EP 06 - UX Designer In Product Vs Service Based Companies | Roadmap to UX Design

Product-based company or a service-based company? As a UX designer, you might be confused about whether to work in which of this company. You might also have few basic questions around what is the roles and responsibility in each of this company, what is the growth in terms of salary, in terms of skills in either of this company. Or you may also have some basic questions such as what is the basic difference between a product-based company or a service-based company. If you have any of this question, don't worry, that's perfectly fine because I'm going to answer all these questions right now. Let's get started. Hey there, hi, Anirudh here. Welcome to my YouTube channel. This is Roadmap to User Experience Design, episode number 6. And today in this episode, I'm going to talk about all the insights around product-based company versus a service-based company, which will eventually help you decide which of this company you would want to kickstart your design career as or want to continue as your next opportunity. So let's get started with the very basic question of what is a service-based company. In order to explain that, let me demonstrate a service-based company with an example. Example, a service-based companies are basically design studios and design agency that might provide design as one of the or only solution to their client. It can also provide development, branding, marketing, and design can be a solution or a list of solution that they are providing as a design studio or design agency. For example, Lollipop Design Studio or Qberto Design Studio. The clients would get the product designed and developed from this companies or design studios, and this design studios would charge a lump sum for the entire project, or maybe a monthly retainer program based on the number of resources required. For example, 2 UX designers, 1 UI designer, 4 senior UX designers, or 2 UI designers. So based on that, the total monthly retainer program is also calculated, which is, we can say, the number of designers that is required to fulfill this solution. Client say the requirement, uh, studios do the design thing, and we are done. So getting requirement, completing the requirement, and providing back to the clients. That is what a design studio or a service-based company does in India. What is a product-based company? A product-based company has its own in-house products or all the other products that the company can use to do business with consumers or other businesses directly or indirectly. There are two main categories of product. First one, B2C, which is business to consumer, also known as D2C, which is direct to consumer. For example, food ordering app. Example, a cab booking app. Or many more. Second one, there is B2B, which is business-to-business. For example, HRMS, the HR management system, order management system, or any dashboards. Examples of product-based companies can be Ola and Uber, which owns their app and does the entire work. Google and Microsoft, that makes products that help both consumer and other businesses. Well, now that you know about the difference between a product-based company and a service-based company, let's just talk about the hiring processes in each of this company. The difference between a hiring process in a service-based company and a service-based company is not much when it comes to a surface level. For example, the total hiring process or the steps would be first the HR round. Either you go and contact to the HR or HR will come back and contact to you. That would be the very first round where the HR would try to understand your requirement, you try to understand the roles and responsibility. The HR would want you to explain what's your expectations in terms of salary and in terms of growth. The second round over here would be a portfolio screening round. You would be able to come and show your portfolio and all your skills to the design team, be able to come and show your portfolio and all your skills to the design team, allocated an assignment that you will have to do, takeaway assignment, and come back to with that assignment within a day or 3. So once you submit the assignment, the design team will have another round with you where you will have to come back and explain the complete assignment. Now this assignment depends on whether you are applying for a UX job, UI job, or a micro interaction job. Based on that, the assignment will be given back to you. So once you're done with the assignment round where you would talk about all the salary negotiation, and post that, the offer letter will be given back to you. That was a basic hiring process at a service-based company and a product-based company. But today in 2022, as the stakes are already high, uh, most of the product-based companies are going forward and taking a lot of other steps because the requirement in a service-based company as compared to the product-based company is not that high or not stringent. A product-based company requires a designer or a product designer with specific values and specific skill set, whereas in a service-based company, the requirement would be either, uh, UX designer or a UI designer or a micro-interactor, motion designer, or an illustrator. We won't have a specific requirement of a person who should know a lot of other things also. But in product-based company, as the stakes are very high, they would require a specific person or a specific product designer to hire. So the process over here would be— some of the companies do it different, such as there would be an HR round, the requirement gathering and everything. Second round would be a screening, portfolio screening. Third round would be takeaway assignment or either a whiteboard challenge. Most of the companies are adopting this, this new feature. For example, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft, they would go ahead and give an option of a takeaway assignment, which will— you can take 3 days or 4 days to submit your assignment back, or you can select a whiteboard challenge. Whiteboard challenge is basically you will be given a problem statement which you need to solve right now in front of all the other members. That can happen after a day or two, but the problem over here is that, or the catch over here is that you would have to solve the complete problem statement live. It can be in office or It can be on a Zoom call. There would be someone from product team, design team, tech team, or some other, other product manager teams also. So you'll have to solve RIPE. Once you are done with that, there would again be a product manager round. There would again be a VP round, which can be a design VP, also product VP. Once that is done, there would be a cultural round with HR, where the HR will try to understand how do you fit the organization, what are you looking forward to, what are your larger goals and expectations in terms of an organization. Once everything is done, then you will have a final HR round where you will talk about negotiation and your salary. So to reiterate the step, there would be an HR round, there would be a portfolio screening, there would be assignment, there would be one-on-one round, there would be HR VP round, there would be direct final negotiation round. That's all about the hiring process. Let's talk about the responsibility of a UX designer in a service-based company versus a product-based company. As discussed, in service-based company, which is a design studio or a design agency, you will be hired for a very specific role, which can be a UI designer or a UX designer, illustrator or a micro interaction or a visual designer. So over here, what happened is you have been given the responsibility as per the project or the client requirement. If there is a project you are hired as a UX designer, you will be given or take care the responsibility of a complete UX designer and the complete UX deliverables. So you might do everything till the wireframe stage, which would be the research, information architecture, user flow, user journey, everything. And once you are done with the actual wireframes and approve it with the clients, that will go back to the UI designer. You have nothing to do with Obviously you can raise a voice in what is wrong or what is right, but post that, the complete thing is given to a UI designer. So as a UI designer, your responsibility starts here when you are in a service-based company, which would be a design agency or a design studio. So over here, as a UI designer, you will take ahead the wireframes, then you will go ahead and do something like mood boards, visual designing, all the color, typography, all the finalization of the visual element, do the complete UI style guide, design system. And once the complete UI is done, you might also do the prototyping and submit back to the client. So that is all. In a service-based company, your responsibility are specifically to the specific role that you are hired and the requirement by the client. Most of the time, if the requirement is of a UX designer but only restricted to UX, which is just the research, then you will do just the research. If there's something of redesigning of a complete product, as a UI designer, you would just redesign the complete product which is given by the client. But in product-based company, the responsibility of a UX designer in a product-based company is is not different than the service-based company. It has everything that we just discussed in a service-based company, but on the top of it, you get to be a part of the complete lifecycle. You also get to collaborate with the development team and the stakeholders and the business team. In service-based company, there might be a situation if you are experienced, you might get to talk to the client directly. Otherwise, everything will be done by your leaders and the project manager. So you don't get the chance to communicate with the business and the development team in a service-based company. But in a product-based company, you, you get to be a part of the complete end-to-end process and also communicate and talk and discuss your idea with the business people and the tech people, which is eventually good for you in a longer run. Let's talk about the growth factor, the financial growth or monetary growth, and the skill set growth. So talking about the skills in a service-based company or a design studio or a design agency, the skill growth would going to be in a one single direction, which means you are either going to work as a UX designer or a UI designer, and all you're gonna do as a responsibility when it comes to responsibility, as we discussed in the responsibility section. So as a UX designer, you're just gonna take off the complete UX deliverables. As a UI designer, you're gonna take off the complete UI deliverables. You may get to communicate with the client in order to improve your communication, storytelling, collaboration, presentation, but that will only happen if you have enough experience. Otherwise, a lead person would do it for you. You would not be able to directly communicate it with the client. You would just do your work UI think, UX think, present it to the leader. Leader will go ahead and talk to the client and convince them or sell your design on your behalf. But unlike a design studio, what happens in a product-based company is that eventually, sooner or later, you become the part of the entire end-to-end process. You might be a smaller individual contributor as a UX designer or an individual contributor as a UI designer, but sooner or later, the more you spend time in a product-based company, you become a part of the entire process, right from the problem statement, the discovery, the problem solutioning, the handover development tools, the analytics, the data tools, everything. You get to communicate with product managers, you get to come in with developers, you get to communicate with the CEO, CTO, you get to communicate with the stakeholders. You understand business from a business perspective and not just a product perspective. You also get to understand documentation processes like PRD, which is project requirement document, PR FAQ, so many other documentation. You get to understand the root cause analysis which is done by the developers and the product team in order to identify some problem statement. You also pick become very good at most of the tools— analytical tools, user experience, CleverTap, and many other tools that, you know, any of your company that uses. So I personally believe that the growth in terms of skills in a product-based company is 360-degree because you get to touch base everything as a UX designer. And eventually, from a UX designer, you translate yourself to something known as a product designer, which has the understanding of the business, users, and tech also. So that's why I would sum it up in a way that in a service-based company, The growth is good, but that is in one single direction. In terms of a product-based company, the growth is exponential but in a 360-degree manner. That's all. Let's talk about the monetary growth. Now, in a startup, if you recall, the hiring process is always done on the basis of the actual client requirement or the project requirement. So that is why if you have good number of clients in a service-based company, which is a design agency or a design studio, the hiring process would be on an ad hoc basis. So if there's tomorrow a client that requires 5 senior UX designers or 2 junior UI designer, the requirement and the hiring process would be on the ad hoc basis, where a design studio will look for more employees on a monthly basis, weekly basis, or a quarterly basis. So that is why once you try to negotiate in terms of the growth, in terms of your monetary benefits, or the hike that you want after a year, that would not be way too much because your contribution is towards some of the client and not the entire organization as such. Because there is no specific product that you have been doing for a complete entire year. You might be doing— you might have done a smaller projects for a month, some other projects for 3 months, some other clients for 4 months. But what you're trying to do is jumping from client to client and projects to projects. So that is why the hiring is abundant. There are so many options already available in market and people are ready to join design agency at any given cost due to the diversification of their portfolio. So that's why the negotiation is not that good in service-based company as compared to a product-based company. So in product-based company, what happens, like I told you, you become a part of the entire process. The dependency on you is way too high. Once the dependency is way too high, if you want to quit or you want to move to some other company because of a good opportunity, they would not let you go. They would do the best to retain you back because the turnaround time in hiring a new product designer, explaining the complete product, complete process, giving the complete knowledge transfer is going to be very tedious to the company. So that's why the negotiation is fair enough. It's going to be a win-win situation for you and also the product-based company. But in service-based company, you can't negotiate because you don't have a dependency on you. If you go tomorrow, your project is done, you can go. The new project that will be come will be allocated to some other employee. But on a fairer note, in a service-based company, the overall increment of the hike can be around 15% or so, 8 to 15%. In a product-based company, it's usually 25%, 20%, or goes up to 30% based on your skills. But at the end of the day, I would definitely say that whatever hike you get in a service-based company versus a product-based company, it's always about the skills and the value that you bring to the table. If you're very outstanding, your values and your skills will definitely be appreciated. So what is a simple takeaway for this complete comparison of a service-based company versus a product-based company? Well, the topic is very huge, there's so much more to discuss, but I just wanted to explain all the important points that you can consider while you're looking forward to switch or select a product-based company versus a service-based company. So, uh, two important takeaways that I like to give you is that first one, if you want to diversify your complete portfolio, means you want to work in multiple domains and gain a lot of exposure in terms of the domain categorization and companies and diversify your knowledge and skills across many of the domains that are available on internet today or the companies that are present, you might want to select a service-based company or a design studio or a design agency because they would have multiple clients. But if you want to become a part of end-to-end process, like right from the problem statement till the development and post the development, and want to understand the user behavior also, how are they actually going ahead and using your product, then you need to go ahead and sit into a product-based company. Because over here you get to become a part of the entire process sooner or later, but you will become the part of the entire process. That was all about episode number 6, Roadmap to User Experience Design. If you have any question, put that into the comment and I will come back to you, revert back to you quickly. This is me, Anirudh Palaskar, signing it off. See you in next episode, which is last episode of this series, how to crack design or UX interview. Till then, bye-bye.