8Minute Talk show — Saleh Naghavi Product designer at Snappfood

Reza Bakhtiarifard: Hello, we are beside you with another 8minute talk show. Today, Mr. Naghavi is our guest.

Saleh Naghavi: Hello everyone. I am Saleh Naghavi, and I’m the lead product manager at Snappfood. When I was younger, there was a game and it was fascinating, so it led me to software. I studied Graphics at school, and I got my associate’s degree at EITTC University. After that, I worked as a graphic for a while, then I designed some sites.

Reza Bakhtiarifard: could you please tell us a little about your experiences?

Saleh Naghavi: My first project was Nestle, and it was my first professional design. It improved the inner and outer team communications. We were a young team, and we knew Graphic, not product designing. I knew about graphics, and I was familiar with technology, so we started the project. Unfortunately, our project didn’t end well. After that, I entered Hichestan, and our project was about houses and apartments. We wanted to process online house sales. I worked on the Snapp Mosafer app for a while, and I designed some parts of that project.

Reza Bakhtiarifard: What changed your mind and led you through technology?

Saleh Naghavi: I’ve never thought about it, believe me, it’s an exciting world! As it’s not real, it can’t limit you. It’s exciting, and you can create and make whatever you want! It can help me produce and design things that are in my mind. I can’t create a sculpture in reality, but I can create and design it with technology. So, I think it’s an amazing world. I was thinking about the cause that I shifted graphic design to product design, and I understood that in product designing, there’s a correlation between the member and the product. We have this correlation in graphic designing, too, but you can’t see the final result. A process is done, and then you can learn, but product design is an interactive activity. You and your user both have access to the product. Your user uses the product, and you can develop your product based on your user’s opinion.

There’s a challenge that I deal with it, and still, I’m searching for the solution, which is inner team activities. As a product designer, you are on two fronts, one is the business, and another is the user. A product designer should find similarities between them, help businesses to identify the user, and add some features to the business based on the user’s demands. How to balance these activities is a rebellious work, but users are not satisfied usually.

Reza Bakhtiarifard: How can we balance them?

Saleh Naghavi: technics need training. What I meant about training is the fellowship, like the reason we research, test, and other activities. We do these activities to have a good view and opinion about product designing and use the test report to improve the business. The other side is, how to balance users which is harder, You don’t have direct access to the user, but you try to create a perfect product to fulfill the user’s need.

Reza Bakhtiarifard: Why do some perfect products fail?

Saleh Naghavi: designing products is one part, the other is marketing. Even you design the best product, it will fail if there’s no good market. I always ask a question from product designers that what’s their opinion about this job, do you think you can save a business alone? In response, some of them say yes and some no, but if you want my opinion, I say no. I’m a part of the business. I should do my best to help the business, on the other hand, marketing is important.

Reza Bakhtiarifard: What are the study resources in your job field?

Saleh Naghavi: there are many books, but what I do is reading everything about my field on the internet.

Reza Bakhtiarifard: who do you invite to this talk show?

Saleh Naghavi: I’d like to invite Mehdi Oloomi, and he is a copywriter.

Reza Bakhtiarifard: Thanks for accepting my invitation. I enjoyed it a lot.

Saleh Naghavi: Thank you for inviting me. That was cool!