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Currently

🏢 Senior Product Designer at Microsoft — shipping AI-powered features for Excel

📚 ISB Leadership & AI Programme — building strategic and business fluency alongside design

✍️ Reading about AI-native design, systems thinking, and the future of the design function

🌏 ****Based in India. Collaborating globally. Open to what's next.

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I'm Abhishek. I design things that matter — and I've been doing it long enough to know the difference between design that looks good and design that works.

Senior Product Designer at Microsoft. ISB Leadership & AI programme. 12+ years across enterprise software, consumer apps, e-commerce, telecom, and advertising. Two startups built from zero.

But none of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is that I started in digital before UX had a name — when Flash was a career choice, when the only brief was 'make it work', and when the only feedback loop was whether people came back. That era is gone. But the mindset it gave me isn't: move fast, stay curious, measure what matters, and never confuse the craft with the outcome.

In a world driven by aesthetics, it's easy to overlook the true essence of design. I don't design because it's my job. I design because broken products waste human potential. Every confusing interface, every failed interaction, every abandoned cart — that's someone's time and energy lost. I'd like to get some of that back. With over 12 years of experience in various domains, I have come to believe in the power of design advocacy and education, and how it can shape our world.

Design is the most interesting problem-solving discipline I know. It sits at the intersection of psychology, business, technology, and aesthetics — and it demands fluency in all four simultaneously. I find that combination genuinely thrilling. What I love most isn't the deliverable. It's the moment a complex problem suddenly has a shape. When you've done the research, run the workshops, drawn the frameworks, and suddenly the answer is obvious — and you can't believe it wasn't obvious before. That moment is worth everything that comes before it.

How I Work

I am a design generalist by choice. I've worked in fashion, advertising, digital agencies, enterprise software, telecom, and startups. I've been a Creative Director, a Design Manager, a Founder, and a Senior IC at one of the world's most complex software products.

That range isn't scattered. It's the point. The best design decisions I've ever made came from knowing just enough about the adjacent discipline to ask the question nobody else was asking. Generalism isn't the absence of depth. It's depth applied across a wider surface.

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How I actually think and work:

Systems first. I look for the underlying pattern before designing the individual interaction. A good system makes 100 future decisions faster.
Outcomes over outputs. I care more about the metric that moved than the screen that shipped. Pretty work that doesn't change behaviour is expensive decoration.
Research is not a phase. Talking to users is something I do continuously, not as a gate before design starts. The best insights come when you're not looking for them.
I disagree constructively. I push back on briefs when I think the problem is wrong. I've been proven right sometimes and wrong plenty of others. Both are useful.
AI is a tool, not a trend. I'm actively building AI-native workflows — not just using AI to make faster mockups, but rethinking what's possible when intelligence is embedded in the product itself. </aside>

Becoming AI-Native

The thing about AI in product design isn't the tools. It's the shift in what's possible.

At Microsoft, I didn't just design AI features. I designed for a fundamentally different interaction model — one where the system generates output, and the designer's job is to shape the intelligence, not just the interface. Chart Insights, the Wiki Agent, Copilot integration — these weren't UI projects. They were epistemological questions: what should an AI say, when should it say it, and how do you design trust with a system that can be wrong?

That's the work I find most interesting right now. I'm currently deepening this through the ISB Leadership & AI programme — learning to think about AI not as a feature, but as a business transformation lever. The goal isn't to become an AI engineer. It's to become the designer in the room who understands AI well enough to ask the right questions and build the right experiences around it.

I believe the designers who'll matter in the next decade are the ones who can work fluidly at the boundary of human judgment and machine intelligence. That's where I'm deliberately positioning myself.

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Beyond the Work

I'm a maker by instinct. I've built apps, launched brands, sold plants, and almost started a 3D print farm. Not all of it worked. Most of it taught me something that no design brief ever has.

I consume voraciously across disciplines — philosophy, behavioural economics, AI ethics, business strategy. The reading list isn't decorative. Every book I finish changes how I frame the next problem.

I have strong opinions about the design community's love of process theater. I think most design frameworks are taught wrong. And I believe the best design education is shipping something real and watching what happens.

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