My experience as a product design intern at Bigbasket
Over the last couple of years, I have had the opportunity of interning at startups and small-size companies until the dawn of Hover Studio, a design studio that I co-founded. At Hover, we give a lot of importance to the design phase of every project, and I used to wonder what went into the design cookbook of large product companies.
I had a lot of questions — How does an idea go from a brief to a shipped feature? How does a feature get approved, especially in a large sized product company when there are multiple stakeholders involved? How are certain decisions made, keeping accessibility and inclusivity in mind, while designing for a large user group?
To find out, I wanted a taste of this experience myself. This is when I actively applied for a product design internship. About a couple weeks into the process, I was more than elated to hear back from Bigbasket, where I was given an assignment followed by an interview. A couple days later, I was in! And this would be the beginning of a few months packed with immense learning and truck loads of fun.
Onboarding 🎯
Onboarding is such an important part of the process, since it’s step one and tends to leave an impression for a long time. Getting to know your team, the project you’ll be working on, going through existing design files, understanding the design language and values of the company: it can get pretty overwhelming. But at Bigbasket, a lot of care is taken to make sure a new designer joining the team instantly feels at home and doesn’t get too overwhelmed. (Over the next few months, I would see this process evolve as well. That’s how much thought is put into onboarding a new designer into the team.)
My first week consisted of a couple of KT sessions, where I was told that I’d be working on Design Systems. Voila! Over the past year, if there was one thing that not just had my curiosity, but also my attention — was Design Systems. I dove deep into this world to learn more about how product companies use design systems, why they use it, how it brings about a positive impact and so on. I also took this time out to read about Brad Frost’s Atomic Design in detail.
Additionally, during my first week, I tried to get to know my team better and go through the design files. Bigbasket uses Figma, and I was glad I could put my auto-layout and component-variant skills to use and sharpen them.
Projects 📚
I got to work extensively on building Melon 🍉 — Bigbasket’s Design System — from the ground up. I was completely amazed by the level of responsibility I was given while building Melon with my team. We had a well-planned schedule ahead of us and hopped on calls on a regular basis to discuss our progress (and memes). Read about my work on Melon Design System here.
As an intern, I wasn’t boxed into one particular project to spend my entire focus and time on that. I was also actively involved in side-projects, which was a great way to diversify my time. Something fresh and new always feels warm!
Towards the end of my internship, I was given the freedom of picking up a feature of my choice and redesigning it. Since I worked on design systems for the first two-thirds of my time at Bigbasket, I was pretty well versed with most of the user flows. Along the course of that, I had made a list of points — opportunity areas — for certain user flows. Based on feasibility, I decided the Gift Card feature would be ideal to work on, presenting its own set of challenges. In order to really sell the problem to my team, as to why it needs to be reworked and what can be improved, I spent the last month working on user research, data metrics, pitch decks, proposals, wireframes, collaborating with design managers & PMs, so on and so forth. More on that later.
Culture 👨👩👦👦
One of my favorite parts about working at Bigbasket is that — from Managers to fellow Interns, everyone is super easy to approach. You can have conversations ranging from “What’s the spacing between the list items in the hamburger menu?” to “I have a meme for that”.
Every Friday, all the design teams make sure to assemble and have a fun catchup session about how our week went. In times of remote work, I believe it is super essential to be in constant communication across teams as frequently as possible. Whether you need more eyes on your design problem or if important company/team updates need to be shared, this would be a great way to put forth the message. And also to make sure everyone’s doing okay. That’s important.
Apart from team meetings, I also used to have 1:1 calls with other designers in the team. If you’re working on a particular project for a while, and you’re already too deep into it, sometimes, you tend to miss a few obvious use-cases.
The closer you look, the less you see.
It never hurts to have another pair of eyes look at your design progress. This may be a topic up for debate — a few designers may be comfortable to present their work only once it’s completed, and that’s okay. But I believe showing your progress to anyone from your team periodically actually helps you to pick up things you never would’ve thought otherwise, at a much earlier stage.
To sum it up, if you ask me what an average day as a designer at Bigbasket looks like, I can’t put my finger on one specific thing. That in itself is an example of a great working environment. Sometimes work can get pretty mundane if it follows a template day-in, day-out. A pinch of surprise is good, but not so much that you’re constantly switching between projects and end up confused. Finding that balance is key, and Bigbasket sure has.
A huge shoutout to my team: Abhiteja Vulapu, Bindu Shree, Raghavan Vasudevan, Jahnavi Vegad, Aishwarya Gopal, Collin Prabhu, Mayank Kinger, Vibhuti Gupta and Riddhi Chaudhari, and everyone else at Bigbasket. Thank you for an incredible experience! I’m glad I was able to contribute.
