Vinish Garg - Vinish Garg

For more sense, meaning, and purpose in our work—on the intersection of culture thinking, organization’s capacity building, system thinking, and design-centric life experiences.

I am Vinish Garg, and I work with growing product teams for their product strategy, product positioning, product onboarding and UX, and product content design strategy—often on the intersection of building capacity and establishing systems for the organization’s goals.

At present, I am making Steering—a students’ career counselling and guidance service that builds their family’s capacity and the decision frameworks to help them select the right courses, career path, and the college for their real aspirations and life-dreams.

A majority of products die because of the lack of right conversations at the right time among the right people. At the early stage of any project, I am most curious about:

Why we work—why an org exists, why we work
What are their operating principles, and what their goals mean to different people in the org
What happens to our work after someone leaves an org? Who cares, and for how long?
Why filling online forms continues to be a poor user experience, what stops us to do better

My approach to work

The state of design

Meaning—My Program

Outcome—My Conference

Products

I enjoying working with leaders and teams who are willing to explore, learn, and grow to have a shared and focused understanding of what makes our work meaningful for all of us. I can lead the teams, define standards and systems, set up actionable plans for operational velocity, and make it work with pilot wins to have the right evidence early in the work.

A few of recent posts are:

State of design 2024 (Design and critical thinking, April 2024)
How system thinking and user research support each other
Content and design—content design and design in product sense (podcast)
SaaS pricing pages and product content strategy (Medium)
Getting hired as a UX writer (Medium)
Our decisions framework (Substack)
When product hires people (Substack)
Investing in product positioning (Substack)
Systems-driven content supply chain for customer experience (Medium)
Common sense business (Medium)

Hosting guests

Since 2015, I host industry experts and leaders in content strategy and folks who work on the intersection of design and content.

Speaking

I speak at the industry events in UX, design, and content. I am looking for speaking opportunities in products and systems as well. My recent talks:

Systems driven content supply chain is the lifeblood of customer experience, See talk details, Related blog post, slides on Slideshare
What makes the product onboarding: Product content strategy, design, and product positioning, Outcome 2021.
Content strategy is an extension of the brand narrative strategy | See talk details, see slides on Slideshare

Focus group on Slack

I have set up a focus group on Slack, to build conversations that impact our work, our career, our portfolio, our success metrics, and our working frameworks. The Slack workspace name is Outcome and Meaning.

If you use Miro, you can see a unified view of my experience and my approach to work in this Miro board (opens in a new tab in Miro).

A UI engineer to me: "Can you teach me UX?"

Me: "Be prepared to learn journalism, politics, art, and be more difficult to work with."
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) December 15, 2021

When teams get into the mode that they are waiting for the instructions.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) October 25, 2020

They: We have a design team of 40+ and we are designing incredible experiences for global enterprise solutions, and for growing startups.

Me: It is a myth.

They: Why?

Me: You cannot do it because you do not have a single content strategist or content designer in the team.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) December 26, 2019

As if a life.

Many new products have a busy interface. Too many icons and inline actions to edit, assign, move, fix, reorganize, restructure!

There is a trade-off between "what they may need" and "what they need". #UX is all about identifying the small margins in trade-off.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) February 20, 2020

I see many teams who talk about 'UX maturity' without a single content strategist around. One or two UX writers in the team is a such a one-dimensional way to process the UX maturity. Sorry. #design #uxdesign #contentstrategy
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) January 24, 2021

Build confidence to build conversations by being available, and by reaching out to others to understand, discuss, and then *document* the operating principles for how the org works, how the team works in core or certain situations, how the decision models shape up.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) January 29, 2022

They: "Why we call it content design if it is about the words and language?"

Me: "Send me your project report, the plan, analysis, and steps in a single text file. Can you?"

Content is message, framing, communication. It needs to be structured and packaged. Content design.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) January 17, 2022

Design for moments.
In design, users' goals are overrated. We design for
(a) what the customer might want to do
(b) what the org wants the customer to do
(c) what the customers might actually end up doing

Users live and interact for the moment, the goal is the natural outcome
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) December 30, 2020

When designers try to get into systems approach of designing, for strategy, leadership, or communication, I guess they need to get more into business side of design for a wider perspective of why org exists as a system. To communicate it to junior designers is a bit of challenge.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) May 20, 2021

My approach to work

Larry Swanson hosted me in their podcast