Fairooz Nazar

Prev. Product Design Lead at @disneyplushs, currently back in the arena
/ Love cinema, f1 and all mountains & beaches
/ From Kerala, India

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

I had always been curious about the BTS of a product redesign and well, we ended up redesigning Disney+ Hotstar recently ourselves.

I now understand why around 70% of product design is about communication during this journey.
Here is the story behind Hotstar X (1/8)

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@ankeetmaini @Phsychi Haha! Not really since you and @QriusV arrived

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

Going rogue is one of my proudest moments at Disney+ Hotstar. Back in 2021, Dark mode for web was simply not getting prioritised so I literally wined and dined my fav engg lead @Phsychi and we built it in stealth for weeks and revealed it only after it was ready to ship

[joshpuckett @joshpuckett]

You need to be going rogue more as a designer.

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@joshpuckett @Phsychi Thanks Josh! The buy-in was so much easier once it was built. Wild how easier this would be with AI now

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@align_all Love ATC, an app that’s nothing like what I have seen before. @bumpbyamo is another one and has the most beautiful yet convincing and sensible permissions flow I have seen till now

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@kedia_naman Really fun experience but noticed that the autofocus is really poor in it, if Iam too close, it’s blurry and I can’t tap to focus on what’s intended. Noticed much better results in the default camera app so had to click and then upload separately

[Adrian Clarke @adrianfclarke]

I promised you all post gathering my thoughts on the Ferrari Luce and now I’ve had a couple of days to digest and think, plus several glasses of cold Tizer, here it is.

Let me say straight off that it’s bad, both objectively and subjectively. I’ll get into what’s wrong with ithe design but at the moment all I have are more questions than answers. A thread 1/n

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@NCResq Mygate is the irctc of Indian startups

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@arpit_vermaniac There is no bigger offender than mygate at this in India though. With zero respect for the user, they are messing up the functionality everywhere. This is what happens when ads team dominates the company, product goes to shit

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

This is so true for design managers especially, because you actually get rusty with Figma itself when you were fighting for the design decisions in the room. Going back to Figma has been something I had missed and with AI, the whole process has evolved.

[Brijesh Bharadwaj @bbharadwaj]

Most managers earned their role by being one of the best ICs on the team.
It's time to be one again.

Most Managers come up the ranks as top ICs.
So in a pre-AI world, when someone said "this is going to take 3 weeks," they knew if that was true because they had done it themselves.

Now think about post-AI work world.
Most current managers have never been an IC with AI at their disposal.
They don't really know what's possible or how long stuff should take.

We see this play out at Segwise all the time.
A founder or head of growth finds us, the value prop clicks.
AI creative tagging, agentic creative analytics, competitor insights and creative generation.
All makes sense. So they send us to their team.

And then they step back.

Then the team evaluates.
But look, most people don't want change.
Their work life is fine right now. They have a process for tagging creatives in spreadsheets, they know how to pull reports from each ad network manually.
It works fine.

A new tool means relearning how they do their job differently.
It could be better, but it is definitely going to be different.

The best teams look forward to such exploration.
But there are also teams which do not want this change, and they go back and say - "Hey I don't think we need this."

In the meantime, our CS team has been chasing them to get on training calls and trying to show them how to get the best out of the free trial.
Every AI founder has dealt with this.

The manager takes that at face value because they don't have the instincts to challenge it anymore.
They haven't used the tool.
They can't tell the difference between "this genuinely doesn't work" and "I just don't want things to change."
Because they don't have the IC instincts for the AI version of the job they were great at.

Change creates chaos and most people don't want chaos in their work life.
But if you're a leader evaluating AI tools right now, you have to become the IC again.

You were one of the best with dumber tools.
You have to be one again, at least until your instincts become sharp again.
Sit with the new AI tools. Do the actual IC work.
Get a feel for what's possible now, not what someone told you is possible.

Otherwise you'll keep hearing "it's not ready" while your competitors bolt ahead.

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@Appyg99 It’s so incredibly poor in understanding Indian context of names or hinglish etc still and the sad part is I absolutely don’t expect Apple to fix the important small stuff anymore.

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@josephradhik I have a feeling you will like their latest video too: https://t.co/sd2uQOuTD2

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@josephradhik I thought the same until I discovered this channel:
https://t.co/ROPzxocKOB

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@krishnanrohit It’s obvious that Gemini is built by a committee because it’s the slowest to respond

[アリムラモハ🦒絵本『キリンリンリン』発売中 @mohamedo62]

ポストをタップするとケンタウロスになるやつ

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@felixleezd I agree with not hiring a designer early on but you should be working with a designer who is committing certain time at least weekly because a good product designer can explore the vision of the founders and figure out what the product should be like. Better done early on

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@nateparrott This is after showing a pop up on every video call saying ‘would you like to use your iPhone as a secondary camera?’

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@NCResq The interesting thing is that in a perfect competition like qcom, personalised homepage is how you can beat the competitors but well, you know how product companies are run

[Fairooz Nazar @FairoozNazar]

@NCResq And when you have a personalised homepage especially in quick commerce, I would expect it to be a few years before every one of the end up looking the same again. It’s a bit of cycle but there is a lot of potential for a better personalised qcom homepage than the current ones