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Chetana Deorah, Design Director, Growth Netflix (formerly)
After growing up in India, Chetana Deorah emigrated to the U.S., right around the time of Y2K. Working at Pentagram, Yahoo, Pivotal Labs and Scribd, she spent more than a decade immersed in growth teams and culture before joining Netflix as Design Director, Global Growth & Acquisition.
Today, as a consultant and mentor, growth is still top-of-mind for Chetana, both personally and professionally. She helps leaders and organizations to think through solutions, experiences and strategies that drive growth culture and business gains. Two themes that surface frequently in her work are resilience and trust.
For organizations focused on growth, the resilience to be able to fail and learn from failings is crucial. Equally important is the ability to build trusting relationships with customers or clients. Whether you’re leveraging user experience design or content strategy, it’s possible to build trust at each stage of growth, be it acquisition, activation, retention or revenue referral. Tune in to hear Chetana’s thoughts on product and business growth, as well as some things to look for when hiring or designing customer experiences.
Carl: Please welcome to the Bureau Briefing, Chetana Deorah. How are you Chetana?
Chetana: Doing very well, Carl. Good afternoon to you.
Carl: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us and get in front of the community and talk about your kind-of-amazing career, if I may say so, really focused a lot on the growth of products. If you don't mind, could you share with everybody just a little bit of your backstory?
Chetana: Sure. It's been a very interesting journey as being an immigrant here in the United States. I landed here around the time of the infamous famous Y2K bug in 2000. My roots in graphic design, growing up in India, we didn't even know graphic design. It was more known as commercial art or advertising. If I were to look at my career, which I consider bookended between my days growing up at Yahoo, or I should say years growing up at Yahoo. Then my most recent experience at Netflix, I feel it's been a fascinating journey where this continuum of communication design and user experience design where the value of a product or a business needs to connect with the customers that care for it the most. Everything that design school did not teach me, I learned at Yahoo and many of us, especially here in the Silicon Valley, still say we bleed purple.
Chetana: Between Yahoo and Netflix, I consciously chose to throw myself into startup land. I also needed a break from corporate America, and that is when I think, to your introduction and question, I really grew from an individual contributing designer to a design leader. This journey included my experience at startups like Liftopia, Betfair, Scribd. Yeah, some go with Scribd or Scribd. We did try to work with our CEO in terms of the branding and naming, because that's also one of the things that customers need to feel that they can connect with. Yeah, my experience has been in the consumer space throughout this journey, and it's been amazing to have been on the side of the building the product experience, figuring out, "Okay, which new feature needs to be created?" To then making sure that these product experiences that have been created connect their value to the customer out there. That is really where the product-led growth has come to be.
Carl: You spend, I think, it was almost seven years at Yahoo, is that right?
Chetana: Yes.
Carl: Then you go through with Scribd and then you come to Netflix and now you're consulting and you're out of all of that crazy energy. How are you? How does it feel to be out here where you're figuring out what's next?
Chetana: Absolutely, and wonderful question. Thank you for asking that. I feel I'm finally at that point in my career where I am creating the space and the time so I can embody this sense of courage, clarity, a lot of C words. Where I can learn to say no. What I mean by that is, again, as someone who didn't grow up here or has not been entirely familiar and conversant with the cultural norms here, with the way business is done. I think I'm finally at that point in my career where I feel like I've got to be rooted and standing in the sum total of who I am, first as a designer and as a design leader. And to really start tuning into those opportunities either proactively or staying open to what's coming my way where I can really give back and really connect with all these years of experience while still continuing to grow.
Chetana: The consulting is allowing me to, both through mentoring or through paid projects if that's what shows up, to get that space to be a bit more selective if I may. I'm also staying open to full-time opportunities in the spaces we are talking about.
Carl: I am so happy for you.
Chetana: Thank you.
Carl: That sounds like an amazing place to be. I'm curious, one of the things you and I talked a little bit before, and obviously as the Design Director of Growth at Netflix, you were really focused on growing the product. I'm sure there's a lot of stories that come out of that, but one of the things we both realized was a lot of your learnings from how to grow Netflix for the end user really are applicable to a lot of other areas. It could be in life, it could be in running a smaller business. I'm just curious, what do you think are some of the biggest lessons you learned as the Design Director of Growth? What are some of those things that you just walked away with and said, "This is the truth."?
Chetana: Wow, lovely question. First and foremost, having stepped away from, like you said, the back-to-back existence with being in Silicon Valley jobs, I've at least come to first define what growth means. I'll start with what product-led growth has meant because that is more tangible, more black and white, and then we can map it to how it has helped me evolve as a design leader and then how I'm bringing that to teams that I'm leading. In the simplest vocabulary, growth is an outcome as opposed to an output. In the sense of product-led growth, there are systems and frameworks and metrics around which this is very measurable. I've also spoken about this topic in a recent design leadership conference, but how does one take this notion of everything that has to be quantified and measured and bring it to customers' experiences? Experiences that are going to stay sustainable with the end customer as opposed to a one-time win.
Chetana: For those listening to this conversation familiar with subscriber bases and revenue numbers, we do see that as a very tangible growth outcome. As a design leader, however, even when it came to hiring for my team that was going to be product designers for growth, I came to realize that while at the core, I do need to look for very strong UX designers and very strong individual contributing visual designers or interaction designers. It became very clear to me that for someone who's solving problems for growth, there is a certain aptitude or an acumen that was a must-have. And few attributes I'll share with you. A designer who can have a systematic approach to their communication and organization with cross-functional stakeholders. Someone who is courageous enough to ask the tough questions because when you're solving for growth, you can be successful by getting these numbers, by getting a bigger subscriber base, by making more money. But at what cost did you do it?
Chetana: Is the designer on my team willing to ask the tough questions to their PMs, to their growth engineering partners, to the business? The other, which is very obvious, is their ability and willingness to learn to work with data. Which again is something most design schools, and even my earlier jobs, did not really focus on. We as design leaders were rarely considered as someone who can be on the business side of design. When you're solving growth problems, a designer is just so empowered if he or she is interested in at least understanding the data metrics that are coming in. The other interesting thing about growth is it's a very... we always say design itself as a collaborative discipline, but in growth, there is no shortcut. The work you're doing requires for you to connect with marketing, sales, brand, the business owners, and then of course the design team itself.
Chetana: I'm looking at is this individual really strong in their craftsmanship and in their design jobs, but are they also willing to stick their neck out and be collaborative at that degree. Last but not least, you and I both know this personally, professionally, or running a business, the resilience to be able to fail and learn from those failings. Pick it up where you dropped it last is an incredible value to have. When you're solving problems for growth or product-led growth or even marketing growth, a designer who can have this detachment or resilience, "I'm going to try this experiment, I'm going to explore this solution and I might fail," is absolutely magic. I'm sharing these attributes with you because not only do I look for this when I'm hiring to build a growth team or develop a growth culture, I also then land up doing a lot of the mentoring and coaching and developing some of these skills. Because you may not always get that unicorn that has all of it put together.
Carl: Well, I absolutely love what you're talking about right now because I was having a conversation earlier with some friends who are design leaders, and everybody talks about design gets a seat at the table. Now it's like, well, what are you going to do with it? How are you going to make sure that you deserve to be there, that you get to stay there? The word that you said that just hit me really hard was detachment, right? Being able to separate yourself, my understanding of what you're saying, is being able to separate yourself from the work that you did so that you can make sure you're ready for the work you have to do next.
Chetana: Yes, beautifully said, yes. It's so amazing you're bringing this up. Oftentimes, when I'm in my first, which has now become a video call interview with candidates, I get to this point conversationally much like you and I are doing when I have to suss out these acumens or aptitudes I was talking to you about. Because I really can see it in the artifacts of their portfolio. What I've come to notice is we, as designers and those of us who really get goosebumps or get stoked when we're solving design problems, do it. Because we are not artists or we may have our artist's lens or our artist's journey on the nights and weekends. Where for an artist he or she can paint a canvas that looks blank and they can put it up in a gallery and sell it for $1 million. We cannot.
Carl: Or we would, right? We wouldn't be having this conversation right now. We'd be relaxing in Fiji because we had sold their million dollar paintings.
Chetana: Yes, and their inspiration and their motivation and the problem they're solving is very different from the one that a UX designer or that a designer on growth are solving. In terms of really connecting with the audience of that product and the value that painting, if I may, or product brings to the person who's going to pay the price for it. In order for that connection with your end customer, detachment with your solutions has been a lifelong journey even for me. Whether it's how I'm running my team or the team is running me or what processes I went to tutoring. Yeah, that's a fascinating growth area.
Carl: When you look at everything that you were just describing in terms of growing a product, this is directly applicable to growing a team. As I was looking through some of the other information that I'd seen you present, one of the things that stuck out was this idea of acquisition, activation... I'm going to get them wrong now, but retention and then I think it was revenue and referral, and that is every business ever, right? It doesn't matter if you're delivering a service or you're delivering a candy bar or you're delivering movies on demand. All of these aspects come into play, so I'm just curious, have you thought about how this could apply to say... I, I mean like a lot of people in our community are in digital services, so they're running web shops. Have you ever taken that lens and maybe looked at that side?
Chetana: We can talk about it in terms of how I have taken these, what are pretty heavy growth jargons and I'm actually recalling a slide when I did have this graph and the credit goes to a gentleman who was one of the legacy folks in the growth industry. But what I did is I took these stages of a product or business growth developer, development and I mapped it to the voice of the customer. So acquisition, activation, retention, revenue referral. In other words, basically means acquisition is how do you find the users? Where do they even exist? In my hiring I would have to ask the question, why should I even look for this right candidate for the kind of problem I want to solve? Yeah, and depending on which companies I've been at, whether Netflix or Scribd, depending on the resources I have with my recruiting team who are such an important part of the hiring process, I then partner with them in terms of where should I find the skill or talent.
Chetana: I would think the same is true for businesses in terms of who are the customers and clients that they even want to work with or are they going to take on every project that comes their way because they want to make the money.
Carl: Which is a fear-based decision, right?
Chetana: Yes, yes, involved with accepting jobs and I've been there, done that. Yeah, it's an amazing model. I didn't map it to such a degree, but I'm fascinated with how you're looking at it. The second one that we call is activation, which is what does the first-time impression and connection look like with the product or the business or this individual candidate? Is there going to be a second time or did you drop the ball so hard that they're not going to come back? We can walk through each of these if that's helpful, but I did map it to finding the customer, connecting with them in that first impression, figuring out what value we can give them so they will come back. Then once that value has been delivered, talk about the money.
Carl: Right, see this is the big difference I think, there are no free trials if you're hiring a company to do something. This to me was the fascinating moment when I was looking at, and I was going, "Okay, well, in our world that is very much frowned upon because we would call it spec work." Whereas in the product world it's called free trial. It's very different because for one you're using your expertise, for the other you're just kind of showing how something works. But it's that one place when I was looking at it when I was going, "Hmm." Because you establish value through that free trial and then people go, "Yeah, that's totally worth 10 bucks, 11 bucks, 12 bucks a month, whatever."
Carl: But on the other side it's like you've got three different people with different prices, one person saying $10,000, another person $100,000, and just like going as a client, as that end user, you're like so confused. It's like that's one of the things I want to try to figure out like how could somebody coming into a team or with service side offer that free trial? We definitely won't solve it today, but it's one of those things that just got me a little bit giddy when I'm asked. I think about the growth of something like Netflix. I'm one of the old timers, I was using it for DVDs but it's-
Chetana: Yes, me too.
Carl: But you start thinking if somebody didn't have that opportunity would they try it?
Chetana: Very true. It's again that first impression. One thing I can share with you is, which is true for whether it's a product of business and individual, even you and I in the way we've connected and picked up. Is at the heart of every connection or collaboration, and especially, when it's about growing, it starts with the trust. For some services businesses, the trust is built over days, weeks, years together and then there is this credibility and loyalty even that kicks in. But today with technology, with user experience design, with content strategy, with even the way in which you and I are able to connect right now being miles away has made that element of trust even more nuanced. Either it can be really easy to connect and build that trust or it can get really convoluted.
Chetana:
Because the older means like with the DVD reaching my doorstep, how does it [inaudible 00:19:10], right? Now it's like I just log in and I can stream anything. One of the things I have understood with product experiences trying the free trial is because we are trying to get a foot in the door, and I don't know if in today's talk we might get to it or not. I also have a very interesting anecdote when my team at Netflix did do immersive research both in two different countries in APAC. What were the learnings we had with this concept of free trial? Because, again, from one country to the other, the word free has a very different value proposition. That's the thing with like what works for us here in the US may not work for the same value proposition in other country.
Chetana:
But from a business point of view or even when we have interviews and we want to have candidates do design exercises, it's one of those love/hate relationships I'm still trying to figure out as a design leader. Is it fair for a candidate coming in for an interview to spend five, six hours doing a design exercise at home? The same goes for spec work with an agency. Just coming back full circle, the agency or the individual should not be subjected to that if he or she has been able to build that first impression and that credibility and that trust through their website, through their online presence, through conversations like this, and then get that foot in the door with their potential hiring manager or customer or client.
Carl: No, that makes perfect sense. I mean that is where, and these terms are also horrible, but thought leaders and like, "Didn't even read my blog post, it showed you that I am a subject matter expert." It's like all of these things just make me cringe a little bit, but they're also very valuable in the sense that if you do see somebody who is saying they've worked on something you're challenged with and they have success and they have other people with real first and last names, they can point you to. All of this matters a lot. One of the things when you were going through that and talking about what's going to work in this culture may not work in that culture, specifically, around the term or the concept of free. It reminded me of we did this launch in eight countries for Energizer, the battery company, the power company, and we made a terrible mistake in translating things instead of transcreating them.
Carl: That was a huge education for me in my late twenties that the web is going to make it so that it is not okay just to cut and paste. You have got to truly, there's no translator, you have to have somebody who understands the culture. I think that's probably true in different industries as well. Maybe not at the same level, but if you have clients that are lawyers versus clients that are professional athletes, it's going to mean a totally different thing as well.
Chetana: Absolutely, and I think that is the fascinating thing about this immersion and leading growth or learning more about growth that you cannot really grow the product, service, or idea if you haven't connected with what matters to that particular culture or individual or business. It's not one-size-fits-all anymore.
Carl: It's totally not. Well, thank you. I just have to say, Chetana, this conversation, it's the end of the day on Friday and I'm all pumped up to work now. This is no good, I'm supposed to be relaxing but you've got me excited to even go back and look through what I'm doing in ways that I can actually take some of your lessons on growth and how to apply them for what we're doing at the Bureau to help the community. So thank you so much for that.
Chetana: Thank you very much, Carl, for having me here and being able to share something that can otherwise be quite esoteric, but certainly in the path of growth.
Carl: You are most welcome, and for everybody listening, thank you so much and we'll be back next week. All the best.
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