Mastering Time, Delegation, and UXR

Episode Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction

4:03 – Collaboration and Communication: Building Trust and Purpose

6:56 – Overcoming Challenges: Legacy Assumptions and Growth Mindset

11:09 – Time Management: Balancing Multiple Roles

14:19 – Leveraging AI Tools: Enhancing Productivity

17:51 – Importance of User Research: Defending Design Choices

22:50 – Advice for Aspiring Designers: Strengthening Foundations and Seeking Help

26:48 – Conclusion: Final Thoughts and Gratitude

Main Insights From The Conversation

In the fast-paced world of design, managing your time effectively while maintaining creative excellence isn’t just a skill—it’s a survival requirement. Madhumita Gupta, Vice President of Design at Reliance Retail, has spent over 17 years navigating this challenge across major companies including Myntra, GlobalLogic, and Philips.​​

Her journey from physics student to software engineer to design leader offers unique insights into productivity, delegation, and the strategic role of user research. In this conversation, she shares practical frameworks for managing multiple roles, leveraging AI tools, and building products that truly serve users.​

From Physics to Design: An Unconventional Path

Madhumita describes herself as a “convert”—someone who took an unexpected route into design. She initially wanted to pursue a PhD in physics, then pivoted to computer science at IIT Kharagpur, and began her career as a hardcore software engineer at Philips working with hardware products.​

“Whatever life’s destiny had for me, I moved again and started doing and practicing design, then got educated in it,” she explains. Starting from the bottom rung as a UX engineer, she progressed through every rank imaginable—information architect, researcher, lead designer, manager, senior manager—accumulating experiences that now inform her leadership approach.​

This 17-18 year journey reflects what she calls “accumulation, amalgamation of all the experiences that you have, learning and getting trained by a lot of people”.​

The Three Pillars of Effective Collaboration

When leading design teams, Madhumita breaks down collaboration and communication into three fundamental elements:​

Trust: The Foundation

“When we know that a team member is coming here with the best of the intent and isn’t having any secondary motive, then it’s easier for people to contribute, question, challenge, contradict others,” she notes. Without psychological safety, collaboration breaks down. Team members become worried about being held accountable even when their intentions are good.​

Clear Expectations: The Framework

Unstated expectations lead to failure in communication. For example, when working across time zones—India and the US—assumptions about turnaround time can create friction. Someone in the US might expect work completed overnight, but does the task really take 8 hours, 16 hours, or 24 hours? Only evaluation reveals the truth.​

Similarly, assumptions about effort levels—”they’re just doing PowerPoint presentations while I’m pixel pushing”—ignore the reality that strategy work is equally demanding.​

Common Purpose: The Direction

“Once you have a common purpose—let’s say we are all working towards this goal—and there are certain expectations that we are going to play for, then once that clarity is there, automatically collaboration and communication becomes much easier,” Madhumita explains.​

Overcoming Challenges: The Growth Mindset Approach

When joining an established team, Madhumita emphasizes the danger of “legacy assumptions”. As a leader with extensive experience, it’s tempting to immediately impose your own methods. But this approach is fundamentally unfair.​

“You need to have a growth mindset and understand what is working well, what is not working well, what have already been tried,” she advises. Often, when you identify a problem and jump to a solution, the team may have already tried it unsuccessfully. Either the strategy needs adjustment or the context has changed.​

Building New Teams

Even when building a team from scratch, legacy assumptions persist because every team member brings their own organizational baggage. Leaders often say, “I led teams in my past organization and I was really successful doing this”—which is valuable experience, but requires adaptation.​

“You have to realize that in this company, with the context and the constraints that we work, would that same method work? Probably not. You’ll probably have to tweak it,” she notes. The essence remains, but local environment, constraints, and company culture demand customization.​

The Strategic Response

Her approach to new challenges follows a clear sequence:​

1. Recognize that existing knowledge and practices have value
2. Ramp up on what already exists
3. Identify problems objectively
4. Prioritize which problems matter most
5. Create a plan with clear ownership—what you’ll address yourself, what requires stakeholder help, and what your team should partner on

Managing Multiple Hats: Time Management for Leaders

As a VP of Design, Madhumita wears multiple hats simultaneously—designer, stakeholder liaison, team manager. Context switching comes with the territory at the leadership level, where meetings cover vastly different topics requiring different mindsets.​

“You need to have some focus time to assimilate all the information that you’re getting,” she explains. Ideally, taking notes between meetings helps, though AI is increasingly solving this problem.​

The Now-Next-Never Framework

Madhumita structures her day using a simple prioritization system:​

Now: Urgent tasks requiring immediate attention—5 minutes or less? Just do it​

Next: More time-consuming but still urgent—requires focus today​

Never: Tasks that should be delegated to someone else​

Once this structure is in place, she tackles “Now” items like email replies or chat messages, then moves to “Next” items like presentations, document reviews, or design critiques. The “Never” category ensures she doesn’t become a bottleneck by empowering her team.​

The Power of Saying No

“You don’t become a bad person when you say no because you have an alternative,” Madhumita emphasizes. When declining a request, she offers alternatives: someone else who can help, a delayed timeline when she’ll have bandwidth, or clarification that she’s not the right person.​

Clear communication about what you can and cannot do prevents misunderstandings and maintains relationships.​​

Leveraging AI: Practical Tools for Productivity

While new AI tools emerge daily, Madhumita is thoughtful about adoption, balancing innovation with data privacy and ethics requirements in corporate environments.​

Her Current AI Stack

Grammarly: Helps ensure emails and documents sent to large audiences are concise, grammatically correct, and properly toned​

Bard (now Gemini): For secondary research like market sizing—”I want to know the total number of customers available in the online market of US”. Rather than searching through Forrester reports, she uses prompt engineering to get quick answers​

Tome: Creates presentation outlines—useful for first drafts that don’t need to be perfect but save time on structure​

Microsoft PowerPoint Designer: Works within corporate templates to automatically suggest layouts while maintaining brand colors and standards​

Stable Diffusion: Generates images for non-commercial use like blog posts or presentations. For commercial work, her team purchases AI-generated images from Adobe Stock​

Notion AI: Helps with prioritization, creating templates, summarizing documents, and generating abstracts​

The common thread? These tools handle time-consuming structural work—outlines, grammar checks, secondary research—freeing up cognitive capacity for strategic thinking.​

User Research: Beyond Discovery and Validation

Madhumita challenges the conventional view that research only serves two purposes—initial discovery and final usability testing.​

“A designer should use research, both primary and secondary, to defend themselves,” she argues. When designing, one of the primary jobs is defending your design decisions because design is subjective and you’re not the user.​

Research as Defense

When a stakeholder says, “I think purple looks better because it’s my favorite color,” how do you counter this subjective opinion? Research provides the answer.​

“I have spoken to 10 users and half of them are color blind. It doesn’t matter doing purple or pink—what matters is the contrast. And our brand colors are giving this contrast, hence we should go about it,” she explains. Without research backing, you cannot make these convincing arguments.​

Continuous Research, Not Project-Based

Research shouldn’t be triggered by project starts. Product designers should continuously research their domain. In service companies where this is harder, designers should request client data about users.​

“You’re not the user and you’re not designing a solution that works for you. If that was it, we were all artists. Artists create things for themselves, but we are designers—we solve problems for others who we are not,” Madhumita notes.​

Research isn’t just a validation tool for both ends of the design process but a confidence builder throughout.​

Right-Sizing Research Effort

Not every problem needs extensive testing. The scale of research should match the ambiguity of your problem statement.​

“If your problem statement is small and you have very high confidence that this is an incremental change, you don’t need to research or test—you just go with your gut,” she advises. But when trying something new or different that challenges established mental models, multiple research phases become essential.​

The Double Diamond framework’s size depends on problem ambiguity—small, confident changes warrant tiny diamonds; ambitious innovations require extensive exploration.​

Authority vs. Authoritativeness

When asked about balancing authority with approachability, Madhumita offers a refreshing perspective: “Authority comes with your title anyway. You are put in a position of power because of everything that you have achieved, so I don’t think you should have to work even harder to show your authority”.​

Instead of focusing on demonstrating authority, she emphasizes confidence balanced with humility: “You have to have confidence in what you know for sure, and then be humble enough to say that okay, there is room to learn more. So ramp me up, let me understand the situation, and then with my experience I can help you solve certain problems”.​

Not all problems need solving—some should simply coexist.​

Advice for Aspiring Designers

Madhumita offers three essential guidelines for designers at any career stage:​

1. Build Strong Foundations

“It’s very easy to learn a tool, and today with AI coming, the tool becomes very irrelevant. You need to know why to use a tool,” she emphasizes.​

Using a cooking analogy, she explains: “I know how to make a biryani by putting rice and some vegetables or meat, and biryani will be ready. That is not how you make biryani. There’s so many ways of making biryani—you will have to tweak it based on the mood, the people that you’re feeding”.​

Foundational knowledge—design principles, user psychology, problem-solving frameworks—remains relevant regardless of which tools dominate the market.​

2. Keep Tinkering

Whether you have 5, 17, or 21 years of experience, “there is always something new coming—new mental models, customer behavior, new problems to solve”.​

Constantly experimenting keeps you sharp. Madhumita recently noticed YouTube’s color-based preference feature for refining recommendations. This innovation likely came from behavioral research showing people unconsciously prefer certain colors. Finding people’s preferences without boring them is an age-old problem requiring constant innovation.​​

3. Seek Help

“You don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to learn everything. You don’t have to read every book. You don’t have to learn every tool,” she reminds us.​

Join communities, talk to seniors, create peer support groups to practice, discuss, formulate, and brainstorm. Too many people pressure themselves to be “the best in the world,” but that’s a moving target. By the time you achieve mastery in one area, the goalposts have shifted and someone else has surpassed you.​

Build a strong support system instead.​

Being Average is Okay

“You shouldn’t be afraid of being average because not everybody in the industry can be a leader or reach that position,” Madhumita says.​

Her own approach reflects this wisdom: “I’m not a great illustrator. I’m good at strategy, but I’m not good in illustration. I’m not good in video creation”. Rather than trying to master everything, she hires talented designers and motivated people who excel in those areas.​

“Make them part of you and then become better together”.​

Product Engineer vs. Software Engineer

An interesting distinction emerged during the conversation about her development team: the difference between software engineers and product engineers.​

“The product engineer really understands what is the actual customer problem we are solving here, and they are solving things for the customer, not just creating a feature,” she explains.​

In today’s landscape, being a product engineer—someone who connects technical skills with customer understanding—matters more than pure coding ability.​

Final Thoughts: The Dialogue Approach

What made this conversation particularly engaging was Madhumita’s appreciation for true dialogue over monologue. “I love the fact that you have added your inputs, which is why it’s no longer just a dialogue but more of a conversation,” she noted.​

This philosophy extends to her leadership approach: collaboration thrives when people contribute authentically, trust exists, expectations are clear, and everyone works toward a common purpose.​

For designers navigating increasingly complex roles—balancing creativity with strategy, individual contributor work with leadership responsibilities, traditional methods with AI augmentation—Madhumita’s framework offers practical guidance: structure your time ruthlessly, build strong foundations, keep experimenting, seek help, and remember that you don’t have to master everything.

The goal isn’t perfection but continuous improvement, not individual brilliance but collective excellence.

Ready to level up your design practice? Start by implementing just one strategy from this conversation—whether it’s the Now-Next-Never prioritization framework, experimenting with an AI tool, or dedicating time to continuous user research.

Special thanks to Madhumita Gupta for sharing her wealth of experience and wisdom, and to the UXArmy team for making this conversation possible.

And to all of you, thank you for reading.

If you have suggestions for fantastic guests from across the globe, feedback, or questions, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at hi@uxarmy.com

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