7 July 2022

New design job

After 6+ months of personal sabbatical, I’m joining Harbor as Founding Lead Designer

After 6+ months of personal sabbatical, I’m joining Harbor as Founding Lead Designer

TL;DR:

I am a Digital Product Designer and have been designing professionally for over 10+ years. Last year in November 2021, I took a 6-month personal sabbatical before starting to look for my next design role.

Fast forward to 6+ months of my sabbatical and a few weeks of job hunting in May this year, I found the best fit for myself at Harbor and joining them as Founding Lead Designer starting July 2022.

A brief history of my design career so far

College days

I, like most Indian teenagers, opted for engineering in college. But I didn’t opt for just any major. I was very much into cars back then (I still am). So I chose Automotive Engineering as my major.

College days

But soon after my 1st year of college, I realized that most of the things that were being taught there, were just theory and the curriculum wasn’t designed to gain real world experiences. Plus, each semester, I kept failing in more papers. So for the remaining time of my college, I didn’t study much and spent most of my time playing football and figuring out 2D & 3D design tools - At the end of the 4th year, I had 15+ backlogs to clear but a decent design portfolio.

1st job

Because of a design portfolio and a few of my work being published in national & international media, I landed a gig with a startup in my last semester of college, with the responsibility of designing their B2C healthcare app. While I enjoyed designing the product, the startup seemed to lack focus and a bias towards action. So I knew I had to secure myself a better job before my college ends.

1st startup job - designing their B2C healthcare app 1st startup job - designing their B2C healthcare app

2nd job

Meanwhile, one of my best friend got placed in an advertising company (VDX.tv) and had told me good things about the company culture. So I prototyped my way into this job as a UI designer with a decent pay - courtesy of a re-branding project I did for the company and my design portfolio that I emailed directly to the CEO.

Some UI work I did at VDX.tv (called Exponential previously) Some UI work I did at VDX.tv (called Exponential previously)

I worked there for a year and realized that there was not much room for me there to grow as a Product Designer because the company was designed to serve advertising clients primarily. It wasn’t a typical product company that I had hoped for. Although the company had a splendid creative team, designing ads for clients all over the world - it wasn’t something that I wanted to do. So I decided to move on.

3rd job

I started interviewing with a few companies and luckily, Wingify, a bootstrapped & very well known Indian company who makes VWO.com clicked. I joined them as a Product Designer.

VWO’s mobile AB testing feature that I worked during my 1st year VWO’s mobile AB testing feature that I worked during my 1st year

At Wingify, I worked on their flagship product for about a year and later moved to their Labs division - created to experiment with new B2B & B2C ideas. It was an amazing time for me at Wingify Labs as I was truly building 0 → 1 products. Over the next 2 years, I worked on 8 different projects, ranging from a product to discover books (similar to GoodReads), a marketplace for luxury boutiques & designers, a subscription-based news product, a few more SaaS ideas, and also a hardware project to digitally frame your pictures.

4th job

My experience with building multiple 0 → 1 products at Wingify Labs and a new found love towards it, led me to join a very small but fully distributed company called SellerCrowd in 2018.

Glimpse of SellerCrowd’s OrgChart that I helped the company redesign among all the other features Glimpse of SellerCrowd’s OrgChart that I helped the company redesign among all the other features

SellerCrowd was a SaaS tool that helped sellers in the advertising industry find industry insights via a Q&A-based feed (kind of like Quora). During my time at SellerCrowd, I helped the company redesign the product from scratch, setting up & scaling their design system, talking to users, writing product requirements in collaboration with PMs, ensuring pixel-perfect implementation in collaboration with devs and QAs. The team was lean. People were friendly and very collaborative. We had multiple get-togethers in various locations in Europe/Asia. We laughed with each other but also challenged each other at work. I loved my time there and feel grateful for the opportunity.

SellerCrowd’s team photo from our offsite in Lisbon in 2018 SellerCrowd’s team photo from our offsite in Lisbon in 2018

After working for about 4 years at SellerCrowd, I felt I had done justice to the role that I was hired for. The product was out of 0 → 1 design phase and demanded more maintenance work & tweaking. It was then that I decided to move on and find another 0 → 1 journey to be a part of.

The sabbatical

The idea of mini-retirements was always on my mind, especially after reading the book “The 4-hour Work Week” during my college days. So when I decided to leave SellerCrowd, I took a pause and contemplated on whether to start job hunting immediately or take that break I’ve always been dreaming about.

After discussing my plans with my wife, carefully assessing my finances to make sure I had a proper runway, I decided to take the leap of faith and go on my first ever personal sabbatical for 6 months. The rationale I had in my mind was simple: “I’ve worked straight for 10 years, I deserve to take 6 months off.”

Picture of me working on side projects and enjoying my sabbatical in mountains of north India Picture of me working on side projects and enjoying my sabbatical in mountains of north India

The goal of my sabbatical was simple. Take rest. Don’t think about work. Let new ideas come naturally for new side projects. And work on my personal website which also acts as my portfolio - so it’s ready when I start my job hunt after 6 months.

You can read more about the Why, How, and What of my sabbatical in this detailed writeup but here’s a summary of what I did in the last 6 months:

Entering job hunt phase

Throughout my sabbatical, I kept my personal website as my priority vs. side projects because I knew I had to go back to a full-time job. By the end of 6 months, I was comfortable to start applying to companies and chat about my new role.

Strategically, I was also building my personal site in public i.e. I was sharing updates of my work progress on my socials - that attracted a lot of potential employers to my DMs. They reached out explicitly mentioning how they liked my website and my work, and that they’d like to chat with me about a potential design role.

My personal website

My biggest advice here to people starting to look out for a change:

Never underestimate putting your work out. You never know who might come across your work on the internet.

What kind of companies I wanted to work with?

I was chatting with most companies / founders reaching out to me because I wanted to stay in “explore” mode for a couple of weeks before narrowing down on the type of companies. But even then, I was very clear on which type of companies / founders I wanted to work with. Few of the core characteristics that I was looking for were:

Company culture is important too

Apart from the product and the company, it’s also important for me to work with kind & humble people. I’d take kindness & humility any given day vs. smart but cocky team members. So, alongside the core characteristics I mentioned above, there were a few values around culture that I used to filter companies. I even ended up making a slide for me and employer’s clarity:

Slide I made for me and employer’s clarity Slide I made for me and employer’s clarity

No industry preference is the best preference you can have as a designer.

Another important preference that I always had while job hunting was to not limit myself to any specific industry. Like I know a ton of designers who only want to work in fintech, food-tech, transportation, etc.

Why I haven’t made that distinction for myself is for a simple reason: I am a builder & problem solver first. Think of me as a plumber. Now, if I restrict myself to only fix taps of specific kind, I am only limiting my ability to gain experience in fixing taps of all kinds. And that’s why I want to keep my industry type preference “open”. This allows me to be open to new industries and go there with the intention solving problems and not playing favorites towards a specific industry.

What was the design interview process like?

The interview rounds in most companies that I talked to consisted of 3-4 rounds.

  1. Intro call: A basic meet & greet call where both parties casually chat about the role, what they're looking for from each other, and gauge whether there's a mutual fit. This call usually lasts for about 30-60 mins.

    Note: At this stage I'd discuss compensation with the founders to avoid spending a lot of time in interview rounds and finding that the company doesn't have the budget to hire me. I always suggest to talk commercials right in the intro call if you're not in a rush to close a job.

  2. Design portfolio walkthrough: If we both feel there’s a mutual fit, in this round I’d present my past design work to a few team members. The call will most definitely consist of a hiring manager, founder(s) if they’re interested, and a few team members. During the presentation, I give them a walkthrough of my design process and 1 or 2 case studies. The call is supposed to demonstrate my design skills to the team & my employer.

    Things they usually look for are:

    • Communication skills: Can Sankalp communicate problems & solutions in a nice & concise way?
    • Design thinking skills: Is Sankalp asking the right questions about the problem? How does he approach critical thinking?
    • Team collaboration & feedback: Who did Sankalp collaborate with on the project and how did he work with them? How did Sankalp react to feedback or provide feedback to team members?
    • Ownership mindset or requires micro-management: Can Sankalp own projects as Lead Product Designer and see them through completion or will he require micro management from leaders / team members to figure things out.
    • UI / execution skills: Once Sankalp has identified problems and has a plan to execute, how does he execute the project? What does his final hi-fi mockup looks like? How does he do dev handoff?

  3. Team call: If all goes well and I am able to convince the team or the founder(s) that I can execute ideas with no hand holding, there’s usually a round with other team members. Here, again, both the parties are trying to gauge how they both would feel working with each other on a daily basis. There can be some repeat questions from round 1 & 2 but it’s for everyone’s benefit.

    Since both of them will spend a good amount of time working with each other, liking each other is as a human being is very important.

  4. Final round with founders: If both parties give a go ahead from the team call round, there’ll be a final round with the founder(s). This is mostly to just discuss compensation and other details of contract.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst

Almost all the companies that I talked to during my job hunt had all these rounds in place. Some skipped the 3rd round i.e. team round as they’d be present in design portfolio round and didn’t feel the need to introduce more members to gauge. But worth highlighting that I was quite comfortable in all these rounds. A few key reasons were:

I think showing up as who you are and speaking your mind in interviews is very underrated and I hear people fail miserably to land a job because they’re trying to be someone that they’re not. You can’t fake your way into a company. Good founders are great interviewers and can catch when you’re faking it.

After spending about 4-5 effective weeks and chatting with about 12 companies around the world, I decided to join a super early-stage startup called Harbor (Now p0.inc).

Meet Harbor (Now p0.inc)

Harbor’s product vision Harbor’s product vision

Harbor is a testing infrastructure company in the web3 space. The company is aiming to provide production-ready staging environments for web3 companies so they can run full-fledged integration tests, bug bashes and collaborate easily between disparate team members.

Why I’m joining Harbor?

What’s next?

We’re hiring

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"Do it with all your heart, or don't do it at all." ✨
Wireframed, designed, prototyped, and hand-coded by Sankalp with extreme love, care, and passion for design.