Kapil Kaul

About Kapil Kaul

I have been fascinated by human behavior for as long as I can remember, It started with reading Dale Carnegie\'s seminal \'How to Make Friends and Influence People\' during my school days and later dense psychology textbooks in our college library when in reality, I was training in Computer Science Engineering. I decided that I wanted to make ads, since advertising seemed an ideal mix of persuasion and creativity, stuff I was fascinated by. While my engineering degree didn\'t get me anything apart from bemused looks in agencies, this curiosity about human motivation and decision making eventually shaped the direction of my career as I have since then taken up 4 different careers that have their moorings in Behavioral Sciences.A few years ago, while working on yet another technology driven \'new ways of working\' project, I realized \'bad design\' is the main reason my job exists in the first place. My work essentially was becoming something between a firefighter and a used car salesman, driving the adoption of soul-numbing enterprise applications. Around that time I had also been getting deeper into Human-Centered Design, as it gave a vocabulary to all that I had been doing throughout my career. I eventually realized that \'Design is the most effective way of influencing behavior change\'. I now wanted to make my job redundant, so I decided to formally acquire the skills while distancing myself from the solution-centric approach consultants excel at. I applied to and got admitted to Parsons School of Design which is counted among the world\'s best design schools. There I got to formally learn how Human-Centered Design can be used to build great products, services, and experiences. Today, I lead a large team of designers and strategists, working on imagining and simplifying experiences.

Experience

1. Director Experience Design

   Tata Consultancy Services

   Jun 2022 — Present · Delhi, IN

   I work with a large, pan India team of designers and strategists, crafting transformational solutions for complex business problems of our clients.My job has 3 parts1) Pre Sales and Evangelism Participate in RFP responses, pitches and assorted pre-sales activities, working closely with account and BD teams. Articulate the \'experience\' aspect in our responses, propose the design approach and resourcing/cost estimates and come up with quick PoC\'s to showcase our vision. I also represent India Design Studios during client visits and meetings, showcasing our extensive capabilities, success stories and PoV on the future of their industry.2) Design Strategy and Delivery Management- Ensuring alignment between client expectations, business requirements and resource fitment. Provide strategic and creative direction in the more complex, high stake engagements. Elevate utilitarian enterprise workflows and sterile linear applications into meaningful, intuitive and elegant designs. Having spent years in the trenches with end users, trying to get them to use the \'new and improved \' applications, I\'ve developed a gag reflex against bad design. My empathy for users doesn\'t come from maps or personas, but the residual trauma of having to first learn those nightmare applications and then trying to train passive aggressive users who would rather be doing their \'real job\'. 3)People Development and Management- Hire, manage and mentor talent. My unconventional background allows me to bring a unique outside-in perspective to design, which hopefully translates into shaping a more holistic \'design as value creation \'mindset vs a more \' design as a craft\' outlook amongst designers.

Education

• Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar University, Agra

  Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Science

• Parsons School of Design - The New School

  Master of Science - MS, Strategic Design and Management

Skills

• Workshop Facilitation
• Experience Design
• Management Development
• Management
• Team Building
• Business Transformation
• Team Management
• Organizational Development
• Strategy
• Onboarding
• Innovation Management
• Culture Change
• Employee Engagement
• Consulting
• Training & Development
• Leadership
• Management Consulting
• Human Resources
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Analysis
• Training
• HR Consulting
• Change Leadership
• Project Planning
• Leadership Development
• HR Transformation
• Personnel Management
• Organizational Effectiveness
• Design Thinking
• Corporate Culture
• Stakeholder Management
• User Experience
• Organizational Change
• Executive Coaching
• Soft Skills
• Training Delivery
• Business Process Improvement
• Performance Management
• Employee Training
• Organizational Design