Fellowship Experience: Nishant Goel

Nishant Goel is currently a product designer at Obvious, is a Fellow from the 3rd cohort of the Product Design Fellowship. We caught up with him a while to ago to learn about his experience with the Fellowship. Nishant ended up at ownpath during his quest for guided mentorship and to help solidify his basics.

Read on to find out more.

“I’ve been a product designer for nearly four years now. Aside from Obvious, I’d had a couple of other roles at a design agency and a start-up - an engineer turned designer actually. I’d always been interested in design and how things were built. Initially joining another design-based cohort made me realise just how impactful it can be.

When you create your own processes, you sometimes succeed, and fail sometimes, and as a self-taught designer, I learnt from all the mistakes I made. But soon I started feeling the need for a mentor who was an industry expert and would help guide my process. That’s around the time I met Shreyas, and when I heard of ownpath’s curriculum and its mentors, my decision to join ownpath was a no-brainer. And it’s been a good decision because I was able to identify gaps and become better at my work as a designer.

My journey here has been amazing. One of our last sessions of the cohort was Designing with Data with Arnab and Ruchin. It was great to be able to learn from experts in the field. Even the assignments were quite good - they were action-oriented, but not overwhelming, very specific to what we learnt in class and how we execute it. I was amazed at the clarity of content put out by the mentors, examples like Akshay come to mind instantly. These changed my perspective of design. That was pretty amazing. I feel like I’m using the word amazing a lot, but it really was.

For me, mentorship at ownpath has been about defining my process. The mentors here helped identify the gaps in my foundation, and strengthen those skills.

I also got to interact with my peers when we did exercises and projects together. It was staggering to see the difference in everyone’s mindset and I got to learn so much. The lively discussions about the human psyche during our Psychology of Design sessions will always stay with me! Whatever I learnt, I was able to apply it to my daily work.

It was just like that when I was applying for the role at Obvious too. I lacked confidence in my skills, but after ownpath there was a change in that thought process. I reached out to the team at Obvious and passed the tests and interview process. I’m quite eager to see how this journey shapes up!”

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If you’re a designer, you can join our Product Design Fellowship. The next cohort begins soon!

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