{"podcast":{"title":"Design Better","slug":"design-better-58582","podcast_index_feed_id":58582,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/designbetter","website_url":"http://designbetterpodcast.com","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/5c7f5f0a-37c0-11ee-b4ef-e736dc77755f/image/d9388f8e30c83625a7a26fcedbaa3b74.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"The Curiosity Department","episode_count":259,"summary":"Design Better co-hosts Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter explore the intersection of design, technology, and the creative process through conversations with guests across many creative fields, helping you hone your craft, unlock your creativity, and learn the art of collaboration. Whether you’re design curious or a design pro, Design Better is guaranteed to inspire and inform. Vanity Fair calls Design Better, “sharp, to the point, and full of incredibly valuable information for anyone looking to better understand how to build a more innovative world.”","last_synced_at":"2026-09-02T22:23:13.471687+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/design-better-58582"},"episode":{"title":"Niyati Gupta: Netflix Product Design Lead on what happens when a designer becomes a product manager, and why your influence might not be in your title","slug":"niyati-gupta-netflix-product-design-lead-on-what-happens-when-a-designer-becomes-a-product-manager-and-why-your-influence-might-not-be-in-your-title","published_at":"2026-06-25T15:11:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/design-better-58582/niyati-gupta-netflix-product-design-lead-on-what-happens-when-a-designer-becomes-a-product-manager-and-why-your-influence-might-not-be-in-your-title","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/design-better-58582","url":"https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/niyati-gupta","audio_url":"https://pdst.fm/e/p.podderapp.com/1794982497/chrt.fm/track/1C4248/prfx.byspotify.com/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/211/traffic.megaphone.fm/MLALE9725115615.mp3","summary":"Niyati Gupta describes her career as one long experiment — deliberately putting herself in uncomfortable, ambiguous situations and treating every move as a personal learning loop. That instinct took her from a bachelor’s in design inside one of India’s most prestigious engineering colleges, where almost nobody understood what design was, to a research role at Carnegie Mellon where she studied health info needs for low-literacy users in rural India, to Autodesk’s bio-nano innovation lab building molecular visualization tools for scientists — and eventually to Google, where she joined the Next Billion Users team. Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/niyati-gupta That team’s mission was to ask an open question: where would the next wave of users come from, what did they need, and what products didn’t exist yet to serve them? Niyati ran immersion sprints in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and Mexico — shadowing users, building prototypes in the field, testing them in the wild, and bringing those insights back to a team that was building products like Camera Go and Google Files from the ground up. And she’ll tell you that the swim lanes between designer, engineer, and PM felt just as artificial out there in the field as they do today with AI accelerating everything. These days she’s a senior product designer at Netflix, working on commerce and partnerships — which means thinking hard about discovery, about fandom, about how you help someone decide what to watch on a Friday night without making them feel like the choosing is harder than the watching. It also means designing across a ten-foot TV screen, a phone, and every device in between, and trying to make all of it feel like one seamless experience. In this conversation, we get…","meta_description":"Niyati Gupta describes her career as one long experiment — deliberately putting herself in uncomfortable, ambiguous situations and treating every move as…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2640,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/design-better-58582/episodes/niyati-gupta-netflix-product-design-lead-on-what-happens-when-a-designer-becomes-a-product-manager-and-why-your-influence-might-not-be-in-your-title/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/design-better-58582/niyati-gupta-netflix-product-design-lead-on-what-happens-when-a-designer-becomes-a-product-manager-and-why-your-influence-might-not-be-in-your-title.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}