Anukriti Verma on Trust and Safety on Socials

Alex Smith: Design Leader Insights is brought to you by Fuego UX. Fuego UX is a leading UX research, strategy, and design consultancy. H Anukriti, thank you so much for joining the show today. 

Anukriti Verma: Hi Alex. Thanks for having me. 

‍Alex Smith: Yeah, for sure. And as we get started, can you give us a little bit of context in your journey and background in design? 

Anukriti Verma: Sure. So I'm currently a Design Manager at LinkedIn and I've been here for, I've been working with LinkedIn for about six years now. But prior to that, I had a whole journey working as an IC. And my career started back in India where I studied visual communication design. I did my bachelor's, did my master's. And from there, my first job was that of a visual designer at a consultancy firm in India. In Bangalore, and I pretty much did both B2B and B2C products. And I knew that B2B products were not for me at the time. So, I started like leaning into finding more opportunities and consumer facing products. And for a brief period, I moved to Shanghai to work at a small design studio. We were like four designers, including me, and that was a really fun experience. Like I, not just as my design journey, but also personally, it was super interesting to live in a new country, and in a new culture, and we were designing apps for the Chinese market. So that was super interesting. And from there I moved back to India. I worked in a product company called OLA.. It's a ride sharing app and now a competitor to Uber. I worked there before Uber came to India. From there, I got an opportunity to work with LinkedIn. And then I moved to California and I've been at LinkedIn since then. Aside from my job, I have been leaning into doing mentoring on the side and building my skills as a mentor. I started mentorship on ADP list a few years ago, and I was thinking, how do I share my insights with other designers who are on a similar path? So I designed a course last year on elevating your career as a product designer. And that was a super interesting journey for me, designing a course, teaching a cohort.

Alex Smith: That's actually like a great segue to what I wanted to to ask you about, because I think being a mentor to so many designers probably helped you on your own path. Cause I noticed now you're in management kind of navigating that transition at LinkedIn from being a designer to managing designers. So tell me about that and how you approach that and how you grow as a manager?

Anukriti Verma: Yeah, for sure. So you're right. I think mentoring on the side really gave me that opportunity to do self learning and really reinforcing my own skills. And on at the similar time at work, I had started to do a lot of vision work and strategy work and long term thinking and working with a lot of my cross functional partners to define the strategy and I was really curious about that work and that is why I kind of wanted to explore management. Spoke to a lot of people, spoke to people who move between IC and management. And it's, it's a hard transition to make as a designer because you're letting go of something that you've built over so many years, right? So it's a new job, like I know design, but I don't know.

Alex Smith: Completely different job. Yeah. 

Anukriti Verma:  Yeah. So that was super interesting, but at LinkedIn we have a lead role, which is like part IC, part management. So I did that for two years before being a manager and that really like eased me. into being a design manager and I, I kind of know what is expected of me.

Alex Smith: Cause I think there's a ton of mentorship for designers out there, right? ADP lists and that, but like, where did, where do managers go to continue to up level and grow as a manager? 

Anukriti Verma: Great question. So I think ADP does have a few design managers as well. But LinkedIn being such a huge org, we have so many, such great people on the team that I work with. So I reached out to a lot of people. Folks within LinkedIn and learned from their experience. And I would say if you don't have that, then reach out to folks on LinkedIn, like not a plug, but people who respond don't maybe send, maybe don't send a cold message, but say what you're looking for. And most people reply, everybody's really happy to help.

Alex Smith: I want to talk about the area of LinkedIn you work on. I don't think we've had a ton of designers in this space, which is trust and safety, and I think it's super important, right? Like the, a lot of people on their interacting with people they know, people they don't know, seeing posts of You know, of all sorts, right? So how, how should people thinking about trust and safety begin approaching research and design for that? 

Anukriti Verma: Yeah, for sure. I think like trust is super top of mind for most social media platforms right now. With all the new privacy laws and child safety laws and whatnot. So you kind of have to think from that mindset coming from rebuilding a member first or a user first product. So when we are approaching our products we are really thinking through safe aspects of privacy, safety authenticity giving members more control on their experience. And my team is a horizontal team. So we work with many teams across our flagship app and we work with them to build experiences that make a safe online community.

Alex Smith: I'm just thinking about the other social networks where it's like just chaos. Is that like what, as a, as a user, it's like, oh, well, this is tied to people's jobs, right? Like they don't, they want to be more professional here. Is that not the whole story? 

Anukriti Verma: Yes, that is like our mission is really to provide economic opportunity to everyone. So, you know, we launched verifications sometime back, I think a year ago. And our first principle was that we wanted to make it free, so that everybody could verify themselves. It was also challenging for us to change that mindset. People were thinking of verification with a celebrity status, but we wanted to change it to authenticity and we're doing pretty well. We have like a huge number of people who verified already and we're building more ways to verify people on LinkedIn and off of the platform as well. 

‍Alex Smith: I'm wondering what advice you have for new designers that are entering the field today?

Anukriti Verma: My biggest advice for designers who are early in their career would be to really work on their craft. I see so many designers struggling to understand if they should focus on product strategy or research and trying to do a lot of things. Just focus on your craft. Just focus. If you are a product designer or you want to be a product designer, focus on your visual design, interaction design skills. And another skill to focus on is storytelling. I think selling our design, really positioning it in the right way, it is half of our job. So, yeah, I would say really focus on craft and storytelling. The second piece of advice would be to really seek out guidance. And like you said mentorship is super important and it has helped me in my career a lot, reach out to people on LinkedIn, connect with people on LinkedIn that you aspire to be people you like reach out to people on ADP list, and I think when you're not doing that, you kind of feel leaving a ton of experience on the table and not utilizing it for your own growth.

Alex Smith: That's what I recommend to other people starting businesses too, it's like people have done this before. 

Anukriti Verma: Right. 

Alex Smith: Go talk to them. Yeah. 

‍Anukriti Verma: You don't have to, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. People have had this experience before, and everyone is more than happy to share their experience. 

Alex Smith: I think that's all wonderful advice, and thank you so much for joining the show today. Where can people go to find more or follow? 

Anukriti Verma: You can connect with me, of course, on LinkedIn send me a message on LinkedIn, or if you are looking for a mentor you can find me on ADPlist. It's my first name. You should be able to find, I don't think there is any other Anukriti on ADP list, 

Alex Smith: Thanks so much for joining the show today. 

Anukriti Verma: Thanks Alex. It was an honor to be here. And I had a great experience chatting with you.