India has been a powerhouse in software engineering for decades, but it’s only in recent years that Indian schools have started producing large numbers of qualified digital product designers. As a result, senior Indian designers with the experience to drive high-value design work can be difficult or impossible to hire on the open market.
For Indian design leaders, that means the only way to scale your team’s impact is to develop talent from within, according to Gaurav Mathur of Indian e-commerce site Flipkart in our recent conversation on design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. But that in itself entails a delicate balancing act.
It can be easy for your team to get trapped in a low-impact value proposition when the team is full of rookies. Leaders must take active responsibility for the narrative of their team’s work to keep alive a higher-impact, more strategic value proposition in the minds of executives.
Beyond that, it requires constant evaluation of team abilities to be able to move quickly to elevate your key players who can model new ways of working for others. Knowing your team’s strengths and growth opportunities can help you seize the moment to strategically engage the right talent.
But the less mature your talent pool, the more mature your training, development and support systems have to be. You can’t do all of it yourself as leader, so you have to be able to scale awareness of team capabilities throughout the team.
Ultimately, success in an environment with a largely junior team comes down to building growth into your team culture, and ensuring the team continues to have opportunities to demonstrate that growth by delivering higher value.
Check out the whole conversation at the link below. Thanks Gaurav and Peter for a great conversation!
Jesse James Garrett 