Join us as we chat with Jitesh Ramesh, Lead UX Designer at RateMyAgent. Jitesh shares his journey from mechanical engineering to industrial design and eventually to digital product design. He discusses the complexities and challenges of bridging the gap between tangible and digital products, reflecting on his experiences working on projects ranging from motorcycle design to construction and fintech software. Jitesh emphasizes the importance of being adaptable, stepping away from the details, and recognizing that design is a shared goal. He also shares valuable career advice, including the significance of collaboration, the potential for job hunting within the design field, and the importance of putting one’s ego last in order to prioritize the craft and make meaningful contributions.

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Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Digitally Diverse, where we do a deep dive into the careers of the movers and the shakers in the Australian design and tech industry. Today, we are joined by the wonderful Jitesh Ramesh, who is the lead UX designer at rate my agent. Thank you so much for joining us, Diteshen, thank you so much and thank you for having me. I’m so glad to be here. Of course, yeah, really, really excited to have you as our first guest for our second season. So as you, if anyone is watching online, you can see I’m in my brand new studio here at NTP. So we’re super excited to have everything up and rolling. But Jitesh, I’d really love to jump in with a bit of an overview of, of you and your career. Can you talk us through like, just an overview for listeners who may not know who you are? I was in my teenage years when my dad used to work in the Middle East, and he used to bring these vouchers of the duty-free lottery kind of thing. And it had this porches and the supercars and I was probably twelve or 13 and, and he would always say, all our problems are going to go away because I’m going to win this. And he’d give this to me. And these supercars kind of caught my attention. I used to draw a lot on the side book and all that. And I always was curious about how people build stuff and electronics and all that. My mom says that I used to put things back, what I took apart. My dad says I never put it back, so I don’t know how to clean that. But I was curious and I was fascinated by all these gadgets and things that he brought from where he was working that led me to, I wanted to do this, I want to create stuff. And that’s been the true calling for me even today. And sometimes I think about, like, what am I doing with my life? And it goes back to, I want to create things that people love to use and add value to their life. So having said that, I started. So I’m from Kerala in southern part of India, and I was misguided in the chase of design to mechanical engineering. And two years afterwards I said, this is not what I wanted to do. And then I kept chasing to understand how to learn about design and where in my socio economic situations, I never got any guidance or even knew what design or anything was. So I was always like, curious. And back then, 1998, 2000, we had to find books from the library to find out what this is and so forth. There was Internet machine in the library that you could hack, you could use. So I was trying to search into all these, you know, design. What is design? And I fell on architecture and stumbled into doing an exam in India called the common entrance design. So it’s called seed common entrance examination for design. And I stumbled on it and I got the 8th rank for that in all India. And I got admission into this industrial design program, which is a two years master’s course, and I loved it. And that’s where my true calling was. And I studied industrial design and I worked as an industrial designer in my early part of my career for three years. And I worked for a company called Tadai Laksaidh, and then I worked for another company called Royal Enfield, which is a motorcycle company. And so while I was doing all that, I was also tasked with working for digital interfaces for the dashboard of a car and also photo frames. And that stumbled me into touch base interfaces before the iPad was done. And we used to design digital photo frames. And it was very clunky back then because it was using a technology called the resistive touch. So you couldn’t do swipe gestures and all that. You had to tap, wait for a bit and then do something else. So all this kind of peaked my. And this is how I’ve adapted my journey into digital product design that I call a software design interface design. And I worked in various number of companies back in India, US. I also used to work for a german company called SAP. And after all that evolution, I had my daughter, my first daughter, and I wanted to move to a better socio economic scenario where I can provide the best for her. So I was in a pursuit to move from India to an english speaking developed economy. Australia, US, UK and New Zealand. I got an opportunity through Atlassian to move to Australia. And I’ve been here from 2015 and worked in three very good companies here. One was Acnex, which is a construction tech company, and a few other startups. And now I am with raid, my agent, working as a lead product designer. Love it. Your journey really is a true reflection of you started right into very physical, very like mechanical engineering. You are like creating physical things. And then to industrial design again, another step into going more digital, I guess. And now to find yourself, at rate, my agent, after all that time, just goes to show that no one really, when you were starting your mechanical engineering degree, did you think one day you’d be working and working on what you’re light doing right now? Not a bit. Not a bit. So my dream job was to get into Porsche. And I remember I still have the letter laminated. I think this was before going into mechanical engineering. I was e eleven or something. I didn’t understand German, so I looked at the advertisement in a library book and it was a model maker. So they had this clay model maker and I didn’t understand half of it. I had to find a german translator in Cochin and he read to me that this is what they’re looking for and this is the address. You can send them your transcripts and so forth. And I was in year eleven, so I just wrote a letter and a lot of sketches and like, you know, this is what I would do. And all very bad sketches and I send it by mail. And one thing that I really appreciate about them was they actually responded back with a rejection letter, but. In German. In German. And I. I didn’t understand. And my mom said, you got a letter from Porsche. And I’m like, I’m like, you know, whatever. And I looked at it and I can’t read German, so I was like, I don’t know what it is, but I’m happy about something that I got back. And then I went back to this translator. He said, it is a rejection letter, but I didn’t see it that way. And I think that was something that gave me a lot of hope that you can do something and wherever you are in the world and be passionate about something that will get you some response. And I still today believe in that same thing. And I asked this question when I get into very troubling situations, like, what can you do about it? Like, what can you now do about something that can yield you a result? And this goes back to, like, I’d never imagined that I would be here, but there’s always been one constant across the whole thing, which is my love for creating something. And I. I think I lose time when I’m in that problem solving space. And I think that’s. That’s the true calling. Like, I like to create something for other human beings to use. Yeah. Honestly, that’s when you know that you’ve found your thing is when time just becomes, like, non existent and you look up all of a sudden like, oh, it’s lunchtime. I thought I only just sat down 20 minutes ago, so that’s really great to hear. And obviously, now that you’re at rate my agent, a very digital focused product, can you tell us a little bit more about, like, your role there and what problems you’re solving with them? Yes, sure. So, rate, my agent is a publicly listed australian business, and our mission is to help homeowners select trusted real estate professionals. And with that mission, some of the work that I’m doing is connecting really good real estate agents to shine. And we create digital experiences where they can collect a review about themselves and their reputation can be improved online, which then helps people who are homeowners either realize their dream of either buying the best property or the dream home, or sell that and monetary part of it as well. So we are kind of like the super, you know, if you use the superpower or a heroes thing, we are like a sidekick to the agent. Yeah. So I would like to call it like the row win to the Batman campaign. Love that. And as someone who has just bought their first house, I think that would be really, really helpful, because it is like the Wild west out there. So any help that both buyers and sellers can get, I think, is going to be a really good product. So what does your team look like as the lead ux designer? At rate, my agent. So we are a very small team and we believe very much in the product trial or the Triad model. So we believe as a company that we can create great product experiences if we invest in product management, user experience and engineering or development. And so right now, we have, we like to call two squads kind of thing, or two teams that are having a goal to improve an outcome for the customers or the business. So I’m embedded in one of that squad and I have another colleague who’s embedded in another squad, so forth, to say, we have been going through a lot of changes, like all other businesses in the market, but we are right now in a position looking forward to how we can take this challenging environment and deliver a great experience for our customers and our users. So, and as part of that, my day to day is I worked with a product manager and a tech lead very closely. We also work as a triad group, managing upwards, like having lots of conversations with our head of departments, like head of sales, head of engineering, CTOs CEO. So we tend to believe that the triad is kind of looking at it from the human side, from the engineering side, and from the commercial side. And we kind of balance the conversations around what outcome do we want to deliver. And this keeps me very engaged and it is super busy because you got to give a lot of time thinking about the problems to solve. And is this the right problem to solve? How do we weigh out the return on investment of that particular problem? And this is where I apply a lot of my design thinking and user experience skills and experiences where we think about divergent thinking, or is this actually a problem worth solving? So we go and talk to customers a lot and users and to understand what their world looks like. And at the same time we, at least I help navigate the matrixes around user experience. Like, what do we mean by improving user experience? And this has been a really good collaborative, good small team where everyone is empathetic about the craft that we bring to the table. And we are now putting in a lot of structures and things to improve a lot of our touch points. So that’s my day to day, looks like all the week to week, I would say, yeah, really cool. It sounds to me like you’re really taking advantage of having that super agile team. Everyone knows their role and, you know, having those pillars there, while, I mean, for some people who just want to be super flexible and be involved with everything, sometimes might be quite rigid, I feel like when you have a really solid goal that you’re trying to achieve, which it sounds like you folks do, you know, having those triads, having those pillars is super helpful because everyone knows their. Knows their bit, they know what they should be doing and they know how they can add value commercially as well. So, yeah, really cool. We do. So one of the things that we really believe in is, I’m not saying that we are perfect. There are challenges that we have. But one thing that I’m really grateful about is the business really values in trying to apply the purpose, people, process, product, profit, kind of model. And sometimes we even challenge a lot, like what is our purpose? Right. And we’ve actually had few rounds of those discussions over the years. And I think now we are in a really good position where we have a clear definition of what our mission is. And that just helps empower the whole team to set goals and work towards a collaborative outcome, rather than. So we generally try to call out if we just go into our silos. Right. So we want to work together. And I feel like that’s one of the challenges in the market as well. Some businesses or some practitioners believe that it’s my thing and, you know, or it’s, why is everyone putting their finger in my craft? And I think that is a problem that I think I believe is, it’s something that I haven’t nailed. I still have those feelings when I get into a conversation, like, why is that person trying to do my craft? Because I’ve spent 18 years trying to perfect this. And that’s something that I’m personally trying to. I’m aware of this problem for me, and I think that’s an advice that I would give to anyone who’s the younger self. For me, I would give this advice that design or user experience is a shared goal and an outcome, so you’re there as an enabler and you actually don’t own it. Right. And that’s probably something that I didn’t learn when I started going through design colleges and all that, because we were taught that, you know, if you put a lot of effort into your craft and, you know, sweat those details, but sometimes when you’re in this collaborative state, you can’t sweat those details because you have to step away from it. And that’s been a hard challenge over the last 18 years to actually practice and, you know, step away from the details a bit. Yeah, no, that’s a bit of a light bulb moment for me. Right. Just hearing that because you’re so right. Like, it is such a massive part of being a good designer and being user centric and, you know, there’s a bajillion buzzwords that you can put in there, but, like, at the heart of it, it is all about the collaboration and listening, like active listening and really paying attention to what the problems are and then obviously the problem solving that comes after that. But how are you meant to solve a problem if you don’t know what it is? So, yeah, yeah, light bulb moment. Thanks, shitesh. We can hang out now, but I’m also very grateful for the people whom I worked with over the years in different companies. They’ve all helped me, challenge me on my thinking about my craft and the importance of, if you think about it, from another craft, like being a doctor. Right. And nowadays, a lot of people would do the Google search and then pre diagnose and then go to the doctor and, like, doctors, like. And I used to have that view about my craft. It’s like, well, I know all about how a good user experience should be, but I think the context is king and context is changing every now and then with new market adaptations and new challenges. Like, you know, there’s not enough money in the market to do a lot of design, so how do you adapt to that? And those things have. Now, I think you mature and sometimes you have to step away from that frustration, take some time, come back and see what others are saying. Yeah, just let, yeah, take that step back and reassess and, yeah, that adaptability and the agility to do that in the moment as well is sometimes a little bit of a struggle for some people, but I think it’s a good muscle to work on. Yeah. Obviously, you’ve started in a very, you know, technical, physical design. You know, you went to university for mechanical engineering, and then you mentioned that your first foray into more of, like, the digital space was, you know, the, some of the very first, like, touchscreen interfaces, which is really cool. What was it about that side of things that really compelled you to make a bit of a career switch, if that makes sense? There were a few reasons. One is from my craft point of view and how I was tickling my intellect. The second one was more around environment and like a, more of a philosophical, like, what am I doing to the environment? But I’ll touch on two things. The first bit was I felt that tangible products, because of their physical realities, and at that time I was working on motorcycles and the actual platform and the internal combustion engine wasn’t evolving or adapting a lot. Now with ev, that’s changing. But at that time, I was working on product portfolios about, and it was at the moment I looked at it and it was locked. I’m just shaping metal, glass and rare earth for people to buy so that they can move from a to b. And that didn’t sit well with me. And I knew that the business was looking at it from a very different lens. And I felt like the digital space and the virtuality of it was way more complex in problem solving than the physical boundaries of it. And I feel the same right now, because if you think about a software interface, it’s very dynamic. Things happen in moment, from one screen one moment to the other. You have to deliver a different experience, which on a tangible product is very different because you are, there are still details that you can go into. But for me personally, I felt I hit a wall in terms of what I was doing, in terms of shaping products rather than solving complex problems of. And I think I’m very grateful about transitioning into digital. For example, I worked on construction product defect management and so forth. And one thing that I’m very proud of was when you have a defect happening on a construction project, how do you map that onto a digital interface so that other people can look at it and get to the same conclusion, that that is a defect. It was really a mind opening a moment for me because it’s very abstract, like, oh, that, that pile broke. Right? But where did it break? Who should it fix it? Who should fix that and all that, and then communicate that in a virtual manner from a remoteness, and then Covid and all that. Like how do you tell someone that you need to come and fix this and it’s on here. You don’t need to spend a lot of time coming to do a site visit and so forth. I felt these problems in, I like to call it the underserved domains of human society, like construction, like fintech. And most people designers would like to work for FAANG companies where social media and so forth. But there’s so many other domains that no one pays attention to, like real estate, like healthcare. And I wish that more designers who are doing those other designs could come into it. And this is another thing that I think a lot of mentees that I talk to, I do tell them that there are opportunities out there. You just need to look for the domain spaces. Agritech is another one. Like if you look at the softwares in those spaces, they are very clunky, hard to use and so forth. But not many designers get excited about trying to solve those problems. I guess to your question, my first reason for transitioning from tangible to digital was that the amount of complexity you have in a digital environment is way more. And I still feel like in my lifetime, I wouldn’t be able to even do like 0.5 percentage of complexity in that space. And it’s constantly evolving. Right? Like with AI and all that, it’s now new technology and new things are happening and it still feels like humanizing technology is way more complex than creating physical products that helps humans become more productive. Yeah, if that makes sense, 100%. And I think one of the biggest challenges, and also one of the most exciting things about digital products versus physical ones is you kind of touched on it. You can iterate digital products instantly for you could roll out so many different features while the user or the customer already has the product in their hand. Like, you wouldn’t be able to do that with a motorcycle, which is kind of to your point. It raises a lot of issues sometimes, but then it’s really cool because you can fix those bugs in the moment. You can fix those issues. That is a really good observation because that’s the lead time, right? So lead time to getting the gratification of your work is way less on in digital platforms or digital space than the physical space, because it takes nine months to make a motorcycle or a car, it takes a year, but you can make an app in like less than half an hour, ship it, and then you can see what people are doing with it. So way more complex, and it also flexes your brain in different ways. About the data, you get back to make decisions on improving the product. So it’s way more interesting and complex and evolving as well. So that’s, that’s something that really caught my eyes. The other part of it was the environmental thing, right? Like how many is it sustainable to create more tangible products? And then I went into a cycle of like, reusability and all that. So I don’t. I mean, I didn’t explore that a lot and I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert and a champion of that and live by values on that, but it was a question that piqued my interest, like should I still be continuing to make products that are not made sustainably digital? Felt a bit more palatable. But I do understand that the servers and the cost of emissions and all that is very larger contribution. So, yeah, I don’t know if that’s a good evaluation of that. I mean, probably when you made that decision, it would have been a lot less impactful than what it is now, but yeah, and I guess we’ve kind of touched on where you started your career, like you did mechanical engineering, I guess. Can you tell us a little bit more about your experience with tertiary or higher education? And would you choose that pathway again? Oh yeah, I would definitely like given time back again, and I also genuinely believe that is the gap in the market which has been filled with boot camps. And I do feel that. So given a chance again, I would love, I would repeat my tertiary educational master’s degree. One thing that I truly believe that I lost time because of my social economical conditions and my family background and lack of finances is that I did spend time in mechanical engineering for four years, which I. I believe I could have spent those four years in design, like a bachelor of design or architecture or something, and then did my masters in industrial design or related field. But that was just the missed opportunity in hindsight for me. But if given, looking back, I didn’t have any other options to get there. So it’s not a mistake per se, but given chance again, I would definitely double down on my education in those fields. The greatest value I got out of those is especially in the masters of industrial design, was the fellow members that were there. They came from very varied background, so we were a 16 member or 16 classmates, so that’s how small the classes were. And most of them came from. Some of them came from architecture, some of them came from fashion technology. So it was a really good mix of people. Some, like me came from mechanical engineering, some people came from computer engineering. So it wasn’t specifically just designers becoming more like, you know, wanting to learn more. Yeah. And I also remember one person came from law, which is interesting. So there were folks who came from different backgrounds. And the biggest value I got out of it is when we did. And the other great thing about the college that I went to, it’s called IDC industrial design center in IIT Bombay. Really good institute for the. I didn’t even pay anything because I got, you know. So I think it was like free education. Really great value, great professor. And the way they thought about it was real world projects. So it was always, we took. It was not just textbooks based studies. And when we picked those projects together, it was always for either a social course, like, I did work for the Dharavi slums and all that. So it was really getting into doing ethnographic studies and improving projects based on some industry backing. So I worked on a project for NCR, which is like an ATM vending machine company, and they wanted to launch their ATM machines in India. And they were wanting to understand whether they should translate from English to local language. That was the project that we got, and it was great because we were split into three member groups, and we had to spend three months studying about the then local. You know, what do people do? How do they save money? Do they use all this? And it was completely mind opening for me because one thing that I learned, most of the people in that socio economic conditions were using ATM’s were not people who were employed. There were street vendors, beggars, and so forth. The reason is they have all this money and they had to keep it in a vulnerable condition. So they used to deposit in the ATM so that it’s safe. And they were not very literate and they couldn’t read English. And one of the things was the ask from NCR was to, can we translate that to local language? But they were not literate in their local language either. So they were taught by someone else that deposit means put cash in. So the way they recognized deposit was the english font was a symbol to them. So if we changed it, they would be confused. So our recommendation back to NCA was, you should not translate because that’s not how they learn about it. Right. That was an aha moment, and doing that collaboratively. And me being an engineering grad, I was looking at it from an engineering point of view, like, can I solve it by, you know, making it something else? And the law student actually said, maybe we should ask some open ended questions. Why they’re doing this this way and like how do they learn about it and all that? So my greatest lessons from that courses was the group of people that I was in and the live projects that we worked on. Yeah. And so I did do a bit of instructions at General assembly and Academy Xi. General assembly has a good example where they use live projects to help the students to work on. So I think that’s of great value to work on live projects to improve your learning of a craft. Yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said about doing real world projects and I being involved with the projects that don’t necessarily get a lot of eyeballs on them, don’t get a lot of funding. So. Yeah, sounds like that was what I’m hearing is the two biggest things that you got out of your tertiary education was the ability to collaborate with people from a diverse background, really opened your eyes to what kind of impact that you could be having on real world stuff rather than just textbook stuff. Correct? Yeah. And you kind of touched on what you did when you wanted to pivot into tech. Is there any advice that you would give to potentially some other people in a similar situation to you where there might be an industrial design or in a creative or not so creative industry that do want to sidestep into product? Is there any advice that you would give? Yes, and I think first thing to acknowledge is product itself is a multidisciplinary field. So I don’t think you should hold yourself back because you come from a certain background of academic education or the work experience that you have. It’s always a humanizing field. Right. And the more you come from diverse backgrounds or diverse cultures, etcetera, it just adds value. But you need to amplify that value. You can’t hold back of that. That’s one advice. And it’s also writing down the value you bring helps you like, it’ll help you overcome your imposter syndrome. You really write it down and you truly believe it. And also try to get feedback from others to understand what, what is it that you actually do well, because that’s reality. If someone else says that you’re good at these things and you can add more value by these I contribution. So one advice is that don’t think about product or digital product being just from technology, like a software background or a user experience or design. You could come at it from different ways. The other advice I think look for opportunities as much as possible. They are there. And sometimes we tend to believe using a pre packaged template will help you get far, it doesn’t. That’s. I think that’s the drawback that I see a lot. There’s no shortcut. So maybe the answer is there’s no shortcut to getting into or staying or being successful in design. It is a lot of hard work, and I think that’s the underestimation that a lot of people have. They believe that because it’s a low barrier to entry, it must be an easy gig. It isn’t. It is a very tough gig in terms of not as tough as physically tough or not as challenging as someone who would be caring for trauma and all that. It’s not that, but it’s still challenging in terms of how to navigate problems and how to demonstrate value and so forth. Those are hard challenges and you would have that in any craft. So not just user experience. So my advice would be looking for those opportunities. They might be just around you and you need to have that eye for it. Yeah. Yeah. Having that. Almost like applying. Like applying that problem solving lens onto your everyday life. And also if you are job hunting, speaking as a recruiter, I know that lots of people apply the same principles of ux into just their job search. And I love it. It’s organized. It makes my life easier trying to help them. So you also mentioned as well that design is challenging. It’s dealing with a lot of diverse people, diverse perspectives, trying to weigh up priorities. It’s quite subjective, in a way. What other kind of challenges have you faced throughout your career? Has there been any speed bumps that has kind of made you press pause for a second and ask yourself, like, what the heck am I doing? I think I want to touch upon a few things you mentioned about subjectivity in design, but also before that, you said about people applying ux methodology, and I was just recently talking to someone else, and one phrase stood out, which is, we don’t usually apply our craft to our craft. I’d love you to elaborate. Yeah. And I wish more people did that. Like, I wish more people either when they’re transitioning or they are entry level or even in day to day and all that. It’s like, how do we apply our craft to our craft? By really researching the people that we are working with, learning from it, or listing down assumption statements about the day to day operations or things. So we tend to believe that design and the thing that we are creating is the only thing deserves our craft. But there’s also a life in general that we can apply this to. So, for example, people who are hunting for a job have you actually looked at whom your target audience is when you’re job hunting? Have you considered the recruiter’s pains? Have you considered the hiring manager’s pains? Like, you know, have you made a resume that, that can be easily scanned? And like, why are you reinventing the wheel on a resume? Like, you know, there’s so many things that you could challenge on that. So I think I’ll leave it at that. The craft, applying your craft to your craft, or the UX methodology to your job hunting or even life in general. To the other question you mentioned about subjectivity in design, I tend to disagree that it is a subjective field and that’s probably one thing that is misunderstood in the design education system. Apple founders and even Steve Jobs used to talk about this as taste. Right? There’s a taste in design and, you know, what’s the taste of it? And he used to critique Bill Gates that Windows or Microsoft didn’t have the taste and they’re better. That’s just their competitive play on it. But I believe design isn’t subjective if you have good principles around it. And that’s where sometimes businesses and teams get confused about it. And it also becomes harder to work on a day to day if you don’t have really good objectives and guiding principles, it then does become very subjective of what people think. And I believe companies like the modern design, mature companies like Apple, Airbnb, Canva, Atlas, and all these big companies have found their way out of it. And it’s like, it’s very measurable. This user experience is very measurable and it’s also improved. It is for a purpose. It’s not just that I want to prettify something. So that’s my view on this subjectivity around design. And a lot of people who transition or enter into design believe that, oh, I’m very creative. I’m going to make. This is only what I like. I don’t think that’s the right attitude to have because you apply certain design principles for an outcome which is like, you made it either appealing or easy to use for a certain audience. And I can go into a lot of detail into this. Like, for example, a certain geography and cultural values might think about the taste of what they think is appealing, but as a business you can actually put boundaries around it. And the way I think about it is like creativity without constraints is art. And we are not in the business of art. Yeah. The more data that we can have to lead where we should be going. Yeah, it’s always going to be a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper into what have been some challenges that you faced throughout your career. Like, have there been many speed bumps or, you know, what? Was there any moments that made you question what you were doing? Yeah, I guess. Off late recently. Over the last couple of years, there’s been questions, or even last few months, there’s been questions about where does design or ux fit in a business? But I go back to every time I get up in the morning. I’ve always been passionate about my craft, and I love doing. Creating designs and things that. So I don’t think that I’ve had a deep reflection where, like, what the hell am I doing? But I’ve had the same question in context of a business where, what the hell am I doing in this situation? Like, can. Am I being utilized better or, like. Or worse that has happened? But I usually try to find that is a reflection of all this. Probably I’m not effective enough in how I’m communicating. So it’s always like, what can I do to get better at that? And never have I been in a situation where I’ve chosen the wrong craft or, like, you know, should I go and do something else that hasn’t happened so far. Hopefully that stays throughout my life. And in terms of roadblocks and challenges, there’s been plenty of them. The first one was even getting into the industry. Right. Maybe a step further than that, knowing, like, I had this passion that I wanted to create stuff. And I knew that. It’s like when you go for a rock concert and you see a guitarist and like, oh, I want to be a guitarist. Right. You know, for a moment, but then you don’t know how to get there. And I had that same moment when I saw these artifacts that my dad brought, or, like, even the duty free gift card that I used to talk about. I was like, how the hell do I do this? Like, how do I get to that? That was the biggest roadblock or challenge. And from that, the other roadblock was finance. Like, I didn’t have any money to go into these colleges. So I remember, and this probably makes me really emotional because I did apply to all these colleges. Like, I applied to Rhode Island Domus Omia Institute of Design, and I did get admitted. I didn’t get admission, and I had to go back to my dad or the banks and say, like, hey, can I go for this? And they were like, do you have any assets to pledge to get a loan? And I still feel very emotional about it because my dad cried, my mom cried. It’s like, no, we don’t. But having said that, my lessons learned was like, well, I am good at this. I’m getting admission. These are data points that I’m getting, but I can’t realize this by myself. What are my alternatives? So. And that’s where I would then say, well, maybe I’ll keep applying for a job and then see if I can go within that organization and ask them to support me and so forth. So I did try a lot within these organizations in India where I would say, hey, I still want to learn and grow in this craft. And, like, I wanted to apply for a PhD in social behavior, but I would prepare the cases and then it would just get some roadblock that, like, oh, we don’t have budget, or you’re like, you know, blah. And then those were the times that I would either leave the organization or look for something else because I was like, no one’s actually investing in me. So it’s like, oh, I felt a bit like I’m adding value to them, but not really someone’s having my back. And I don’t know if that’s the right mindset to have, but these were the challenges that I faced. Like, how do you improve your craft yet be paid for it and add value to the business and then grow there? And I don’t know if I have a good answer there. And I’ve seen some of my colleagues really succeed in having investment from the organization they worked and so forth. So that’s my journey and the roadblocks that I’ve had to get into design and be employed. The other challenge has been, in fact, sharing, demonstrating the value of design for some companies that aren’t as design mature as you would aspire to be in your head. To be honest, there are very few design mature organizations in the world. And as much as I would love to be a part of that, you also have to understand that’s not practical. And there are other businesses that want to be successful through design, but they’re not going to be as mature as you believe that, you know, you want it to be. So now it’s like, find. And I think it’s a challenge, not a blocker, because it’s like setting the right expectation in your mind and also articulating to the business that where do you want to go? And, you know, how can you get, how can I help the business get there or the team? And that’s been a really hard conversation with some businesses that I work with and personally I don’t know. I need to get better at this. I sometimes bail too early. Yep. Pull the pin. But I think that’s. Yeah, I think setting expectations is very important, especially when, you know, when I look back at all of the businesses that you’ve been with, some of, like, really, really large global businesses, just being able to be heard within those spaces must have been, like, such a grind. So good for you, for, you know, just keeping on going. And at the end of the day, if you just come back to your craft, you can’t really go wrong. It’s, you know, you’ve got to compromise in some aspects, but also have, have big, hairy goals for other bits. Yeah. Yeah. And I think some, like, if you look at my pattern and you probably have done it, one of my design managers where I started, he asked me this question, and even my grandfather used to ask this question, do you want to be the head of a mouse or a tail of a lion? And it’s a really interesting question because based on where you are in your life, you have different answers to that. And I’ve always had this as a guiding question because sometimes you want safety, sometimes you want to take risk and changes the way you are, and sometimes you just want to be ahead of a mouse and just run around and, like, you know, break things. But sometimes you just, like, you know, when I had my kids, I probably wanted a bit more safety and, and these organizations change again. You need to be happy what you’re doing, whether you’re, and I believe a lot in your early part of your career, you want to do a lot of practical examples of working on solutions a lot more, where you come to a stage where, like, yeah, I’ve done that enough. Now I want to get to the next stage of how do you frame. So I am very grateful for all the experiences that I’ve had throughout my life in having had to try these different projects and applications and so forth. So no regrets. Yeah, I think even though it might be, like, really tough in the moment, a lot of those things are just building blocks to build you up into, you know, where you’re meant to be heading. Yeah, I guess it would be good to know as well. Like, you mentioned that proverb, which I will ponder over the next week or so. Thank you. Is there anything that you like to do to, you know, build up that resilience, or if you’re feeling a bit flat, like, to spark that creativity and motivation? Actually, I should give some credit to one of our HR person, Tennille Humphrey, at rate my agent, she’s recently started this project called the Resilience Project at the organization. And it’s been really good. It’s really good. And my key takeaway, which in some aspects, when I was growing up in India, we had a different outlook towards life. And even my parents and my family had that attitude towards life, is like, be grateful for what you have, rather than looking for what you don’t have. And right now, over the last couple of months, we’ve been actually doing this in practice, where we start writing the three things that you’re glad about rather than what you don’t have. And it’s such a good way to start your day or start a design process or something. And I’ve been trying to adapt that to something called gratrospective. So gratitude plus retrospective. So look back, but then look into what you had rather than what you didn’t have. But acknowledge it’s a fine balance because you don’t want to be just giving gratitude and like, sit on your laurels because you do want to challenge yourself as well. But as human beings, we sometimes are very good at finding the black spot on a white paper rather than looking at the white paper. So it’s trying to find that balance. Currently practicing journaling and writing, and that’s been one of my constant. Another constant in my journey in design is visually externalizing my thoughts, either through writing or sketching or sometimes I fiddle with my guitar. It is externalizing what you’re thinking. And the more you sit and chew on things, you go into a negative headspace. And I also have the self rule that I use is like, consumption to creation ratio. So what are you consuming? What are you creating? Right? Because you don’t want to spend a lot of time sitting on social media and blah, blah, blah and consuming a lot of artifacts or content. And your creation is so low, and then you’re in this paralysis state. It’s like, oh, there’s so much thing. I don’t know what else to do. So on a weekly basis, I try to balance that. It’s like maybe 30 percentage consumption. And then I try to do 70% of creation, which could be writing it. Write down what you just consumed, and that just helps you balance your brain on. And it just is, to me, it’s been working a lot. And I even looking back at my design career, that’s how I would look at some. How do you do a sketch marker? Like, you know, how do you do that? And then you have to practice a lot. And I think Mister Miyagi in karate Kid said that a lot. You know, wax on, wax off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about the content in, but also the content out side of things. Like I raise my hand. I actually, I’ve been pretty good. One of my 2024 goals was I deleted, I removed the Facebook app and the Instagram app off my home screen. So I have to be very intentional when I want to go on there. I can’t, you know, just, I would just find myself opening Instagram and being on there for 20 minutes without even realizing what I’m doing. Yeah, that has now just gone to TikTok anyway. But for the other ones I feel really good about, you know, I’ve just, I’ve taken them away from and I have to be an intentional to go on there. But I think there’s something to be said about like quality versus quantity as well. There’s just so much content that floats around on no matter what device or, you know, and even like what books and magazines to read. Like it’s a. Yeah, a really interesting concept to be really intentional with what you are consuming. And then how does that impact what you’re then creating? Correct. Yeah, I’m gonna have to. You’re giving me all of these nuggets of information today that I’m just like, okay, I know that I’m gonna be pondering that for the next couple of weeks, but I think the consumption to creation the way I think about it, right. It’s the same that you do to your body, right. If you eat a lot of bad food and not exercise, you’re gonna have a health, bad health outcome. Right. But it isn’t the same thing you do to your brain which is one of the biggest, largest organ in your body. Your putting in a lot of information. But the brain actually operates by not just consuming the information but it’s also is looking for a channel to externalize it too. So either by speaking or even like I think that’s, that’s how I think about it. So as a living organism, you need to balance what you take and what you give. And it’s a life philosophy probably even like what do you take, what do you give, what do you consume, what do you create? Like, you know, so that’s probably how I look at it from at a philosophical level. No. Super interesting. And is there any like any content or any like books or I don’t know, YouTube creators or like anyone that you follow or any content that you like to consume? Throughout your day to day. Yeah. So I listen to Shane Parsh’s knowledge project and I listen to dollars to donut by Steve Portugal. Those are few of my go to podcasts. And I have this life philosophy where if it needs to come to you, it’ll come to you. Right. So I rely on my product managers and my design colleagues and others who curate things and recommend things to me. So for example, recently someone would say, hey, in Lenny’s podcast, this series was really good, so you should listen to that. So I would rely on that. So I rely on people to curate and give me the good content and then I would listen to that one rather than. But my go to ones are I do read, but I’m a very slow reader, so I’m not very fast and my recall is quite low as well. So I do buy a lot of books and like, I buy. Recently I’ve been reading a book called the Brand Gap and I’ve also been reading another book called success and luck. This is what I’m the good fortune and the myth of meritocracy by Robert H. Frank Luck and suck. So this has been, this something that I’m reading very slowly. It doesn’t look too chunky as well. Yeah, but the bit heavy. So you need to really, you know, slow down and think I before. So it’s not like a quick one and read and go. And some other things that I do is I go back and read some books, like for example, some of my craft books, like the design of everyday things and the classics that I just want to go back and revisit. And I still believe there’s a lot of good books that people are not reading and they’re just relying on YouTube’s and short form content. I don’t follow any of the short form content creators. I don’t know why, but I sometimes like to listen to YouTube videos of like the events, like a conference or something. For example, Justin Bauer has a good one about using data to inform your product strategy. That’s like, so there are some really good ones from mind, the product or so very curated pockets of content houses that I would go and look for. And I rely on my friends and colleagues to give me the curated one so that I don’t have to spend a lot of time digesting. So like your friends and your family and your colleagues is like your life algorithm. Like, any information that should be tailored to me will arrive to me. I guess those content creators are looking for an NP’s score of like, yeah, yeah, pretty much, I guess. And also, do you like. You’ve probably worked in so many different types of teams and companies over the years. Is there any mentors that you have gained along the way or any business leaders that you like to follow and keep tabs on? Definitely a lot of them. A few from my life in India. Shiva Kumar, he’s head of design at Royal Enfield. He’s a great philosopher. He’s also. His craft skills is amazing because he comes from temple architect family. So he. There’s a lot of care in how he does clay modeling and even how he thinks about design. So Shiva Kumar is a great person. He was my first design manager, so probably a hats off. And I learned a lot from him. Laid the foundation. Yes. And then as I joined Australia, the people who recruited me, Alistair from Dropbox, he’s now at Dropbox. And the other person was Ross Chadwick. He founded the company Kinde. He’s a CEO of that organization. He was a design manager at Atlassian when I was transitioning into Australia. And I have few more product people that I look up to. Kirsten Mann, she’s a chief product officer at Prospection. Amazing leader. And then there’s a few more design mentors. Belinda, who works at Oracle, she was my manager. And Tim. Tim, who also works at paper Giant, I think at the moment I’m not sure where he’s head of design there. These are some of the people that I look up to and they’ve been hugely impactful in my life. And there’s also one other person, Cameron Rogers, who’s at head of design at Reese. He’s been instrumental in helping me do a second ment in product management. So I did a nine month product management second minute at Reiss and I really liked that. And I really loved that company. Gave that opportunity to try a different craft and then if you feel safe, you can come back to it. So I would really encourage people to look at Reese as a business that values transition a lot. And they do have a lot of programs for entry level grads to get in and try out different things. So that’s that. I think more australian businesses should be doing that. Yeah. Yeah. The ability to, like, add a few different skills to your bow, I guess, would be, and I think as well, most design and product teams in Australia, other than your massive atlassians and canvas and such, they’re pretty agile, they’re pretty small. So the fact that they’re investing in that is pretty incredible. Yeah. Thanks for the shout out. Yeah. And I like to end the podcast with one of my favorite questions. And I will say that you have given quite a bit of fantastic advice during this chat. So I want to ask you one last time, if you could give, give your younger self any career advice, what would that be? Put the donkey last. And I don’t know if you would understand that. Is that lost in translation? Please explain. Yes. So while we were growing up in India, my native language is Malayalam and we grew up learning English as our first language, official language, and our teachers considered to learn English. So we would always say, I and my friend would go to this, so we would put I first. And that’s in our language, we put us first. Right. And one of the things they say is that I, the ego is the donkey. Right? So put the donkey last. Right. Or put your ego last. So that I would probably put it this way. So the way they wanted us to remember that is, it’s like my friend and I, my, you know, that’s so the I comes last. Yeah. And it was a big lesson for me as a nine year old because there was like, put yourself last. And the way they would say is like the I in. I don’t know why they considered it to be a donkey, but it’s basically the ego is usually called as the stubbornness. Right. Donkeys are usually considered to be stubborn and not moving. So the idea is that the ego in you should be the last thing that you pay attention to. So I think the advice that I would give my younger self is put yourself last, Jitesh. But I still struggle with it because it’s a very hard, I think it’s instinctual to put yourself because survival. Right. But, you know, if you can consciously try to put yourself last through your craft everywhere, I think you would be better in what you do. And I try to do that, but I’m not really successful. And my younger self, I would give the same advice. Put yourself last. Yeah. Thank you for explaining that. I think, yeah, with the context, that is such a sweet story. And I think that’s something that we can all probably take two cent of. I know for me personally, I spend most of my day on LinkedIn. It is so hard to not compare yourself to lots of other people and what they’re doing. And so, yeah, taking your ego out of it, it’s so much easier said than done, but still, fantastic advice no matter what industry you’re in. So thank you so much for joining us, Jitesh. Really appreciate your time and really loved hearing more about how you got to where you’re at and all the bumps along the way. Thank you so much, Ellen. And I’m so grateful for you having me here. Thank you. Thank you.