Stoicism and Design
An unlikely marriage of old-school thought and new-fangled tech
At first glance, design and Stoicism seem to have nothing in common. They appear worlds apart—not quite apparent what one has to do with the other. But, let’s dig a little deeper.
Setu 101
First, some context.
Setu is an API platform. We are trying to overhaul our country’s aging financial infrastructure, enable efficient data streams between institutions and companies, and provide more and more Indians access to finance as part of their daily lives.
We are smack-dab in the middle of this immeasurably vast and intricately complex system, jostling nuanced regulations, labyrinthine laws, and balancing integrations with all the entities involved.
Setu’s role in the ecosystem comes with a lot of responsibility. We juggle both the demand-side and the supply-side—our actions have far-reaching consequences that ripple down on both ends. We’re battling on multiple fronts, and in the melee, it becomes easy to lose sight of our long-term goals and ideals.
What we need is a simple, pragmatic approach to everything we design and build. We need a design system that wasn’t only about aesthetic colour schemes and handsome buttons—we need a framework for making decisions.
Decisions, decisions
How can we design an API that is both intuitive and performant? How can we reduce the integration time from weeks to days? How can we make sure a partner has everything they need to quickly test and go live on our systems? Can we solve such problems efficiently at scale? Having a good-looking UI, is just an added bonus, not the goal itself. Design tends to be about solving problems.
Instead of worrying about specific regulations, a partner’s infra setup, or a newly-passed law, what is it that we can do about the situation, that would be beneficial for all? How can we enable others to do the things that they have set out to do?
If we were building around a new framework like OCEN and Account Aggregator, how can we contribute and make it better for the community?
As we create new API specs, how can we make it intuitive for the end-developer over time, across multiple products? How can we not alienate fintech first-timers?
Enter Stoicism
Keeping in mind the above points, what is the simplest framework that can encapsulate the above points as succinctly as possible?
Turns out, the principles of Stoicism already sums it up quite beautifully.
View everything around us objectively, accept them as is.
Be fearless of failure and avoid the pursuit of temporal pleasures.
Practice wisdom, temperance, justice and courage.
Be mindful of what we can change, and what we cannot.
Stoicism is one of the more practical schools of thought that still remains relevant today. Just from the four tenets, you can already see how it might be applied on a day-to-day basis at a company like Setu.
As fintech is a rapidly evolving space, everyone involved—the government, regulatory bodies, corporations, business entities—are all just figuring this out, there is often no precedence. It is imperative for Setu to quickly accept and adapt, and plot our way forward. We need to take an impartial stand in order to truly create value in the long-term.
Setu operates on the bleeding-edge of financial technology. We are in uncharted territory, and we absolutely want to push the boundaries further. This cannot happen if we are unwilling to change the status quo. We do quite a few experiments and trials before arriving on a solution. Iterate as much as possible—every thing is a learning opportunity.
This vast fintech sea is also chaotic—everyone jostling for space in its turbulent waters. As we work with more and more partners to create this network, there are fewer and fewer things that we can truly control on a large scale. It would be arrogance on our part to think we can solve for every single entity out there. Instead, we play the role of the enabler—help other companies to solve financial woes for their specific cohorts.
Are you seeing the pattern emerge? These four principles give us a nice little scaffold to use in our approach to problem-solving. This scaffold is also generic enough to offer flexibility where needed, and specific enough to nudge participants towards a Schelling point.
A first step
Of course, like most things we do, this framework too is an experiment to see what works and what does not. By no means are these a concrete selection of rules to follow, it’s more of a collection of guidelines to help you forge your way forward at every stage of building your product.
Do you agree?