Design Syncs @Bizongo
I joined the design team at Bizongo in February 2019 looking to start working in new stable start-up space in Mumbai. I was motivated by the simplicity of Bizongo’s business model and how driven the employees were to facilitate a new experience in ordering packaging materials online.
PS: If you are not aware of what Bizongo does, they have created a robust marketplace for everything packaging where the technology would do the heavy lifting of helping people place, track and receive complicated orders without having to manually follow up with suppliers, traders or transporters themselves. We have a product where users can place large orders online and get all notifications and updates on their orders through Bizongo’s applications (think Amazon for everything packaging).
Who are we?
When I joined, the design team was 6 people (4 in Mumbai and 2 in Bangalore) who were very welcoming and quite open about the big issues the design team was facing and had a bold strategy to work on these items while working on creating new designs. The designers all worked on different products and devices across Bizongo’s offerings supporting all packaging needs in a B2B setting. All the designers here have specific strengths that they contribute to Bizongo’s design structure ranging from artistic skills, branding, strong management, B2B and B2C capabilities. This diversity makes our design syncs very successful and fun (the weekly doze of fancy food helps).
What is a design sync at Bizongo?
After I joined the product team at Bizongo, in the first design sync we worked on figuring out where design is at Bizongo and how it can be streamlined and standardised across products. We made weekly plans for things to be achieved as design group which would improve and refine the design process at Bizongo. Some of the things we discussed and have successfully achieved through these design syncs include.
- Setting up our values: We want Bizongo to be bold, modern and empower the users. These values are reflected in the way we conceptualise and design interfaces here.
- Make time for feedback: All designers have an option to request an hour to get group design feedback and get any help from the designer’s individual skills and experience.
- Standardise the design process: We loosely formalised all the steps that a designer would do starting from research to high fidelity designs. We think the designers here take ownership very seriously and they have the freedom to pick and choose how they want to do research and design as long as it makes sense for the user and the business.
- Tool Selection: We had the most fun with this. We were all told to select a tool of choice that we would want to use for designing interfaces. Then we pitched our tools, had a hearty and loud discussion about how things would work and now we all use Figma for designing and generating feedback from other teams at Bizongo.
- Component Library: This is a work in progress. Since Bizongo has multiple products and multiple designers we first focused on building interfaces and functionality. Now that we are confident in these aspects of the product we want to bring in consistency and try to templatize the design components for quicker adoption.
How we do it?
We are a tight group that sits mostly on the same desk (sorry Bangalore folks) and the proximity gives us the freedom and opportunity to ask for feedback from other designers and PMs. We are now 8 designers working collaboratively (and remotely) to improve the experiences and bridge the gap between business and user needs. Our design sync’s have an agenda planned by senior designers but in most cases, our 3 hour meets lead to multiple debates, philosophical talks about usability and ideas that we want to implement here at Bizongo. We are trying to create a design process and design practices that aim to build a usable and functional product with engineering and business constraints in mind.
Thank you for reading!
Bizongo is an equal-opportunity employer, and we’ve made it a passion of ours to reimagine packaging as a business from scratch. The road to perfecting this is still miles away, but we believe we’ve made a good start. Why don’t you come on board and join us in our quest?
