Born in Bangalore. Still here. Still building.
I grew up in Bangalore, and I spent a good chunk of my early years trying on different hats. Marketing, ops, a brief and inexplicable stint as a VIP bouncer for the IPL in 2019, a founding team at an edtech startup. Not because I was lost, but because I was curious. I needed to find the thing that used all of me at once.
Product design was that thing.
It's the only discipline I've come across that genuinely demands you think about business goals, user psychology, technical constraints, and organisational dynamics — all at the same time, before you draw a single screen. The moment I understood that, I stopped looking around.
That was about five years ago. I haven't looked since.
What I actually do
When someone at a dinner party asks what I do, I tell them: "The PM thinks about what's good for the company. The engineer thinks about how to build it. I'm the only one in the room thinking about what the user actually needs."
That usually lands.
What it doesn't capture is the bit I find most interesting — before any of that, I'm building a map. Anytime I get a new product or feature to work on, I want to know where it sits in the whole organism. Who created the need for it, who uses it, how it affects the people upstream and downstream, what breaks if it doesn't work. I draw it out. I call it a mind map; it's really just me refusing to design in isolation.
Only once that picture is clear do I touch Figma.
How I work with people
New teammates have walked into a room, seen me, and assumed I'd be a difficult lead. I get it.
They've usually come around by the second week. I've been told I'm dependable, easy to work with, and — this one I'm proud of — that I have an almost supernatural ability to cover for people when things go sideways without letting blame land on anyone. I don't think that's a soft skill. I think it's a design skill. You learn to hold complexity without making it someone's fault.
Outside the work
I swim. I read. I lift weights more often than is probably necessary. I fall down rabbit holes of long-form YouTube videos about historical events that have no bearing on anything I'm doing.
I watch a lot of sport — MMA, football, F1. People sometimes ask why sport matters if you're not playing it. I think watching elite people operate under pressure, inside systems, with teams that either work or don't — that teaches you more about discipline, communication, and decision-making than most courses will. I've stolen more than a few product thinking frameworks from watching how F1 pit crews handle a bad race.
I'm also deep into learning how to actually build and ship products using AI — not just use AI as a design tool, but understand enough about the infrastructure to close the gap between what I design and what gets built.
What I believe about design
Systems first, screens later.
The best interfaces I've ever seen are boring to look at and invisible to use. They don't need to announce themselves. The work happened upstream — in the flows, the constraints, the decisions about what not to build. By the time pixels are involved, the hard part is already done.
I use AI the way a good chef uses a sharp knife — not to replace the thinking, but to move faster through the parts that don't require it, so I can slow down on the parts that do.
I'm not precious about tools. I'm very precious about outcomes.
Currently
Product Designer at Zenda, building tools for schools across the Middle East and Singapore. Open to conversations — collaborations, interesting problems, or just a good back-and-forth about something I haven't thought about yet.
Systems before screens
When a new feature lands on my desk, my first move isn't a wireframe — it's a mind map. Who uses it, how often, what does it touch upstream and downstream, what breaks if it doesn't work right? Only once I can see where something sits in the whole organism do I start designing. By the time I open Figma, flows, constraints, and edge cases are already resolved.
Outcomes over aesthetics
The best interfaces are boring to look at and invisible in practice. Nobody notices them because there's nothing to notice — things just work, reliably, every time. I optimise for the fifth session, not the first impression. What I care about is whether it still makes sense on day 200, when the novelty is gone and the user just needs to get something done.
Human judgement, AI speed
I use AI at every stage — to pressure-test flows, surface edge cases, and generate rough visuals that help stakeholders see how the final product might feel, the way an architect uses a sketch model before building anything real. That's not the finished design. Significant manual refinement happens after. But it compresses the distance between idea and alignment, so my Figma time goes where it actually counts.