Very Good morning. For years we’ve been living in the age of “Peak” something. Peak oil. Peak earth metals. Peak coffee. Peak coal. Peak office. Inside virtually most of India’s and Southeast Asia’s most ambitious digital businesses, there is another peak. Peak Designer. There are just not enough designers relative to the demand that exists for them. Google India has been unable to fill a vacancy of a mid-level UI (user interface) designer for several months now. As a result, there is a mad rush to “become” a designer. This isn’t new. Every time a new tech career has become valuable, there has been a mushrooming of institutes, courses, and training programs that help eager professionals acquire the coveted tag they seek. Java developer. Project manager. Oracle architect. Crypto engineer. Product designer. With too few colleges turning out too few qualified designers (an estimated 2% of applicants get a seat at India’s best design colleges), the supply side has been busted open with online courses, weekend meet-ups, and glitzy DIY portfolios. This is naturally leading to a lowering of what used to be fairly strict standards of who got to be called a “designer”. Hiring managers are faced with both a shortage of designers and a glut of candidates, through which they sift through. Experienced and talented designers, meanwhile, have another problem. Not many are able to break through to the business or C-suite side of things in spite of the criticality of design for most organizations. The role most suited for many designers to consider a transition to, argues our guest contributor Sridhar Dhulipala, is that of a Product Manager. "Typical product managers weighed down by technical debt and engineering pressure bias ingrained from years of risk-averse release management, tend to plan incremental changes to products in the roadmaps they draw, reflected in the decimal numbering of versions ie. V1.02, V1.03, V 1.1 and so on. Designers entering into product management can stimulate innovation to a greater degree given their mindset and tolerance for ambiguity, desire to think outside the box,” says Our Sheela. Organizations should think of designers as potential business leaders as well. With a nearly three-decade career in design, Sheela has had a ringside view of how the profession—and by extension, designers—have evolved. He says that design firms and product organizations need to realize that nurturing design talent and evolving the craft aren’t mutually exclusive goals. Instead, they’re both necessary for design to make the next leap in India and Southeast Asia.
