. People speak engineering speak and designers need to contort themselves a little bit and speak engineering speak and talk about why design can be useful and say it in ways that an engineer would understand.
”Ultimately, the most important things are the people that we're working with, how we are organized, how we communicate and the stories we tell.”
My organization was an example where early on in Carrot’s life, as happens in a lot of places, we had a lot more engineers than the designers. And there's a point at which I was talking to my co-founder and I say, “I feel like we're reaching the point where we've gotten too far and we're too engineering-driven and design is suffering as a result. We need to figure out a way to bring design back into the culture and make it bigger.” And for us, what we realized is that we needed to ask for people's trust, and kind of shock the system. So we brought in too many designers temporarily and had an agency that came in. At that point, we almost had a one-to-one designer-to-engineer ratio during this redesign process. What that did is it helped us put a lot of investment to try to bridge the gap. Now it's healthy. We spent some time walking people day by day building trust that design is important to the company. We showed how it fits into our process and how similar and different it is to engineering. A lot of people assume that it's very different, but actually, it isn’t, there are a lot of similarities. So yeah, it's a lot more healthy now.
”History is the most important subject we can learn, period.”
To quote one of your articles "the analogue faces reveal what Apple does so well — taking the familiar and making it their own. Over the years, they have released quite a few faces with roots in history. Each one started as an iconic watch archetype and was remade to take advantage of the Apple Watch platform."How would you explain to a room full of designers that history matters?
I read a lot of history books and spend a lot of time thinking about history. History is the most important subject we can learn, period. Currently, there's a real focus and a lot of attention on STEM and technical fields. That’s important because there's definitely a lack of it, but the result is that people ignore some of the other ones. I know, at least in my experience, there was a focus on what could make you money, but I wish there was as much focus on what could teach you to be a human being. If you look at history, technology has been moving really quickly, right? We get a new iPhone every year but we don't get a new human every year essentially, right. We get a new human-like every 100,000 years or something; we don't evolve very quickly. So a lot of the issues have existed for the entirety of the human race. If we look back in history, we can learn from the people before us, even though they might not have had the same technology but they shared the same problems with us. That's one aspect of it, where there's a lot we can learn from history.
On the Apple Watch side, what we can do is steal from the things that have worked in the past and then keep in mind the mediums and the constraints that we have today and see how that changes the equation. What Apple did well was they didn't either take a chronograph then stick it on the watch, or take the GMT and stuck it on the watch, right? That would have been easy and probably it would have been fine and nobody would complain. But they did something more interesting. They were like, “What's only possible on this platform given the technology we have?” Now there's a clear difference between like a GMT on the Apple Watch and a real GMT. People are happy to own both as a result because the physical one has qualities that are specific to this medium, but then the digital one has qualities that are specific to that medium and they're related, but they're different. That's a really great way to incorporate history into our design.
Can you elaborate on how we would use history to go from identifying a user problem to producing a solution?
It’s a hard one. My practice involves a lot of research and letting things percolate in my mind and also experimentation because I still haven't cracked the creative process of how to go from a problem that we've identified to an actual solution linearly. It never seems like that. It's always this meandering path. Maybe step one, the only step that's consistent, is getting really obsessed with something and then spending a lot of time doing broad research trying to understand what are the unique constraints that we want to place. I feel like a lot of times it's hard to know that up front. You’ve got to do a lot of research on what has been done in the past, what have other people done, what's worked, and what's not worked and talk to other people, especially talk to users. Doesn't seem very linear to me.
What are key skills, or qualities, needed to be a successful and effective Designer?
There are so many. Communication is super important. The hard skills are not that important, but you need them to survive. A designer is someone who uses Figma, but actually, most of the time you're not. You're probably sorting through information, talking to team members or organizing feedback.
Curiosity, being able to learn from different sources and building that muscle is also important.
Can you tell us what a Product Designer does exactly?
Two things. One of them is finding or identifying problems. The other part is solving problems or helping to solve problems. Both of them can be these iterative processes that happen all the time but they can also happen at any point in time in some initiative or project we have.
Finding problems is important, whether it's looking through various sources like customer feedback or conversations, connecting the dots, seeing that there is a problem that maybe we haven't realized and then really honing in on things. Designers should talk to as many people as they can in the company, constantly be having conversations and trying to figure out what needs to be fixed.
”At the end of the day, design has to be a collaborative process.”
Then the other side, of course, is coming up with solutions. In my role, I try to be as much of a facilitator as possible. I don't want people to feel like a designer is someone who will do all the work. Instead, I want to provide some structure around conversations so that people can come and provide their ideas and constructively provide their feedback. So if we provide structure, we can find a way to get the person that doesn't talk as much or who's quieter to actually surface some of their ideas and get those into the fold. At the end of the day, design has to be a collaborative process. Especially, since designers are rarely the ones who are on the ground. We might be using the product that we create, but it's not the same as a user. It's helpful to have other people chip in, pitching in on the design.
How do we become good at facilitating, as well as being good collaborators?
It’s a skill that has to be built over time because there are so many small components to it. The easy first step is that book, Sprint, where if that week-long sprint fits into your process, it's a good resource. They have the exact format you need to follow. I also like this website called GameStorming, where they have a lot of free workshops. Then there's another book that’s called The UX Team of One.
The first step is identifying a workshop that is a good way to solve this issue that we're having now. Then it takes some experience to figure out how to actually craft it to do a particular situation and then successfully run it.
What advice do you have for designers looking to build products that have "a careful balance of design, technology, usability, personality, and history" as per your article?
Advice usually tells us more about that person than the person they're speaking to. Any advice I give is going to talk more about me than any other person. Unless you're similar to me, I don't know but the first piece of advice I always think about is to figure out what problems you're dealing with in your head and figure out ways to solve them or find other people who have them and see how they work on them. Because the biggest obstacles to success tend to be in our heads or our organization or they tend to be the stories we tell ourselves.
The most important thing is getting the first draft. Successful creative people get something down because it's easier to react to something than it is to create something. I used to be very precise, a little fearful that I wasn't going to make something good. So I would spend a lot of time trying to craft something either in my head or somewhere hidden before I show it to anyone. I felt the time is usually the other trade-off there and it's usually not worth waiting for a really good first draft. You're much better off with a terrible first draft that everyone has really strong opinions on because you then start to collect a lot of feedback. Kind of similar to workshops where things become a lot easier because now you have these words people use, this specific feedback. So that's the advice I give to myself. Like how quickly can you get something out at the beginning? Then you can start to kind of be like, “Okay, this doesn't have enough. The usability is not very good. Or like there's no personality here. This feels flat”. And then you can start to kind of tweak things and work things.
As a designer, what is exciting to you about your work? What drives you?
The thing that drives my current work is the mission of our company. I love design. I love doing the work every day. It's so much fun. I love working with a team of diverse people, and have different kinds of ideas and feeling like we can kind of mind-meld and make something that's the product of a bunch of brains. I love that day to day. We help people in a personal and often tough moment in their lives. When they're trying to build their family, trying to preserve for the future, and hearing the stories and knowing that their lives are changed, it is super fulfilling. For example, one of the things that convinced me to continue with Carrot, early on, was when I met someone at a party right after we launched with our first customer. I was talking to them, “Hey, what do you do?” And they're like, “Oh, I work at this company.” I'm like, “Oh, wow, that's our first customer. I work at this other company.” And they're like, “Oh, I used your product.” It turns out they were our first user, I didn't know that. Then a couple of years later, I randomly met them again at a different party, “Hey, it's been a long time, what's up?” and he showed me a picture of his daughter that was born because of Carrot. We helped a little bit. I always think about that story, seeing that human connection and seeing like his daughter was possible, in part because of the financial assistance that we helped with at Carrot. That's the driver behind my day to day work.
To do good and have a lasting impact, what techniques should designers have in their toolkits?
A technique that we can use more of is thinking about “What is the end-user experience? What are the actual inputs that affect it?” And a lot of times, it's like, “How is our organization set up? How do these different functions communicate with each other? Can we do something to bring them closer? Can we do something to facilitate better conversations?” In those cases, you're building connections in the organization, even though they might not be like a formal committed connection. That's a technique that designers should do more of like, “How can we affect the way that the organization works? Without being stuck feeling like we need to change the reporting structure, or we need to change the way titles work or something like that.”
I read a little bit about design orgs, from Org Design for Design Orgs. I read a lot about engineering orgs because a lot of the things are similar and in engineering, there's more energy. There are more people, and it's an older field. There's a lot of really well-thought-out stuff there. Even though some things don't work, some things have to be translated but I find engineering stuff to be useful and insightful.
What advice would you give to people with similar backgrounds as yours, maybe young engineers, who are interested in design but feel like it’s impossible to get into it?
It's like any sort of switch, it's going to be painful and there's gonna be a lot of ambiguity. Looking back, I don't know any other way I would have done it. When I was doing the transition, it was really painful. It was really scary. There was a moment when I went from having a salary to being a freelancer. Freelancers talk about this a lot, having droughts and sometimes you have five different customers all at once and you can only pick one. But similarly, I didn't know what design was about, I didn't know what part of design I was interested in. Part of it was doing some coding and on the other side, I was doing icon design. Those aren't super compatible with each other, people rarely do both at the same time. I would say that if it's interesting, then trust that it’s the right direction and find a way that works to transition in that direction, that doesn't put you in jeopardy. Also, know that there's going to be lots of ambiguity and lots of uncomfortable situations that you have to push through. Seth Godin talks about it in The Dip, where basically anything worth doing has this period where it sucks and you have to do it and if it sucks, you're probably doing the right thing.
What is your favorite thing to do in your free time?
Work on my blog, and that involves everything else in my life. Aside from my blog, I love to take and edit photographs and use cameras. Particularly cameras that are fun to hold and use.
What is your favorite book?
That's a hard one... In the last five years, my favorite author has been Brandon Sanderson, the fantasy author. I love The Mistborn series.
What podcast are you currently listening to?
My top ones are Conversations with Tyler which is with Tyler Cowen because of the way he interviews people. It's very different compared to other interview podcasts. Of course, I love 99% Invisible. I've been listening to them since the beginning. Indie Hackers has Courtland Allen, yet another good interviewer.
How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Maybe designer, engineer, writer. I don't know what the order is, but something like that.
