Transcript of Interview With Mohit Gupta

Interview With Mohit Gupta

This interview features Mohit Gupta, user experience leader at CDK Global. You can watch it on Mohit’s profile page.

Transcript

– Hello again. I’m Joe Welinske, conference director for Convey UX, and our next event is coming up the last three days in February. We’re gonna be in Seattle, in person and also online as well. And I have the great pleasure to be able to interview our many speakers for the conference. And today I am talking with Mohit Gupta. Hello Mohit. How are you today?

– Thank you, Joe, thank you for this wonderful opportunity. It’s really a privilege to speak among such a wonderful, talented line of speakers on Convey UX and I’m looking really forward to it and you know, excited about it.

– Well, yeah, we’re, we’re very happy to have you involved as well. I’m right now talking from my home office in Bellingham, Washington, which is just north of Blinks Seattle headquarters. Where are you talking to us from?

– So I am mostly based out of Houston, Texas, but right now I’m just on travel and right now I’m, I’m in India as we speak, working with my India teams about some initiatives and planning for next year. So yeah, really excited to be here and you know, trying out some Indian cuisines and all that, so.

– All right, great. Well the, probably the best place to start is if you could tell us a little bit about your background and the types of things that you’re involved with today.

– Sure. So, so I have been practicing and I love to use the word practicing rather than, you know, saying I’ve been, I’m having an experience because we are in the field of UX where everything is evolving and everything is changing so quickly and so fast. So I always love to say I’ve been practicing UX for past 14, 15 years and I had the leverage to work cross industry from a lot of different organizations from banking, finance, insurance, and right now in automotive sector where we are doing a lot of innovative solutions using, you know, the user-centered design process to, you know, build better engaging experiences for the customers. And right now I am working with an organization called CDK Global and, and it has its own history, you know, for the past 50 years if in North America or you know, you have bought a car, we can, I can guarantee you, you have gone through our softwares in some part of the lifecycle of it. And CDK in general kind of is a data and technology company which heavily works in the field of automotive, heavy truck and heavy equipment segment. And we provide innovative solutions to our customers to make them grow and develop their business further. My particular role within this organization is I’m the group UX manager and I lead few portfolios such as for TELUS neuron data APIs and reporting for which I build, you know, the strategy design and lead the research teams towards building, you know, better tools, softwares, and even understanding what is new happening in the industry and so forth.

– Well I’m, I’m sure there’s a lot of things that you have going on every day, every week, every month. But is there anything in particular, maybe anything exciting and new that you would be able to share with us about your work?

– Yeah, and you know, this automotive industry with EVs coming in and you know, people getting into more smarter intelligent things, CDK is no different. And with everybody, we are also in the market of how to understand AI and ML and how we can use these and integrate these technologies into the workflows and our products to gear deliver value to our customers. In fact, you know, we are working on an initiative where we are building some insight dashboards and reporting tools where we are going to leverage a lot of information coming from, you know, the coming from the users as well as leveraging the old data to find patents and anomalies and then give recommendations based on that. So, you know, dealerships and automotives can make better business decisions faster. So it’s really exciting because UX is mostly focused towards users and then we are closely working with data science team. It’s, it’s a close collaboration where we are kind of moving the gap and reducing the gap between the human and the technology more and more. So it’s really exciting times we are in.

– Yeah. Well thanks for that deeper look into your work and, and mentioning the work about AI because that’s one of the major themes of the event. But let’s talk about your specific topic. The title is Experience Maps, empowering designers in Agile teams to navigate and Address UX debt, UX Debt. So there’s a lot there. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you decided on this topic and what we can expect to learn from it?

– So the reason for me picking up this topic, being in, in this UX industry for a while and I’ve worked across banking, insurance and all these other areas and what one aspect which I have realized that we work in agile teams and we lay a lot of emphasis on research and collaboration and design. But a lot of times what happens when we are doing these agile, following the agile methodology, we realize that we want to quickly deliver and sometimes when we are quickly delivering things or we are running an against a timeline, we try to cut corners and that’s where the term comes in minimum viable product, which we all have heard about in our product development lifecycle. And this talk is more about, you know, how to understand minimum viable product because minimum viable product is more focused around technology. And the talk kind of talks about how you can use experience map to make that shift from minimum viable product to designing around people or around your users and making a minimum lovable product. And when you do a minimum lovable product rather than a minimum viable product you are launching with the features or the capabilities in your product, which your users will like and that sets you up for success. But to get to that journey, sometimes we, we have to take those shortcuts but how to take them and when to avoid them and which are the ones you can live and which are the ones you cannot, we will talk about that. And also how to practically do the time management. You know, in agile we have sprints, we have quarterly PI planning, annual planning, how do you go around managing that? So it would be a very practical scenario explained with life project examples that how you can effectively, effectively work in agile teams and manage the UX debt which you develop as you are doing going through the product life cycle.

– Well your topic I think is gonna be particularly valuable and interesting for our more experienced practitioners and that makes up most of our conference audience. And so I think this’ll be a topic that starts a lot of great discussions at the conference. We also have people that are relatively new to the field coming to the conference every year. Do you have a tip or any advice for people that are just getting started or maybe just starting to get involved in in their own leadership in their organizations?

– Yeah, so just like this talk, of course this talk gets into a lot of details about how to manage UX debt and this is focused towards leadership but it also helps newcomers to understand how they fit into an organization. So you know, the top leverage is, you know, beginners as well as you know the experts about it. But if I have to just focus on what, you know, UX aspirants who are trying to come into industry and do, I would say the very first thing is design is about alignment and collaboration. Those are the two key aspects because a lot of times every team is working in some, some sort of silos where they have their own set of agendas and I think designers or you know, the UX team plays that very key vital role which can bridge the gap between business and technology because you know, we UX teams have the opportunity or the designers have the opportunity to have an equal communication about understanding the requirements and doing the designs. And then they are the people who present the design to the technology or dev teams. So they play a very crucial role and that that is where they can talk about the vision about what product. And going back to my point about minimum lovable product, they can explain about those scenarios and how the product is going to make an impact and have the entire set of team working in one direction. So sharing a common vision and that, and that is possible because designers just don’t talk with words and you know, sentences, they talk with pictures, they have the power to show designs and you know when a picture is there people can react to it more, understand the vision more and go further from there. The second aspect I would always say is understanding the why for what you are doing. So all the new people who are coming to industry, I know a lot of times people think about designers as somebody who is a person who will chunk out a lot of screens and I will not deny in the beginning you should do that, but at the same time also make sure that you understand why you are doing what you are doing and how you can bring value to it. Because a lot of times in the in industry people don’t understand our profession and what, you know, nuances and value add we bring to the table. It is our responsibility as designers to go and talk to them and explain them that the UX design is a lot more than just the screens and the screens are just the tip of the iceberg.

– Well thanks for sharing that advice. I’m sure a lot of people will find that very helpful. The last thing I wanted to mention is our conference bookstore. And so we have a local book shop adas in Seattle that will have books on sale at the in-person event. And then we also have an an online version of that. Are there any books that you’ve read recently, something you might want to recommend to us?

– Yeah, and I’m glad to hear about your bookstore. I’m definitely wasting it when I’m there. But you know, to all the designers who are getting into the field or are already in the field, two books, which I always recommend. The first one is the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. You know, he, every designer should know about him, read about Him. It’s a very easy, simple read and it goes back to my point where it would tell you how, why you should think before designing something. And the second book is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve kras who talks about how you know our subconscious works and how you can improve that. But the book, which I’m reading right now is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Canman. And you know the, this book, I think as you get seasons, as you get into design more and more you will realize that you have to make a lot of decisions which are subjective a lot of times. And what this book talks about is two different models of thought. One is, and then I think the book calls it system one, fast, instructive and emotional. And the second, you know, way of thinking is called system two, which is slower, more deliberate and more logical. Now there may be times where you have to be very intuitive and make a fast decision, but at some point of time there may be few scenarios what do you where you have to be more deliberate and more logical. So this way of thinking and, and to this the author calls thinking fast and slow. You can, you know, ramp up or ramp down making your decisions. So what happens is a lot of times we make decisions with our biases and this book is a very interesting read for designers to remove their biases from their decision and you know, look at things from a more open and holistic perspective. And I think that is all design is about, you know, thinking about sustainability, holistic nature, microscopic as well as macroscopic view. And I found this book very interesting thought and perspective, which it brings up.

– Well thanks for that book review. It’s very helpful. We’ll try and get that in the bookstore. And Mohit also, thank you for taking the time to visit with me, talk about your work, and we look forward to seeing you at the conference in about three months.

– Thank you, Joe. Looking forward to it as well. And a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much. Great,

– Thanks a lot. Bye-Bye

– You. Bye-Bye.