Twelve years. Eight organisations. Two startups. One through-line.

Every role I've taken has been a deliberate upgrade in one of three dimensions: scale, complexity, or skin-in-the-game. The arc goes: agency creative → enterprise design leader → startup founder (twice) → AI product at one of the world's most used software applications.

I didn't drift into any of these. I chose them because they would make me better at the thing that matters most: designing products that change how real people work and live.

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Microsoft  (2023 – Present)

ENTERPRISE  ·  AI  ·  SCALE

Senior Product Designer, Microsoft Excel

The largest canvas I've ever worked on. Excel has 400M+ active users. Every design decision is a default for someone's daily workflow. I was brought in to design AI-powered charting features as Excel's Copilot integration was being built.

What I actually did:

• Led competitive analysis that found 98% of Excel users never created a chart — and reframed the product roadmap around that finding.
• Designed Chart Insights — an AI feature that generates actionable analysis the moment a chart is inserted. Now drives 9% of total Copilot usage in Excel.
• Redesigned chart defaults through a data-driven process that reduced chart deletion rate by 30%. Turns out users prefer charts they don't immediately hate.
• Shipped the Wiki Agent — identified the problem (chaotic designer onboarding), built the case, designed the solution, shipped it internally. 40% reduction in onboarding time.

What Microsoft taught me: the discipline of designing at scale. When your design decision affects 400M people, you learn to respect constraints, move carefully, and build the case before building the thing.

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ThinkPlanty  (2020 – 2023)

STARTUP  ·  FOUNDER  ·  E-COMMERCE

Founder & Chief Product Designer

My second startup. A plant e-commerce brand in a market that had never moved online. I built everything: the brand identity, the product experience, the fulfillment automation, the GTM strategy.

• 4% MoM growth in a traditionally offline category.
• 85% customer retention through a post-purchase experience designed to feel personal at scale.
• 1000+ orders milestone without a marketing team.

What ThinkPlanty taught me: design thinking isn't a design tool. It's a business tool. The most valuable design decisions I made at Planty were in logistics, pricing, and customer communication — not the UI.

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Cheil / Samsung  (2018 – 2019)

BRAND  ·  CREATIVE DIRECTION  ·  DIGITAL

Design Director – UX, Cheil Worldwide

Cheil is Samsung's in-house agency. My job was to make Samsung phones desirable in India's most competitive smartphone market.

• Led the digital launch of the Galaxy A series — exceeded sales targets by 15%.
• Won 3 major account pitches including Samsung Opera House and Aakash Digital.
• Led a cross-functional team of 12 across design, copy, and development.

What Samsung taught me: the relationship between brand and product. You can't design a great product experience and a bad brand, or vice versa. They're the same thing at different resolutions.

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GoodWorker  (2022 – 2023)

B2B  ·  LEADERSHIP  ·  DESIGN SYSTEMS

UX Design Manager

GoodWorker was a jobs platform with a broken funnel and no design system. I was hired to fix both while managing a team of four.

• Rebuilt the employer portal and job-seeker experience end-to-end — 12% conversion improvement.
• Built the design system from scratch — because at the scale they were growing, inconsistency was costing them velocity.
• Reduced time-to-hire by 25% by streamlining the job posting to hiring workflow.

What this taught me: you can't design your way out of a broken process. Sometimes the design problem is an operations problem in disguise.

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Airtel  (2019 – 2020)

CONSUMER  ·  SCALE  ·  GROWTH DESIGN

Principal Experience Designer, Bharti Airtel

India's second-largest telecom. The job was to redesign the Airtel Thanks app — a loyalty and rewards platform — without breaking it for 100 million users.

• Launched Airtel Thanks 2.0 to 100M+ users with zero critical incidents.
• Built the growth design function from scratch — the first dedicated growth designer role at Airtel.
• Increased MAU engagement by 6% through a gamification framework that didn't feel like gamification.
• Scaled the design system across 5 product teams.

What Airtel taught me: humility. Designing for 100 million people means 100 million different contexts, literacy levels, devices, and expectations. Scale isn't just a number. It's a design constraint.

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Watchlyst  (2016 – 2018)

STARTUP  ·  FOUNDER  ·  0→1

Founder & Chief Product Designer

My first startup. Built to solve the 'what should I watch tonight' problem before Netflix made it worse.

• 50K+ app downloads with zero paid marketing.
• $40K from Facebook Accelerator based on product vision and early traction.
• 2.5-minute average session time in a category where 30 seconds is standard.

What Watchlyst taught me: the difference between designing for a brief and designing for survival. When it's your product and your money, every design decision is suddenly very, very focused.

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Design thinking is not a muse of designers. It has to be applied everywhere — logistics, pricing, hiring, communication, strategy. The moment I learned that, I became a much better designer.

The through-line across all of this: I've never stayed in one domain long enough to stop learning. That's not restlessness — it's how I stay sharp. Every new domain brings a new set of constraints, a new user mental model, a new set of problems that design hasn't solved yet. The best thing my career has given me is a wide frame of reference and the judgment to know which part of it is relevant right now.

The T-Shape Experience

As a creative professional with a deep-seated belief in the power of design, I have always been driven to explore and excel in diverse fields of design. Being more "T-shaped", I have had the opportunity to gain valuable experience across a wide range of design domains, systems, and ideologies. My curiosity and passion for cross-disciplinary exploration have further enabled me to approach design challenges with a holistic perspective, consistently broadening my knowledge and skill set.

Expanding my repertoire of design skills, is essential to creating innovative and effective design solutions. My passion for interdisciplinary exploration has also allowed me to bring fresh perspectives to my work, resulting in designs that are both thoughtful and impactful. Overall, my conviction in the power of design, coupled with my multidisciplinary expertise and constant drive for exploration, have made me a valuable asset to any design team. I am always eager to take on new challenges and push the boundaries of what is possible in the field of design.

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Product Design

With extensive experience in product UX design, I have worked with prominent companies and startups. I managed UX and product development for Microsoft, in data viz and charting within Excel (400MAU). At Airtel, I improved user experience and metrics for the Thanks App version 2.0 by fixing broken journeys and internal systems incrementally. I also co-founded Watchlyst, a content aggregator app, and consulted with many startups on product design, including problem-solving, marketing, and technology development. My experience provides a deep understanding of the product design universe and the ability to create solutions that balance business needs, user experience, and technical feasibility.

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🦸🏻‍♂️ Exposure