Anamorphic by @kingsidharth

What happens when you get three women leaders on a panel to talk about #design, leadership, #culture, hiring, team-building, and better representation? You get an hour and a half of awesome conversation! 

In the 4th edition of industry roundtable, we'll listen to — Geetaa Bhatt (Head of Design @ Clevertap), Aastha Gaur (UX Lead @Google), and Karthi (Founder @ Xperian) about their experience of 10+ years, building teams, the leaders that pushed them to become leaders, and how they are investing & growing the next generation of leaders. 

Karthi Subbaraman, Founder @ Xperian 

Karthi's career spans over 20 years. She started her career as a Software engineer and later became a designer HP. She'd go on to work with many big names in the industry and become a visiting faculty at NID and MIT. 

Her recent venture is Xperia, where she teaches Product Design & Product Management to the next generation of designers and product managers. 

In this episode of Anamorphic, we have an excerpt from an Instagram live with Punit Chawala. He's a UX Manager at Magic Bricks and runs a popular design channel with over 20k subs.

You can find Punit Chawla on 

How does Google hire designers? What's the hiring & interview process like? How can one improve their chances of getting through? Does portfolio matter? is it necessary for a designer?

How do you convince business and stakeholders to focus on delivering real design value instead of focusing on short-term and aesthetics?

Hardik Pandya, a product designer at Google, answered these and many more questions on Instagram live.

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Hardik Pandya is a Designer at Google:

While each one of us is born naturally curious, the education system & our mental-models, that our society runs on, train it out of us. Owning and honing this curiosity can change our lives — especially in the age of the internet.  

With the internet, education yourself and building a career & wealth has become the easiest it has ever been. You can pick-up any soft-skill, learn a language, learn to design, build an app, learn programing, find jobs and freelance gigs across the world, collaborate with folks, or even network and build a brand.  We can either use the internet to stalk our crushes and ex-s or use to our advantage.  

My journey with curiosity & internet led me to try out my hands at the business starting at the age of 12, and then being a part of Indian startup ecosystem with Instamojo (2012-2019) and now across the world with Headout. Working startups & building industry-changing products is my calling.   

Startups create wealth — and wealth is better than selling time to get money. However, wealth & success both are subjective — for some, it can be owning shares, IPs, or degrees, for others, it can be a stable relationship, living a healthy & natural life. So how do you find and define your criteria of success? How do you #findyourpassion?   

The first step is to expose yourself to various ideas until you start getting interested in something. You can use the internet to do this — Wikipedia & YouTube is your friend here. (both free!)   

The second step is to try and invest effort into your interest and gain some skill & experience — you can find tutorials & people online to help you with this. 

 Once we start putting effort and see the results — that's when half the "interest" drop from viable options. Some that stick will turn into a passion as you continue to invest focus & time in it.   In the world where most mundane jobs will be taken over by AI, just a college degree won't be enough. 

More and more startups & jobs will revolve around multi-disciplinary people. Don't wait for a sign form the universe — skills & learnings compound over time — startup today.   

--- Speech by King Sidharth at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore on 22 Feb 2020.  

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