Describe your most meaningful experience(s) and why they matter to you. Please limit your statement to 250 words maximum and provide your submission with a link.

Two experiences have played significant roles in how I approach designing at scale. 

The first was forming and leading a team of design and engineering students from different schools in the midst of the first COVID-19 lockdown to prototype a tech solution for displaced migrant workers in India. Many of these workers were daily wage earners and had lost their jobs in large cities. Our solution integrated with an organization that worked with multiple NGOs to connect these workers to jobs in their area and government assistance programs. But our initial solution failed - and for none of the reasons I expected it to. 

During multiple rapid design-test-engineering cycles, it became abundantly clear to me that the traditional design and human behavioral patterns I had learned do not scale the way I expect it to in emerging markets. These users had completely different contexts and mental models from the globally accepted standards of UX. It exposed a massive blind spot in my understanding of technology, design and business.  

This experience led me to hunt down the Next Billion Users team during my internship at Google, where they design technology fundamentally differently for users of countries like India and Africa, where 75% of internet users will live by 2025. After designing for two of their projects and my past experience leading the COVID team, I have a renewed understanding of the growing market and the  impact of technology in the global south as well as my approach to building at scale.