#19 Accelerating product development with an integrated Design Team - with Shruti Ramiah @N26

Shruti is a design researcher and interaction designer. She leads the talented team of The Studio at Zalando in Berlin. At the time of recording this episode, she led the product design & user research team at N26. She has also worked in strategic design consulting with IDEO, user experience at Nokia, and with a few other places. Shruti’s goal has been to nurture effective collaboration between design, research, product management and engineering to deliver customer-focussed solutions – building the capabilities and processes that enable all disciplines to do their best work. In this episode, she talks with Christian and Alex about the role of Design & Research Ops, amongst other things, that help build an effective integrated design team.   Table of content: 0:28 - Intro Shruti Ramiah 1:45 - How Product Design functions @N26 5:05 - Design collectives & Design Ops 7:05 - Collecting customer & stakeholder feedback 10:10 - The role & mission of Design Ops 21:40 - Solving symptoms or problems with Design Ops? 24:00 - How to hire the right people for a Research Team 28:00 - Collaboration between Product Managers, Designers, & Researchers 39:40 - Integrating Design in cross-functional teams 43:20 - Things Shruti would love to have known at the beginning of her career 47:31 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Find Shruti on the internet:  Website: https://shrutiramiah.com/  Linkedin: @shrutiramiah  Twitter: @itursh   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩        👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery     📸 Instagram: @productbakery     🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20     🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/