“Trust Your Intuition” — with Puja Balachander, Founder and CEO Devie
Today, we’re speaking with Puja Balachander, Founder & CEO of Devie. We speak with Puja about her time working as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, how she got into user research, and where her inspiration for Devie originated.
Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager.
Journey Map listeners know that with the right map you can take your career anywhere you set your mind to. MindManager work management software puts your ideas, plans and projects on the path to success by transforming them into dynamic digital maps, charts, diagrams and more. Mind Managers flexible visual format makes it easy to capture, organize, understand and evolve critical business information and with powerful collaboration sharing features it’s the perfect tool for keeping remote teams aligned, on track and headed in the right direction.You can take a free thirty day no commitment trial today by visiting www.mindmanager.com/journeymap.
Transcript:
Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Today’s guest graduated with a degree in International and Global Studies from American University. She’s worked as a Design Strategist with the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows. She has also worked as a Service and Systems Design Consultant and Coach with the World Bank Group. In 2018 she became Co-Founder and CEO of Devie. For those of you who don’t know Devie is a social enterprise with the mission to support every parent to help their child grow, and in the process to close the primary school readiness gap. With Devie, a digital coach supports parents through daily five-minute chats. Today we’re talking to Puja Balachander, Co-Founder and CEO of Devie. She is a trailblazer in the space of social entrepreneurship. Puja, welcome to Journey Map!
Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager. Journey Map listeners know that with the right map you can take your career anywhere you set your mind to. MindManager work management software puts your ideas, plans and projects on the path to success by transforming them into dynamic digital maps, charts, diagrams and more. Mind Managers flexible visual format makes it easy to capture, organize, understand and evolve critical business information and with powerful collaboration sharing features it’s the perfect tool for keeping remote teams aligned, on track and headed in the right direction.You can take a free thirty day no commitment trial today by visiting www.mindmanager.com/journeymap.
DH: Today we’re speaking with Puja Balachander, Co-Founder and CEO of Devie. She is a trailblazer in the space of social entrepreneurship. Puja, welcome to Journey Map!
PB: Awesome thanks for having me!
DH: I normally don’t do this for what will become obvious reasons, but could you please let us know how old you are as our first question?
PB: I am 25.
DH: In terms of you know our show it’s called Journey Map which oftentimes we are speaking with people who have 25 years of industry experience, professional experience, let alone their age. So sometimes I’ve been accused in my introductions of going very long when we try to include every point that we think would be relevant and in your case it would have probably been the longest introduction in the history of the show had we got into all those points. So you have done a lot of stuff in a very short amount of time. Can we just start with what is it about your childhood, or just who you are as a person that has kind of made you so hyper active in terms of the amount of experiences that you had?
PB: When I think about my childhood, I actually really disliked change, I was really resistant to any kind of change growing up whether it was moving, going to new schools, just anything I absolutely detested. As I got older I don’t know why, I just really started to enjoy learning something new, and in my career I tended to follow the opportunities where I would have the greatest potential for growth and learning. I think that’s what drove me changing jobs reasonably often and finding these new challenges. So when I was at the Presidential Innovation Fellows I really enjoyed having these new projects every few months and I really enjoyed having that new challenge, and new topic to dive into. So I started out in Veterans Affairs, and I moved to Child Welfare, eventually I moved into something at the Department of Commerce with the pay gap. It was really interesting to have these new challenges to dive into, and learn these human centred design skills that I had never really been exposed to. When I went to the World Bank there were so many learning curves, I was working in a new language, I was working with a team who were significantly older than me, in a new country adjusting to those new cultural norms. While learning all this stuff about public health, maternal health, and childhood nutrition things that I had never really studied. While learning all the ins and outs of the Madagascar public health system, which was really interesting. Also learning these new things around systems design, and design coaching rather than being the user researcher and designer on the team. I actually remember that job in particular I had been interviewing for management and consulting positions and in the morning I had accepted a management and consulting job and in the afternoon my contract for the World Bank came through. It was just really obvious even though the pay differential was crazy, which choice I wanted to take because the learning and the growth was just so much more with this opportunity. Similarly when I moved to the City of Austin the opportunity was to lead, work in government, and do more strategic work for the city was an incredible opportunity to learn. Now, obviously with Devie this is the biggest challenge and growth I’ve had yet.
DH: Wow sounds like we could have a whole episode just discussing where you’ve traveled to and why, but I’ll stick to my script here for a bit. So in 2015 you had this opportunity with the White House Presidential Fellows, could you explain what that is and also what is the role of a design strategist in that organization?
PB: Yeah so the Presidential Innovation Fellows is a really awesome program to bring designers, product managers, developers, and data scientists into government. On what basically were temporary, I mean it was meant to be a temporary situation where you come in and you kind of do a project, and bring the digital innovation skills into governments and try to bring that mindset to whatever kind of public challenge is put before you. Traditionally they were hiring much more senior people, so these are usually people who are very advanced in their careers, they are considered thought leaders and experts. I started my career there as an admin effectively, I was an operations associate and I just ended up being in the right place at the right time but also being interested in the right things at the right time. There was a project around child welfare, and child and family services that was happening at the time, and I just kind of offered to do anything I could do to be in the room. I was like I’ll take notes for you, just let me be there. Over time I just got more, and more involved to the extent that I ended up being one of the 3 Presidential Innovation Fellows working on this project. I ended up working on that, while I was still doing all of my admin duties on the side so it ended up being two jobs in one instead of just the one I was hired to do. So in terms of what I was doing is a design strategist, because I was on this project with the Department of Health and Human Services, and our project there was on improving child welfare outcomes. So first it was just a crazy user researching phase, where we travelled all over the U.S., we spoke to hundreds of experts,stakeholders, biological families, foster families, alumni of the system, and social workers to kind of understand what the core challenges were that were making outcomes for children and families that are involved in the foster care system in the US so abysmal. Then our next stage was to actually prototype solutions and recommend solutions both from policies down to products that might be helpful through the Department of Health and Human Services which is where we were based. So in terms of design strategy this project was my biggest one, but I did similar roles with the Department of Veterans Affairs and a couple of other projects as well while I was there. Most of them were just around doing user research, coming up with what those ideas and recommendations were, and then prototyping them with often state and local variants of the federal government service that I was working with.
DH: So it seems to me like between that role and the next couple of roles that you had you know I run a user experience agency myself, and it seems to me like you’re really dove into the world of UX research and strategy pretty heavily, but your education doesn’t necessarily point to that area of focus for your relatively short career but still impactful at this point. How did you kind of get into a UX researcher strategy type position? So a) do you think about yourself in those roles? And b) how did you decide to go down that path in the first place?
PB: Yeah I mean I certainly did think of myself in that role now that I’m kind of doing the start up thing. That’s one of the many hats that I wear, but yes historically I was definitely doing user research, UX research, and then later service design more related work. But I really fell into it, I did not kind of choose that career and I didn’t even know that it kind of existed. I really thought that I was going to be working in international development. I had gone to India, my dream job was to work for state or USAID in Washington DC doing poverty alleviation work. I ended up just because as a former internship supervisor who moved to this position at the White House and asked if I would be interested in joining, and so I ended up going there. Then I realized that this whole world even kind of existed, and because my background is in international development I had been doing a lot of youth empowerment work in India the year before. When this child welfare project came up I was like “Oh this is kind of close to something I used to be doing around youth empowerment like let me get involved in any way possible”. It just ended up being that you know my one qualm with the international development work I was doing was that it tended to be very kind of removed from the end beneficiaries and now I would call them users, but at the time I would call them beneficiaries. It felt very bureaucratic and so I found that doing the user research side of the work just really grounded me in what the actual needs were, and it felt like a much more intuitive way of doing the work that I wanted to be doing in the first place. Especially when I was at the World Bank a lot of my work consisted of okay and how do we bring those principles of UX research and user design into actually designing international and public health programs.
DH: So through that description of not only how you got into UX but also some of the projects that you were working on, our listeners could probably start to understand how you could go onto found Devie. But what was the turning point that saw you say, this is the problem I want to tackle and here’s how I’m going to tackle it?
PB: I mean honestly I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial, that’s the reason I went to business school. Then once I got there I started working on this problem of early childhood development and I wasn’t married to that being the problem that I was going to solve, it’s really just something that business school allowed me that opportunity to explore in a relatively risk free way. So I was doing a lot of the user research, and early prototyping while I was in business school, and it just became so clear. Basically I had this idea that if I need to be working on solving or addressing global inequality or climate change, like to me those are the big kind of problems of our time. With early childhood development as I did the research on it the more it felt like a really transformational thing to be doing, that actually my previous experiences lined up serendipitously well with. Then when I actually did the user research it just felt like such a compelling problem and it was just a very human problem in terms of speaking to parents all the time. The solution that we actually ended up coming up with which is Devie because parents early on started responding really well to it, unlike other times that I had tried to start something where I just couldn’t get excited enough about it. The process of figuring out the solution and testing it was just so all consuming that I was like okay this is the thing that I need to be doing.
DH: If you think about the emotional roller coaster that you’ve been on during that time what’s the highest high on that emotional journey in creating a startup?
PB: That’s a really good question. It would probably be the day we released our beta and I just saw like the numbers climbing up of the parents actually using it, and seeing some of that first feedback that would probably be the highest high. It’s probably a tie with like one of our funders coming through at the end of my MBA program, back when the funding came in it and it kind of became clear that I’d be able to work there full time. So probably a tie, but I would say the actual product coming out and seeing users use that was the highest high for me.
DH: I wanted to just want to flash forward now. You have really now firmly established yourself as this as a social entrepreneur and when you also talked about some of the other projects or departments that you thought you might see yourself working in office there is that kind of social bend to everything else. If you were to ever jump into the dark world of capitalism and do something that’s not social entrepreneurship or social programs based, what do you think it is something you might try in the future and why?
PB: I honestly have no idea I’m trying to think now like what that might be. To be honest, the problems that are of most interest to me just tend to be the social ones. I mean maybe I would be a venture builder that could be pretty interesting, I love learning about these spaces. Maybe being able to work for an accelerator or even work for a funder, helping entrepreneurs go through it would be I think a fun job.
DH: What do you think is your superpower?
PB: I think speed is my superpower, I’m pretty speedy and decisive. I think I have a lot of intuition as well, so I find it pretty easy to make what other people would consider a difficult decision quite quickly because it just feels right. Then once I’ve made the decision I don’t tend to kind of hmm and haw about it. So I think speed, being decisive and intuitive are probably my super powers.
DH: You’re the first person who’s ever answered that question with a superpower that could actually be the superpower of a superhero, which is great. Has there ever been a time where that super power has failed you? Where maybe by being so fast, so speedy you fell on your face a little bit? Can you think of a time where that super power has actually hurt you rather than helps you?
PB: Yeah I mean 100%. I think I’ve been lucky that I’ve been surrounded by people that are counterbalanced to that. There’s definitely been times that I’ve been in danger of plowing ahead without thinking. For example when Devie first launched I was going all in with getting a bunch of parents to start using it, but I didn’t stop to think okay we should stop to develop the product a bit more and doing this little by little instead of going and getting a whole bunch of people to start using it and then having a mediocre experience and then have to do reputational control afterwards. I was kind of going with very much you know put in people’s hands they’ll tell us what to do, let’s just get it in as many people’s hands as possible. So I do think that actually if I had put more thought into our release I might have made it a private beta or maybe made some different decisions early on. Now that I have kind of like the right team members and able to not recover from that decision but able to continue evolving in the way that we want to with that decision having been made. I’m glad I have people on my team that can pull me back from that.
DH: The support system is key. Listen, Puja thank you for joining us on Journey Map today I’m sure this is not the last people will hear of you and I’m excited to hopefully check in in a few years and see where the journey has led to. We will include you in our show notes and links to where people can find more about you and the company, and thank you again for being here. It was a real pleasure.
PB: Awesome thank you so much!
