HappyFunPeople: Miloš Roganovic

HappyFunPeople is a series where we talk with HFCers about their life experience, what motivates them, and what it’s like to work at HFC. I spoke with Miloš (say it MEE-lowsh or MEE-los) over video chat for the following interview, which is heavily edited because we went on a lot of tangents — ed.

“I’ve never been in a band, but it feels like being in a band.”

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HappyFunCorp: Thanks for taking the time again to chat with me. Why don’t you introduce yourself — your name, your role, where you come from, and when you started at HFC.

Milos Roganovic: I’m Milos Roganovic. I started at HFC in 2013, I think in July, and I do design for HFC.

HappyFunCorp: Tell me about where you’re from — you had sort of bounced around a lot?

Milos: So, I was born in Yugoslavia and stayed until about the age of eight. Then my family moved to South Africa where we spent about four years.

HappyFunCorp: And where in South Africa were you?

Milos: Johannesburg. We were there for about four years and then we relocated to the US and specifically New Jersey. From there I bounced around between New Jersey and New York, with the majority of my time, or my formative years being spent in New Jersey.

HappyFunCorp: What did you end up studying in college?

Milos: I went to Rutgers where I did a psychology undergrad. Then I transferred over to the Art Institute and did an associates in design. That was just because I thought anything that I would do with psychology would be miserable.

I did the undergrad because I think when I started I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. From all the intro classes, I just kind of picked the one that I got the best grade in. I was like, “all right, let’s do that.” Which is a good way to, you know, seal up the rest of your life.

HappyFunCorp: What gravitated you towards design? Like, what indicators were there that this might make sense for you?

Milos: I got into photography and ended up joining the school paper at Rutgers, the Targum, and they had these opportunities to go and shoot sports. That was a lot of fun, and the more I did that the more I got involved with various aspects of the paper. Initially I worked at the photo desk getting images ready for layout and would eventually move over to design and layout. I even got to learn how to use Quark Express.

HappyFunCorp: Yeah! Old school. [laughing]

Milos: So we did the layouts and, I think at one point I kind of came to the realization I would much rather make, whatever, like $50,000 a year and do this all day, then whatever I would make with a psychology degree. I think it was junior year where I started looking at monster.com to find out what kind of jobs were available with my psych degree, and it was a lot of human resources and maybe some research things like research assistant jobs… and none of it seemed at all interesting.

“All your insecurities are exposed when you’re trying to put something together and presenting to a group of people that are now gonna effectively cut it apart.”

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HappyFunCorp: So how was your transition to doing design work full-time and getting into that headspace?

Milos: My time at Rutgers was spent chasing a piece of paper, and doing classes for the credits more than because of any real interest. I wanted to finish it in four years and get the piece of paper saying that I completed it.

Then I went to what I feel like, arguably, should have been an easier program, but there was this really big psychological shift when you start working in a program that you’re actually interested in. Looking back, my grades and performance at Rutgers were always driven by my desire to get a degree, and while this new chapter was not life or death I found myself getting a lot more emotionally invested and asking, “Holy hell, am I actually good at this? Or not?”, “what am I doing?” You know, you start questioning a lot more things. So I remember that was a big experience.

All your insecurities are exposed when you’re trying to put something together and presenting to a group of people that are now gonna effectively cut it apart. But once you have gone through enough of those reviews you begin to know what to expect, you know, what kind of criticism is going to help you, what criticism is going to just kind of cut you to the core, and how to deal with it. How to move on from it and produce the next version. So that was the big difference between those two experiences.

HappyFunCorp: I think that people don’t appreciate how hard that process really is… I felt a similar thing studying music. It is funny how your emotional stakes play into it. You’re exceptionally good at presenting designs and being in that moment. It’s clear that you have a lot of experience with navigating those potential insecurities and moving forward.

Milos: I will say that because I’ve been with HFC for six years… I don’t know if I’m using the wrong word… actually, it could be “confidence.” Some of that is built up with the place where you’re working. So I know if push came to shove, there are people that would understand my point of view on it, they would have my back on it. I know what to expect, but I can honestly say that if I started in a new place, like day one I would probably have the same anxious urge to throw up that I did in year one at HFC. Regardless of how long you’ve done it and the people that you’ve seen, you’re still going to go into these new experiences and feel like it kind of resets. You might just rebound back to that confident state a lot faster.

HappyFunCorp: You trust the people that you’re working with, you know that they trust you. There’s a safe environment.

Milos: Yeah. There’s a comfort level that you get to and it makes it better. Maybe it’s a lame analogy, but it’s like your music experience. I’ve never been in a band, but it feels like being in a band. You can go in and you know what that other person’s going to do and you can play off of that.

HappyFunCorp: Let’s talk about your early professional history as a designer.

Milos: My first job out of school was a commercial real estate ad marketing agency. That was a husband and wife team, a really small group. It was me and another designer and we would do some flash sites, some HTML stuff, mostly brochure design, and print work.

Then in 2008, the financial crisis hit. We got laid off. So I found a new position in White Plains, which was clearly removed from the city. I started there as a freelancer, just kind of helping out here and there. And then somehow it snowballed into a full time thing and due to my desperation to have security. I stayed there for five years.

They had a catalog of commercial real estate clients with these buildings and the work was very repetitive. So every season there were different events or conferences that they would go to. And for those conferences you’d produce this set of materials and that set of materials already exists from past years. So you’d update some images, you’d update some information on those things and then get them printed. And then they would go off to the conference and then you’d kind of wait and you do that again. So for five years I did the same flyers for the same five or six companies. Yeah, it just wasn’t rewarding.

“In terms of what keeps me at HappyFunCorp year after year, it’s the variety of projects.”

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HappyFunCorp: How did you stay sane? Like, were you doing stuff on the side…?

Milos: There were still interesting things where, you know, somebody would want a website. So I’d find myself getting into like front-end development and doing that on my own, but that was also limiting because when I would also do a design for a site, I would only ever put things into the design that I felt comfortable building.

HappyFunCorp: Tell me about your introduction to HappyFunCorp.

Milos: The first place that I worked at, the other designer that worked there was named Billy. He is friends with Holly, our now Chief Executive Officier. Holly reached out looking for new designers and I got put in touch with HappyFunCorp. We started with a freelance project. Slowly, or, relatively quickly, I guess, in the grand scheme of things, I became full time. And since then, yeah. Here we are today.

HappyFunCorp: What are some highlights? I think you’d mentioned Twitter (X) and TezLab.

Milos: Yeah. Twitter was exciting because it was getting exposure to a real project at a top social media company, so that was interesting, getting to see how they do stuff and we also got to work with one of their designers. So, overall I just enjoyed that project because it was a different thing compared to the startup clients that we primarily worked with.

Probably the more rewarding project is TezLab because that one feels like it has real growth potential and people are actually using it.

HappyFunCorp: In fairness, I think it’s different structurally. You get to work with Twitter, but there is sort of a firewall because we are a vendor not hired to do strategy. So with TezLab, because it’s this HFC Labs project and it’s just the founders and you and a couple of developers, like, you guys are the team. So there is no insulation.

Milos: Yeah, it’s almost like having two jobs. One, you work at an agency like HFC and customers come in, you do the design projects. Then there’s TezLab, which is, I dunno, like we broke off and we’re this little startup. Yeah, you get like those two kind of different experiences and that’s been fun.

HappyFunCorp: Is that your first experience really having users as a designer where you are engaged in such a way that you could get that full feedback loop?

Milos: It’s probably not, but it’s the one that sticks out the most. For most porjects what happens in my part of the process, I create just that first version and then either they bring it in house to continue to evolve it or they come back for version two, but maybe somebody else gets staffed on it. With TezLab I find that I’m always part of it. I’ve seen everything from the very first version.

Disney was another rewarding project. They had a much more formalized process for getting user feedback along the way. So that was really interesting, seeing somebody brought in and asked really targeted questions like, what do you think will happen if you click this? And then seeing video capture of them using the remote, what they’re doing on the screen, and how they’re reacting to the questions and what was confusing, what wasn’t. So that was really nice as well.

“…I’m really into remote work. So I’m always trying to find ways to recreate the element of being in the same room as the person as much as possible.”

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HappyFunCorp: So what do you think it is about HFC that’s made you stick around? Um, you know, through the years and also through a move.

(Ed. Note: Milos lived in NYC and worked out of HappyFunCorp’s office for several years before moving with his family to Sacramento, CA, where he works remotely.)

Milos: I don’t think the move would have happened without HFC. HFC enabled me to do remote work. So the structure, the team, makes it possible for me to do my job anywhere. Because that was a possibility, keeping my position and keeping everything going, moving with 2 kids and a wife across country was made significantly easier by having this one consistent element while everything else was changing. Without HFC it would’ve been way more difficult, so I’m grateful to HFC for that.

In terms of what keeps me at HappyFunCorp year after year, it’s the variety of projects. Though from the outside, what we do might always seem like the same thing, I find myself getting stuck at times on some basic things. With every new constraint or slightly varied approach, you find yourself exploring a whole new solution even though, at the end, yes, there will be a navigation, there’ll be a settings area. Those things are obvious and easy, but it’s the other stuff where you’re kind of fine tuning. For me that just makes it different, so you’re not always working on the same product.

The fact that [different verticals] come in waves, I find that we are not stuck just being a hospitality shop or like my previous position doing the same flyers over and over again. So if Bitcoin is popular, we’ll do a lot of cryptocurrency. If dating is popular, we’ll do a lot of dating apps.. By the time I get bored of a certain subject matter, we’ll be on to the next thing. And that’s always been a positive.

HappyFunCorp: What are you excited about in the future? Either like in terms of potential work from HFC or the type of work that you’re doing and how that’s changing? Either because of tooling or trends or something else.

Milos: I am excited for the growth that is occuring with our team. Any time we introduce new people to the mix I think there is an opportunity to learn and benefit from their past experiences.

In terms of the tooling, I guess I’m really into remote work. So I’m always trying to find ways to recreate the element of being in the same room as the person as much as possible. So that there’s no barrier to the progress that we’re making because I’m on the other side of the country.

HappyFunCorp: What have you found to be useful for that?

Milos: I would say that a mandatory thing, at least in my opinion, is having an Apple Pencil and an iPad that you can connect to your computer and then using Quicktime to record or to display what you’re doing on your iPad. Then you get a sketching app and you can whiteboard and draw. It allows you to quickly show a client “this is what I’m getting from what you’re saying. Tell me if I’m right or wrong.” There’s nothing fancy. It’s not precision drawing, but you can kind of communicate that concept really quickly and reach some sort of clear resolution on the call, as opposed some written feedback that gets emailed and I’m going to interpret it one way, going one direction, waste a bunch of time, and then they’re going to clarify what they meant.

HappyFunCorp: You’re basically whiteboarding using this tool.

Milos: Right. And it’s as quick as a piece of paper, but it’s a hundred percent clear and they see it. And I can kind of control the environment, zoom in on things and “Oh, this would go here” and then go there and draw that. “Let me zoom out with a complete view of that flow.” So on a number of occasions it’s kind of proven to be really helpful. And I think clients have liked the kind of design-on-the-spot thing. That’s fun for them because most of the time they provide feedback and then two days later they see it, and this way they felt like they were more engaged in the process and felt like they could have more control over it. I think it helps move the project towards an approval or at the very least to a space where everyone is happy–

HappyFunCorp: It’s alignment

Milos: Right. Alignment. Exactly. That’s a much better word. I feel like it’s an invaluable tool, right to the point where, if my iPad broke right now, I would just go out and buy another one. I need this device.

HappyFunCorp: Last question — what advice would you give someone starting at HFC today?

Milos: Don’t hesitate to reach out.

HappyFunCorp: Right. There’s definitely a working style — an assumption of self-sufficiency at the very least, an expectation that you will ask for help when you need it.

Milos: Yeah, but everyone can be kind of focused on their own projects. Just reach out and ask and I’m happy to answer. Everybody’s really nice.