Srikanth's Blog

As planned and committed, here's my 100th post. Here's why I started blogging. To work on my writing, build discipline, and gradually develop my book projects. I'm in the process of developing a daily writing practice. It's been around three months I started this blog and I think it was quite an intense experience in terms of staying committed to the goal and moving towards the target one post at a time. I enjoyed the writing process, accomplished the goal, and also generated lots of new ideas for my book projects.  Well, initially I had a plan to publish only 50 posts. However, midway I completed this goal and changed the target to 100 posts .  Here's what I learned.  You have to show up on the bad days. I have started to treat my writing as a task and not overthink in terms of my voice and outcome. Once you decouple output from outcome, things become easier. In fact I strongly feel the outcomes get better when you decouple, detach, and move on to the next idea. I ...

Questions are for prospects who are seasoned professionals. However, you can modify these questions for new entrants in the job market. In hiring, context is everything. So questions should be adapted to meet your specific business context, culture, and environment. The idea is to assess candidate's future potential, values alignment, leadership quotient, holistic personality alignment, and how they envision themselves in their future workplace. Here are 10 questions you should ask as a hiring manager. 1) What are your values? 2) What is your life's work? Unless it's personal. (Assess trajectory, potential, and alignment) 3) What is your most significant achievement so far? 4) What are the 5 things you have learnt in your career so far? Life Lessons. 5) Who are our competitors and why do you think so? 6) Why did you choose a job over entrepreneurship? 7) What's the one thing that can improve our product, service, or brand and why? 8) Apart from your work identity, who a...

The average career span in our lifetime is 30 - 35 years or so. If you spend three years in a company, it’s 10% of your life. If you spend one year, it’s 3.33% of your life. Changing jobs is a highly contextual and personal experience. I'm not advocating for anything here. The idea is to only spotlight. Time is your most precious asset. By all means, choose to work with companies that are aligned to your values, those that respect your value, and are also doing some meaningful work from a societal standpoint. Focus on building diverse skills, a learning mindset, and explore the possibility of being a multipotentialite. Smart companies and hiring managers focus on the current and future potential of a prospect. While you work for the company, ensure the company is also working for you. Think deeply and strategically about your tenure at an organization. In this VUCA world, it’s in your best interest to build your own identity. It’s a huge risk to build an identity totally based on ...

Success is a definition and it should be absolutely yours to define. Most people are swayed by the society’s themes and definition of success, and in turn they fall into the trap of constantly comparing with other people. The society’s definition is in its own interest. Like individuals, I think the society too, has a survival mechanism and there’s a demand to constantly influence individuals to work for the system, in the sole interest of its continuity. When individuals are successful, the collective is naturally successful, contributing to real societal progress. I think each and everyone should think for themselves, identify goals, define success, and accordingly measure success. Success is subjective. You should define your version. What does success mean to you? I think the quality of your sleep is a good way to measure some degree of success. If you’re able to rest well, it means the body and mind are in union and you’re working towards your goals, living well, doing your best, ...

There are best practices and then there are new practices. If we only follow best practices, how can one develop new practices? Today’s best practice was once a new practice. For whatever reason, someone had the courage or was just curious to challenge the status quo, experiment, iterate and replace an existing best practice. Or someone was naive and ignorant of the so-called rules and by sheer accident they created a new set of rules which eventually turned into a best practice that you’re following today. Well, it's safe and common sense to follow best practices in most aspect of your life. You don't want to create new practices in areas where your life depends best practices and a set of predefined rules. For example swimming, flying an aircraft, or driving a car. Only domain experts can propose new practices in this context. For everyone else, you have to follow the rulebook. There's no question about it. However this is not the case in every line of work. For example i...

Perfection is a sophisticated form of procrastination. Progress is a simple form of determination. Don’t overthink and stay paralysed, when you can accomplish your tasks, projects, goals, and dreams through consistent progress. Try, fail, explore, learn, and iterate on your work and move ahead. The more your work, the better you can think and churn out high quality work. Don't suffer from the perfection syndrome. Move ahead! If you don’t allow the mind to consistently function, it won’t reach its optimum level of output. Focus on progress, be it even as little as 0.1% of your work every day, you should do it. For example, if you want to write a book, at least start with the title, few chapter names, or start jotting down your ideas, and don’t wait for the perfect day to write and become an Author. You’ll become an author, if you work towards it and not just dream towards it. Perfection is an outcome of progress, if at all there's something called perfection in the first place. ...

This post is a chapter from my book The User Experience Consultant: 10 Reasons Why UX Designers Should Consider a Career in Consulting Chapter 3: Adventure Every day, there’s a new challenge to be solved. Consultants work with clients to solve big problems that can have a direct and positive impact on their business. It’s an adventure out there. A new domain, a new market, a new set of users, new set of processes to understand, and new things to learn with every new project. I beg to differ that product companies are more interesting and challenging for UX designers, because everything is more or less sorted — well, at least with the large product firms. Once you solve the big problem and the core product is built, where is the adventure? All else that remains is building on top of that fundamental user experience and doing patch work, day in and day out. You’re basically moving pixels, not people. Not everyone gets a chance to be in the initial development of the product. Only the fou...

AI is the best thing that has happened to the UX industry. It is helping us to focus on the really important things — the ones we should have focused on, in the first place. UX isn’t over. In fact it’s just getting started. The new AI era is a seminal event for the industry, separating the wheat from the chaff. UX is serious business and demands collaborative and multidisciplinary thinkers. The 10 important things you can and should do as a UX practitioner in the new era of AI. Here's how you still add value. 1) Facilitate design workshops to discover problems, generate ideas collaboratively and solve the right problems, early on. (Facilitating a workshop is a key skills for a UX practitioner) 2) Talk business through design. Show the value of your design in terms of real business for your stakeholders. Build the capability to talk design at three levels. The Developer level, the Product Managerial level, and the Executive level. (Levels of conversations shows your levels of thinki...

Anyone who is exploring new things, doing something different, learning a new skill, progressing and advancing into new territories, is compelled to experience an imposter syndrome. You start to feel like a fraud, self-doubt creeps in and you question yourself. This is inevitable, when you see progress in your life, because you have never seen this particular progress before. It's called progress for a reason. I think, no matter at what stage you are in building a new skill, you tend to feel like an imposter. From beginners to masters, everyone needs to embrace the imposter syndrome. This syndrome is here to stay as long as you’re challenging yourself, changing, advancing and venturing into higher levels in your work. I think there’s a high probability that anyone who hasn’t experienced an imposter syndrome is a real imposter. The syndrome itself is a good sign that you're not one. Once you set yourself on a path to mastery — at every stage, you’re stepping into a new world whe...

The fundamental problem in India is talking about work in number of days and not hours. If you look at the Americans, they talk about work only in terms of hours. I have noticed that when we are asked about work estimation or completion timelines of a specific project or task, we quote the time in days and not hours. This includes me as well. It's about time, we make a radical change in the way we look at work. We need to reason from first principles in solving our fundamental problems. The way we do business and run the economy needs a total change.  Tasks can't be estimated in days or weeks. We need to be laser focused when we estimate our work. There's immense talent and potential in India, but what's lacking is the work ethic. Most people are notorious for showing up late at meetings or appointments, and show little respect for time. Time is the ultimate currency, no matter how much talent we have at our disposal. The rapid rise of GCC investments in India is a sign...