Earlier work · 2008–2024
Before Sprinto
Five companies and a few agencies. Billing, lending, payments, reputation and GTM. In almost every one, the first thing I built was a design system.
Sprouts.ai: everything from zero
An AI-native demand generation platform for B2B go-to-market teams. There was no design system, no brand guidelines, and a product that had grown faster than its own visual language. The first job was to give the company something to build on. The second was to prove it was worth the detour.
- Product experience strategy across the platform
- The design system, from nothing
- Brand and marketing design
- Investor-facing product work
- Sprouts' first design system and brand guidelines
- Revamp 3.0: a UX diagnostic-to-ship cycle, presented to users and investors
- Product 4.0: a roadmap for the next-generation design system
- A new side pane, website page scoring by funnel stage, and new dashboards
A recommendation a salesperson doesn't trust is worse than no recommendation. They'll work around it, and now you've added a step.
An exceptional design leader who brings together strong creative vision, user empathy, and a deep understanding of how design drives business outcomes.
Goutham JoshiManaged RK at Sprouts.ai
Birdeye: sole designer on a 0-to-1 product
A customer experience platform for reviews, reputation and customer interactions. Appointments was mine end to end, concept to ship, with no other designer on it. Payments ran alongside, where money changes hands and the tolerance for ambiguity is zero.
- Product experience across Appointments and Payments
- Customer engagement workflows
- Analytics and insights UX
- Contributions to the design systems team
- Appointments, owned 0 to 1 as the only designer
- A custom checkout for the Payments product
- Design tokens across the system
- AI features across Appointments and Payments
Design tokens halved the handoff rate. Not because the designs got better, but because the conversation stopped being about pixel values and started being about intent.
Yubi (CredAvenue): five apps, one company
A fintech marketplace connecting enterprises, lenders and investors for debt financing. The platform had grown into five app experiences that looked and behaved like five different companies. I built the design function from zero, reporting to the CEO and then the CTO.
- Design leadership for the whole marketplace
- Product experience strategy
- Brand and visual identity
- The design system
- The design function, from scratch
- Three disciplines: interface design, user research and UX writing
- The CredAvenue Design System, one component library for five apps
- Self-serve onboarding for borrowers and investors
- Peer Comparison and a Capital Calculator
Standing up user research and UX writing as named disciplines, not things a product designer does on the side, is the decision I'd repeat everywhere. It changes what the company thinks design is for.
Chargebee: five years, four different jobs
A subscription billing platform used by SaaS companies worldwide. I joined as employee #43, when the company was about fifty people. This is where I learned that the hardest B2B design problems are modelling problems. Get wrong what a subscription is, or what an invoice is, and no interface work saves you.
- Interface design across the billing platform
- Subscription management workflows
- The design system
- Mentoring as the design team grew
- Leap UI, the design language system that scaled the team from 1 to 30+ designers
- A modal system that replaced full-page reloads, validated against session recordings
- An eight-month rebrand, including a new logotype
- TimeMachine, the email notifications revamp, and ReportBuilder
- An integration framework that made a new app a two-sprint job
The modal system looked like a component decision. It was really a decision about whether users should ever lose their place. Once we'd made it, a whole category of complaints stopped arriving.
The most skilled yet most humble designer I have known since 2017.
Prashant Kothari JainFirst PM hire at Chargebee
Ellucian: one style guide, held together
Enterprise software for universities. My first real encounter with enterprise-scale complexity, and with how much of it is self-inflicted.
- Enterprise UX across the finance module
- Mobile UX architecture
- The style guide and pattern library
- One style guide maintained across the finance product
- Ellucian's first mobile experience
- Direct customer appreciation at launch
In enterprise software the style guide isn't a design artefact. It's a coordination mechanism. It's how thirty people who will never meet ship something that looks like one product.
His contributions for Ellucian's UX Pattern library are commendable.
Mohan VenkateshManaged RK at Ellucian
Early career: the years before the job titles
Self-taught, from a Fine Arts foundation. My father was a typographic artist, and that upbringing is why I still care about kerning in a compliance dashboard. Agency work taught me to defend a decision to someone paying for it. Web services taught me that a design which can't be built isn't a design.
- Typography, hierarchy and layout under deadline
- Brand and print work
- Front-end builds and HTML prototypes
- The move from print thinking to systems thinking
- First products with states, not just compositions
Craft is a trust signal, not a finishing step. In compliance software especially, if it looks careless, people assume the automation is careless too.