Kothur Raju grew up in his father’s interior design business in Hyderabad. He now manages projects at Advantum Health. His father’s rule for a room still runs every decision he makes.
The house was a decent size. It just did not feel that way. The living and dining rooms were closed off from each other, and not much daylight made it inside, so the family who lived there moved through a home that seemed smaller than the one they had. Kothur Raju remembers walking it with his father, who ran the interior design business Raju grew up in. His father did not see the walls. He saw what the space could become.
They opened up parts of the layout, brought in more light and rethought where the furniture sat. Nothing about the fix was dramatic. When it came together, the family had the house they had lived in all along, finally large enough to hold them. “That project taught me that even small design changes can completely change how people experience a space,” Raju said.
He is a certified interior designer, which is not what colleagues expect from the PMO manager at Advantum Health. Design came first. He spent years learning the trade from his father on residential projects, and he learned the business too, handling invoicing and client coordination alongside the creative work. Somewhere in those years he noticed he liked solving problems and improving processes as much as he liked designing rooms. Healthcare offered more of that, and after a stretch when the two overlapped, it became his career.
His father was a practical man who did not believe in making things complicated, and he gave Raju the sentence that still runs his work. “Don’t design for yourself. Design for the people who will live in the space.” Raju applies it to everything. Before a plan looks good on paper, it has to work for the people who will use it.
The rule showed up early, on a design project where material selections and approvals lived across a tangle of emails and phone calls, and nobody was sure which answer was current. Raju suggested one shared tracker everyone could see. It was a small fix. It cut the miscommunication and moved the project faster. He has been finding versions of that fix ever since.
“Don’t design for yourself. Design for the people who will live in the space.”
The largest came earlier in his healthcare career, on a project that required updating about 3,000 line items. The team started working through them by hand. Raju stopped, noticed every update followed the same pattern, and built a macro and a template to carry it. He finished all 3,000 in about five hours. The manual route took nearly five days. He is a big fan of automating routine work, he said, because the right automation saves time, reduces effort and makes the result more consistent.
The other lesson that shaped him came at Advantum, from Chief Administrative Officer Samantha Wagner. In his early days he would spend too long polishing a presentation before anyone saw it. “You’ll learn more from feedback than from spending another three days trying to make it perfect,” she told him. He shortened it to three words, progress not perfection, and he shares work sooner because of it.
Raju works from Hyderabad, where his mornings start with priorities and coordination and the rest of the day is issues, progress and ideas for making processes run better. Every day brings a different challenge, he says, which is what keeps the work interesting. He credits his family with the resilience and the habit of continuous learning that make him good at it, and he credits Advantum with a collaborative culture where both are welcome.
The designer never left. Walk into a hotel or a restaurant with him and he is already reading the layout, the light and the way the room flows. His family jokes that he cannot enter a home without suggesting changes, and he still helps friends and relatives with their spaces. “I still find myself rearranging rooms in my head all the time,” he said. “That’s probably something I’ll never stop doing.”
The rooms at Advantum are made of workflows and approvals rather than walls. The instruction is the same one his father gave him. Design for the people who will live there.