‘Every engineer needs to have direct exposure to problems’ – 65 quotes from the Future of Work 2020 conference

StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week. Drawn from our special coverage of the recent Future of Work 2020 conference, here are 65 gems of insight from a star-studded lineup of speakers. See our full coverage of the keynotes, panels and workshops here.

Growth is learning to reliably create a valuable outcome. - Sidu Ponappa, Gojek

Learning is here to stay. And the most important aspect of it is you have to learn, unlearn and relearn constantly. - Ranjit Radhakrishnan, BYJU'S

Developing personal adaptability is extremely important when it comes to navigating yourself through an ambiguous career path. - Parvathi Menon, Innovation Alchemy Consulting

Try to put in teams that are multi-disciplinary, and you can expect some magic to happen. You need both depth and breadth approach to make innovation. - Sriram Iyer, Flipkart

If you don't understand your user, your competitor will. - Ekta Grover, InMobi

Every industry is hackable today. From the needle to the airplane, everything is hackable. - Vineet Kumar, Cyber Peace Foundation

As you grow bigger you need to have full-fledged firewalls to safeguard your data points. - Navnath Wadekar, Vodafone

Taking a step back can be the quickest way forward. - Tina Ngo, Influx Worldwide

Boredom is a great motivator. - Mukesh Bansal, CureFit

If you are scaling, scale it right. - Shivangi Srivastava, Khatabook

It all however starts with whether you adding something to the user’s life. - Viral Mehta, Pocket Aces

Payment is nothing but interaction between two different people. - Sumit Gwalani, EpiFi

Touch can offer only so much. Voice assistance has been gaining popularity, and the way people interact with devices has changed. - Vivekanand Pani, Reverie

Content is spread across a long tail of genres. To figure out what the user wants is an exciting problem. - Debdoot Mukherjee, ShareChat

People who are consuming the internet for only communication and entertainment purposes today, are going to transact online. - Chetty Arun, Razorpay

It’s mind-boggling what technology has made possible. - Yaw Yeo, Alibaba Cloud

Today, businesses have realised that they are all into technology, regardless of the vertical they operate in. - Iqbal Kaur, Zylotech

It’s very important in the space industry to make sure that the satellite functions the same way in its earth orbit as it functions during ground testing. - Richa Hukumchand, Pixxel

Web 3.0 can be the internet of resources – sharing resources in a trust-worthy platform and marketplace that also has all kinds of transactional needs. - Vikalp Sahni, Goibibo

AI is real. But is AI inclusive and free of bias? Engineers today have to figure that out and start with a hypothesis before claiming that AI is really transforming industries. - Rajashree Rao, Rolls-Royce

That will be an augmentation of human abilities, where AI will do things that the human brain cannot do. - Prithvijit Roy, BRIDGEi2i

Tech leaders are very optimistic about the future of work. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a catalyst for more productivity. - Parvathi Menon, Innovation Alchemy

How many of us have built a culture where data is used to improve and not prove and disprove? - Aditya Jalan, Bounce

AI is only as good as the data. - Swapan Rajdev, Haptik

You have to remember today, that AI can be biased if you don't audit the algorithm. - Philip Varughese, Accenture

You have to ask the questions: ‘Do you need AI at all? What will you use it for?’ You have to plan it based on your objectives. - Hemanth Sheelvant, Bosch

It is critical to understand the problem before technologies like machine learning come into play. - Vineeth Narasimhan, Kristal.AI

The future of AI is about unlocking human potential. AI frees up humans from mundane tasks and leave them for more creative jobs. - Dale Vaz, Swiggy

There are virtual doctors, lawyers, etc., but actual lawyers and doctors are needed to build AI. Also, if AI reaches the wrong hands, it can cause complete devastation. - Philip Varughese Vayarakunnil, Accenture India

Pervasiveness of AI is ubiquitous, it’s being applied, adopted, and implemented across several genres of industries. - Sameer Dhanrajani, AIQRATE

Real-time continuous intelligence and the business value for consumers is becoming important for enterprises to capture. - Amitabh Misra, Adobe

One of the advantages of working in VR is being able to draw in a 3D space. It helps to place things very accurately. - Karthik Bharadwaj, AutoVRse

Some of the best faculty in AI and ML across the globe are Indians, but not a lot of them are working in India. - Arnab Kumar, NITI Aayog

If you look at where India stands at R&D investments, it is just 0.8 percent of the GDP as compared with US where it is 2.7 percent or Israel with 4.2 percent. - Shivananda Koteshwar, Synopsys

Financial inclusion is all about providing services such as credit, basic banking services, and insurance at affordable rates, and in a timely fashion. - Ravi Garikipati, Davinta Financial Services

Democratising fintech means, we have to ensure that the customer’s journey of sending money, spending money, managing money, and growing their wealth should happen as a trusted bridge on a single platform. - Rahul Chari, PhonePe

India is not a country where we can keep opening up new bank branches. We have to make it in whichever device is in hand and is capable of doing it. - Sidharth, ex-Instamojo

If you are someone that has received a phone call from banks to help you avail of a loan, you are part of only about five percent of India’s population that receives such a call. - Dharmesh BA, D91 Labs

Founders have the option of downloading safe financing and other templated documents from Y Combinator for free and use it to negotiate even without a lawyer. - Vatsal Gaur, HSA Advocates

Urban challenges like worsening traffic conditions in the past seven to eight years, and conveniences like the introduction of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have presented huge opportunities for startups. - Arvind Sanka, Rapido

If you dismantle the feudal structure that exists, India will grow faster than any other country. - Lalitesh Katragadda, Indihood

India will have its own social networks because of the many local languages. It depends on who understands what users want. - Ankush Sachdeva, ShareChat

We live in a very dichotomous time. On the one hand, we hear about unemployment and, on the other, we hear companies say that there are no skilled people who qualify for the jobs available. - Sandipan Chattopadhyaya, Xelpmoc Design

As long as customers see that you are genuinely trying to solve their problems and not repeating the same mistakes, they will forgive you. - Deepesh Agarwal, GetToWork

Product managers are at the centre of the business where they are talking to almost every stakeholder in the company. Hence they are at the heart of the collaboration. - Kapil Rathee, Junglee Games

Companies don’t always take feedback. Instead, they keep building products. - Ashish Agarwal, Kaleyra

A product manager must focus on being a problem owner and not a solution owner. - Rohan Choudhary, Glance

Listen to your consumer because s/he will invariably drive the product road map for you. - Rohan Choudhary, Glance

If we keep the consumer in mind and have clarity on the problems we are trying to solve, that’s where the magic happens. - Soumendra Mohanty, Tredence

As a B2C consumer, you can visualise yourself as a consumer, so it's easy to design products for B2C consumer ecommerce. - Abhilash Pillai, Udaan

We have moved from creating for the masses to creating for personas. - Sumit Dagar, Intuit

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By observing how your users are engaging on other marketplaces you can build new use cases. - Prasun Jain, Gojek

While there are experts who handle the experience design and the whole UX, the onus on software developers to know about usability is much higher. - Hemant Khandelwal, Harness India

Today’s UI is just too complex. - Karthic Rao, Dgraph

A framework is better than a process, as processes tend to be rigid, lead to complacency, and quickly become outdated. Frameworks, on the other hand, are strong guiding lines but can be flexible when needed, and are adaptable over time. - Dhruv Kapoor, Zilingo

Build trust by design. Increase trust through registries, attestations and signatures. - Pramod Varma, India Stack

Today, designers are moving up the ranks to the proximity of the CEO. Increasingly, a designer is among the first five hires in a startup today. - Jay Dutta, MakeMyTrip

When we talk about design, we are talking about technology. The two are inseparable. - Padmini Ray Murray, Design Beku

Don't start with a long list of problems. Start with what the possibilities could be. It's a very, very simple switch. - Meeta Malhotra, The Hard Copy

Outcome is greater than output. - Sameer Bhiwani, Scripbox

The 10x Developer is someone who has 20 people around him to mentor and discuss things. - Vibhore Sharma, Info Edge

Be in control of your business and be the smartest person in the room. - Siddarth Pai, 3one4 Capital

When you work in teams and harness the power of chaos, great things are possible. - Anandamoy Roychowdhary, Sequoia Capital

You cannot solve the world’s biggest problem, whether in healthcare, education, or anything, without being passionate. - Suman Bose, The Futures Project

Every engineer needs to have direct exposure to problems. - Amod Malviya, Udaan

YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).