Niyati Gupta: Netflix Product Design Lead on what happens when a designer becomes a product manager, and why your influence might not be in your title

0:02I still feel like as a designer, the user in the room is still your biggest influence. Bringing back the user perspective and the authority there, it is changing now just because you're so experimental now. But there is still something about that user motivation and perspective that you bring to the table that will never be refutable in terms of building influence. Niyati Gupta describes her career as one long experiment, deliberately putting herself in uncomfortable, ambiguous situations and treating every move as a personal learning loop. That instinct took her from a bachelor's degree in design inside of one of India's most prestigious engineering colleges, where almost nobody understood what design was, to a research role at Carnegie Mellon, where she studied health info needs for low-literacy users in rural India, to Autodesk's BioNano Innovation Lab, building molecular visualization tools for scientists.

1:06And eventually she landed at Google, where she joined the Next Billion Users team. That team's mission was to ask an open question. Where would the next wave of users come from for Google? And what did they need? And what products didn't exist yet to serve them? Nyati ran immersion sprints in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and Mexico, shadowing users, building prototypes in the field, testing them in the wild, and bringing those insights back to a team that was building products like Camera Go and Google Files from the ground up. And she'll tell you that the swim lanes between designers and engineers and PMs felt just as artificial out there in the field as they do today with AI accelerating everything.

1:53Aarron Walter:These days, she's a senior product designer at Netflix, working on commerce and partnerships, which means thinking hard about discovery, fandom, and how you help someone decide what to watch on a Friday night without making them feel like choosing is harder than watching, which, if you have kids, is a constant battle. It also means designing across a 10-foot TV screen, a phone, and every device in between, and trying to make all of it feel like one seamless experience. In this conversation, we'll get into what NextBillionUser's work taught her about designing for people who aren't like you, how she thinks about influence, and why she's convinced the title was never where the influence actually lived, and what Netflix's design culture looks like from the inside, including how they run crits and how they think about A-B testing.

2:36Aarron Walter:This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

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3:58We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

4:08And now, back to the show.

4:15Nyati Gupta, welcome to Design Better. Hi, so excited to be here. Yeah, so you're at Netflix these days. I had a realization as we were preparing for this interview that I wanted to share with you. I have been a Netflix customer for 27 years. Wow. So since the very beginning. And I think that is an uninterrupted account. So that's kind of amazing. Oh, we're so happy to have you. It was so many years. Yeah. So you've worked across a number of different companies on different types of projects and initiatives. You've been at Autodesk, at the Innovation Lab, Google, where you had an interesting foray from design into PM.

5:03And we want to talk about that because that's fascinating. You worked on Next Billion Users there, which is sort of like emerging markets. I always find it fascinating to say Next Billion Users. It's a very grandiose title for a project. But you were at Meta with WhatsApp. And these days you're at Netflix. You're a senior product designer. When you look at this arc of your career and you stitch it all together, what's the through line that you didn't see at the time but is obvious to you now? I call my career one long experiment of trying new things, experimenting, failing, learning, and putting myself in uncomfortable situations and just being okay with that.

5:47So I started as an accidental engineer because back in India, back then, nobody knew what to do with the designer. So I just ended up coding and learning about how things are built. But since I've come to US, I really deliberately put myself in ambiguous rooms like incubator, innovation lab, early stages teams, where NBU, for example, Next Billion User, it was designing 0 to 1 for a market that we've never been to. Realized ambiguity, there was not an obstacle. It was where the most interesting design happens. One of my biggest experiment was becoming a PM for a few years. Not because I was done with design, I was unhappy, but because I genuinely had this hypothesis about myself and I really needed to test it.

6:29I'd already been stretching into PM territory at Next Billion users, writing specs, pitching leadership, owning outcomes. So I just went deep. I went to Google Meet during pandemic with about 40 % team and features that needed to be shipped yesterday. Amazing learning experience and it confirmed both why I went and why I came back. Then all these experiments kind of end and I take a decision at the end, but I call them my personal learning loops. Every move taught me something that the previous role couldn't.

7:00Aarron Walter:There's a number of things we want to touch on there, but I wanted to stay for a moment in your kind of early design career or maybe even the educational portion. So before we hit record, we were talking about design in India and the fact that kind of surprisingly to us, our second largest audience outside the US is in India for Design Better. And I'm curious, you know, one of the folks I used to teach with, Bill Burnett, had mentioned, this was maybe 10 years ago, that the Indian government was investing a lot in design and design education. So talk to us a little bit about how, you know, the kind of design is perceived in India, what's happening with that government investment?

7:35It's changed so much since I was there. I did a course, which was called Bachelor's in Design, which was probably the most unique that existed, but also it existed inside IITs, which is one of the biggest tech institutes in India. I was doing design inside an engineering college where nobody understood what it was. So gradually, my design was more tech focused, But we were also taking courses like typography and photography to just have that create aspect. Now it has changed that a lot of these colleges do offer a bachelor's or a master's in design. And it has really taken a shape and visibility because not just that there are more of us and more of us advocating for it, but we've seen it work in companies as well.

8:22There are really good startups and that really kind of thrived with design being there and they were very design led. It's not a path that you just keep designing, but there is a path to leadership. There's a path to growing as well as with any other role. There are big tech companies coming into India and investing a lot. You will see Anthropic going in right now, but there are other companies who've really invested and brought people and hired those roles in India. So definitely people are seeing viability in a career, but also the promise of this is amazing. And coming from like a tech background and engineering focus, people are also seeing that there are alternatives to it.

9:04You can be very different kinds of designer. You don't have to be one kind of designer as well. So people are seeing all that and it has really transformed. It is a big conversation. You see some of the big conferences happening in India, like Design Up is great. So there's a community that is very, very strong back there. I keep going back. I'm in touch with a lot of these. But also it is still a niche and small community. We know a lot of others because it's still growing, but not that big. But 10 years ago, I actually knew every designer in the company because they were either coming from my college or a few other colleges that are in India.

9:38So, yeah, you'll see a lot of it. And obviously, AI is shifting that a lot as well as to how the conversation is going. It's fascinating. I love that you just described the college that there's design inside of an engineering-led college. It prepares you perfectly for the real world because that's what most companies look like. Yeah, didn't know that back then. Yeah, but it does make me think of Google, which is founded by engineers. It's got a very engineering culture, although I will say I think it is the largest number of designers under one brand. Granted, they're spread across a lot of different products.

10:14Let's talk a little bit about your time at Google because it's a fascinating organization. And Next Billion users, you mentioned that this was something that you were very passionate about. What was it about that project that you were so passionate about? And what'd you learn from it? It is definitely my longest and my best time there. You rarely get to be in that big company and creating something zero to one. And I got to do that multiple times. The charter of that whole team was to really think about where would our next set of users going to come from, what markets, what products, what is this now exist, you could grow those in your own teams.

10:54But what are those big bets that we could be thinking about? Also, think about the market really deeply, and what is unique in terms of problems they're facing, things we can solve for them. So it was an incubator is what about growth that was not about incremental growth, it was about really, looking at big picture, but also really solving for what was in the market. So we were not dealing with problems like how do we get to search better, but we're dealing with problems like connectivity, connection, data, the real constraint that people are facing there and really drive from it. The team worked very differently.

11:30So we were so immersed in the market. We used to do immersion sprints where we went in the market, really spent a whole week doing rapid prototyping with the users, learning from them, iterating on them, coming back. We did so many pilots with a few users. A lot of great products came out of it. Camera Go, Google Station, Google Files. And there were so many more. Google Pay, a lot of these big good products came out of it. They either were rolled in, became flagship. Some got killed as well, but it was a long experiment of things that we were trying to do, but really, really grounded in users and the insights and the regional.

12:11Give us some more detail on this. You say you went to the market. Where did you go in the world? And what were the circumstances? You also said we were immersed in the market data. Like, what was it you're taking to that place to help you understand the core problems? We still do this in a lot of different ways. But regions we were targeting were a lot of like India, Asia market, Mexico, Latin America. I have traveled to India, Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, just doing these emotions. And these emotions took a couple of flavors depending on what product and what stage that product is. But it went all the way from really doing deep dive on topical things like safety, connectivity, digital confidence, topical things that we could take back and apply to all the Google products to make them better for these markets, not just the new products or buildings.

13:08That was the first theme. The second theme went into really having themes and products and how can we make those products, pivot them, iterate on them. So one of the things I did, I ran like a four or five day immersion sprint for one of the products called Camera Go. I went to Philippines. We really did two days was just shadowing users, how they use camera, asking them questions about what they're struggling with, what they use, came back, did the two-day quick brainstorming. We built a few prototypes and then last two days were just testing those prototypes in the wild and doing like rapid prototyping.

13:43And then we came back, processed all of it and that really evolved how the product ended up being. So that was the second kind of immersion sprints. And then third was really pilot, really testing the products that we build in the wild. So one of the SMB products was we had 70 SMBs try out for two or three months a product, two diary studies, give us feedback. And that helped us kind of pivot, see how can make this better. Does this live like this? Does this change? So these were three ways we used to do this. Amazing experience for sure.

14:15Aarron Walter:We had Julie Zhu on years ago, and she spoke about some of her early days at Facebook, where they would deliberately throttle internet access for some of their product and engineering teams. So they could kind of experience like, okay, this is what it's like using this product when you're maybe in a remote area that has bad self coverage. Are there any things that you did like that to help sort of bring that experience you immersed yourself in back to your team back at home? Back at home, we used to have these actually studio setups of sorts where we had low internet connectivity set up. We had these posters of archetypes that we used to see in the market that we used to bring back to and they were really all over the floor.

14:54For us, as a constant reminder of real people, we've met and encountered that was so different from us. We also did create a lot of frameworks and things top of mind in terms of playbooks that other teams can also use. So it's not just us. with NBU because we were immersing we knew so much about how that market is so different in terms of just the infrastructure but also like how they interact with technology but a lot of other teams don't so we used to come back and do these immersions with other teams and give them these tools of these are the five things you should think about for every product you're building especially things around onboarding, navigation, account, voice, use of voice was so big, use of visuals were so big.

15:40Language, there are like so many different languages you should be thinking about. So just those topical big things that all the teams should be thinking about, we brought them back and kind of went to other teams and advocated for them. Google has this really unique program. I don't know if it's still in place, but basically allowing designers to become PMs. Was it other people could become PMs as well? Like engineers could become PMs? Anybody could. They had this PM rotation. They also had a design rotation program. So in general, Google had these rotation programs where you could just try out a different role for a couple of months or a year, depending on how much ever you want.

16:17And then you can just end up interviewing for that role if you want to convert into it, or you can go back. I want to talk about what you learned from that experience, because I know some folks at Google, we've had some inside view of how some things work. And I was struck by the designers who had been in this program that they thought about design very differently. They're always thinking about aesthetics and craft and so forth, but they were thinking about the business. They're always thinking and talking about the business in a way that the rest of the designers weren't. Almost like they're super designers because it was multiple disciplines.

16:55What did you learn from that experience? What did you come out with that you didn't have before you became a PM? Oh, so much. I think I was a different designer after the PM rotation. But also I realized doing that PM rotation, how my design background was a huge asset for it as well. And a lot of things I was doing as a PM was something I was also doing as a designer, just with the different lengths. What I brought back, one of the obvious ones is definitely business thinking, business acumen, just not thinking about the user, but also having a business perspective. And not just that I know about the business and I want to use it, but it is just the core part of how I think.

17:37It is not business versus user, but it is business and user going towards a shared goal. And that perspective really changed. And the second thing I brought back was being on the other side of the shoes. I learned fluency, how different roles speak, what they care about, what they do, sleep on. And now whenever I work with them, it's somehow easier and more organic because I understand the perspective. And when you understand a shared goal and you're driving towards a shared goal and each speak each other's language it just flows more frequently a few others that I feel like is not talked about much but I think is great I do this all the time it's just writing as a thinking skill as a designer it's so uncomfortable like visual is my thinking skill but now writing is my thinking skill and I learned this from Josh Woodward who's right now leading Gemini and labs but he used to lead the NBU before and he's a PM who's like, who has just put things on paper and just brought so much clarity and alignment to people.

18:39And that's what I do now. I just put things on paper, even like raw version and AI is lovely in helping write it even better. But writing things helps you with prioritization, alignment, everything. So just that, I feel like I've learned it so much and brought back to me.

18:54Aarron Walter:It's wonderful. If we think about sort of the product team triad of engineer, designer, PM, and the way that AI is changing those roles, there's a lot of this blending happening where as a designer, I might be able to code stuff that I couldn't code before. As an engineer, I might have access to some design tools and both those paths true for the PM too. How would you think about that? Let's say if you were to kind of rewind back to that role, but still have access to these tools, how would you think about that as a designer using these tools to become more PM or business oriented? I would talk about one of the reasons why I came back to design was this.

19:31This is pre-AI, pre-pandemic. The swim lanes were so much rigid then. I was able to see what the solution should be, but I had to explain it abstractly so the designer can create it. I just felt very backward to me. And I really missed the creation aspect, the thrill of making things. And now with AI coming in, and that was something I brought back to design as well. Like, I think the swim lanes are very artificial now. They're not rigid, they're fluid. You're all kind of owners of building a product. You're all going towards a shared goal. That kind of thinking changes your role a little bit, where you're not like, these are the five things I'm supposed to do.

20:12But I'm supposed to do whatever possible to move this forward. And that's how I think about my role now. I do come with a user lens. So that is still my priority, where I am bringing in the user perspective, their motivation, making sure the trust is not broken. It's still my prerogative, but I'm not holding myself to a swim lane where I cannot write a product spec or I cannot set up a timeline or I cannot be in a prioritization conversation because that's PM's role. I don't think that is true anymore. We all are moving so fast now with AI that those artificial swim loans are just going to slow us down.

20:50And that's not true anymore. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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