Devina and Althea Coutinho, run a UX design firm, speak to Down To Business about scaling creativity, creating an engaged remote team, and learning together for a more efficient team

For Down to Business this month, we have the Coutinho sisters—Devina and Althea—who set up DesignCoz, a UX design firm, in 2014.

Their design journey started, interestingly, because of their father.

“Growing up, design was never in the picture. Engineering/medical streams were the only typical career options,” says Devina, saying she indulged her creative streak with tailoring and embroidery.  “Looking at that, my dad urged me to look at creative options. One day, he attended a career fair and that’s when he came across the idea of design as a career,” she adds.

Althea is a piano player and a footballer who has played for Maharashtra. She wanted to pursue filmmaking but Devina suggested that she looked at the design course at Symbiosis, Pune. “She suggested that I study film and video design instead of a mass media course, as that would open up my design thinking and give me the base to do other things as well’.”

The first year made her realise that filmmaking wasn’t her cup of tea and that UX might be closer to what she wanted to pursue in life.

Explaining UX design, Devina says, it is about understanding the user (of any product) and empathizing with them, to solve their problems. “Most of UX is about tangible stuff such as mobile apps, websites and web portals. For instance, the experience of a banking customer. One experience is online, when you open the app to perform a task. But, how does the same translate into a physical experience?” she adds.

Learning from your clients

The push to start one’s own company, says Devina, was an organic one. After supplementing her Symbiosis degree with one from IIT, she became the placement coordinator at IIT Bombay. In addition, she was the alumni secretary for IIT Bombay in Bengaluru. With former students looking for collaborations on design projects, work started coming in.  Soon, Althea joined in.

In 2015, when they started DesignCoz, Devina says India was witnessing its start-up boom. “We were getting exposed to many of the novelty products coming out in the market. People were trying different things and for me, at the time, it became about doing fun stuff. In the start-up space, the pace at which you innovate is much faster, the growth is exponential. So, we started with the idea of having fun and learning and we are still doing that.”

Althea says that with their clients being primarily start-ups, the sisters also got a glimpse on what it took to set up their own firm. “A lot of our clients started off from the white board and we were there. We saw them raise multiple rounds, go from a two-member team to a 500-member team. That was exciting. It seemed like the best way to learn how to scale a company,” she adds.

Grow slowly, steadily

While their growth has been organic from the start, Devina says the priority until 2022 had been to get the foundation right. “If I am to achieve scale, I need to know how to manage the demand and supply. We wanted to ensure that we scale only after setting the right foundation,” says Devina.

The sisters say their vision is create for UX a company that has the scale of some of the larger IT firms. “But, when you are looking at the creative services, it is difficult to manage with more than 50 designers. Each designer has their own way of problem solving, hence the way one navigates a project changes from person to person. This makes it difficult to scale a team of designers beyond a certain point. So that's the opportunity and the gap that we are trying to bridge. We are of the opinion that even design can scale. And, in order to do that, we are bifurcating and working on creating a symbiosis between process and technology,” adds Devina.  She says that the idea is to introduce best practices from the team’s collective learning experience.

Share struggles with the team

Working in an industry with creative individuals has its own challenges. One important one that Althea and Devina faced was that every designer had their own learning journey. But, to make the process quicker could everyone share their lessons, bringing others on board at the same time?

Althea says, “What we realised is that we could get everyone to just articulate where they struggled, and the solutions they identified. Then, if we documented these, the next person to join the team automatically has a head start. So, we discuss these insights—which could range from problems in design, soft skills, deadline management—at quarterly meetings.”

Their template is simple:

What we struggled with

Analysis of what caused it

How we overcame it

How it could have been avoided

Keeping a remote team engaged

With an office in Mumbai in 2020, things changed with the lockdown. Now, Althea lives in Pune, Devina is in Dubai and the team of 20 works entirely remotely.

“We do meet in Mumbai once every three months. This is so that everyone can align on common goals. We revisit our vision and together decide upon the next milestone. These goals are broken down into smaller sub goals that need to be achieved every quarter. Quarterly meetings ensure everyone is aligned,” adds Devina.

To keep the team together, they play remote games, some of which they have designed as well. “We use them regularly. Just today, before jumping into this meeting we had our weekly game hour where we try out different remote games. That’s something we do on a weekly basis,” adds Althea.

Reading up for business lessons

On the go-to resources for business learning hacks, Devina depends on online recommendations for books. She has referred to books to learn how to scale up the business, how to approach your business etc.

She adds, “When we were looking at getting remote working in place, there were a lot of interesting ideas in Remote: Office Not Required, (2013). Though the book was written long before the pandemic, a lot of concepts that were discussed are pretty relevant even today. Then when it comes to creating a process, I recommend The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. For strategy there’s nothing better than Michael E Porter’s Competitive Strategy.”

To Devina’s list, Althea adds Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It... and Why the Rest Don't by Verne Harnish, the Good to Great series by Jim Collins and the entire E-myth series by Michael E Gerber.