Information
I am an Indian Product Designer based in Stockholm, Sweden. For the last decade, I have been working as a developer pushing pixels or as a designer enabling others to push the right pixels.
Given my love of working closely and iteratively in autonomous teams, I have had the privilege to work with startups including SlideShare (acq. LinkedIn), and former scale-ups and now unicorns including BrowserStack, ClearTax (YC-14) & Epidemic Sound. I was also a long-term contributor to NextCloud as a part of the Google Open Source Program.
Since 2021, I have been leading design for the editor experience at Mentimeter.
Photo courtesy: Alex Radsby
A bit more in detail
I was born and raised in a quieter part of New Delhi, India, where I led a nerdy life. Like most kids who were good at Physics and Math, I left home early to pursue education in engineering, soon realizing I sucked at it.
During this university education, an introductory course in software engineering got me interested in Linux distribution software. I started lurking in KDE developer forums, giving design feedback on things I didn’t like or was too naive to understand.
Since the open-source community was small and designers were limited, I started contributing design fixes to ownCloud (later known as Nextcloud).
Cut to two years later, I co-authored the Nextcloud calendar and co-maintained its design and AngularJS-based frontend with over 150 active contributors through two internships with Google Open Source.
I also interned at SlideShare (which was undergoing an acquisition by LinkedIn) as a Software Engineer for their data insights team, which furthered the confusion about whether I was a designer or an engineer. Regardless, I got to learn D3 and data visualizations.
I also did an exchange thesis at IDC, IIT Bombay, where I learned a thing or two about type design as well as UX research, while being a contributor to Swarachakra, an open-source Android keyboard for Indic languages.
After barely graduating, I worked as a UX designer at BrowserStack. I was part of shipping the rebrand as well as evolving and experimenting with their pricing pages.
I also had a short but highly eventful stint at ClearTax, which was India’s first YC-funded fintech company. I did a mix of design and engineering for their tax-filing core product.
I moved to Sweden in 2016 and studied Human-Computer Interaction at KTH, Stockholm.
I joined Epidemic Sound as an early Product Designer in 2018, where I worked on a variety of domains ranging from launching a new subscription tier to helping bridge the gap between creative direction and engineering to launch their first rebrand. Later, I also led efforts on building Kosmos—a new product that powered all of the 30,000 tracks, 100,000 sound effects, and their related metadata. During my time, Epidemic Sound grew from a small sales-led scale-up into the music-tech unicorn it is today.
Today, I lead design for the Editor experience at Mentimeter, where I focus on shaping tools that help presenters engage meetings and classrooms.
My belief system
I believe a designer’s greatest strength is constant prototyping — not just to validate solutions, but to explore and understand problems. For me, prototyping isn’t a step in the process; it is the process.
I value the strengths of a diverse team. Not every designer needs to be good at everything — great work happens when we lean into what we’re good at and bring in others when we’re not.
I prioritize continuous research. Whether it’s establishing a formal practice or tapping into ongoing explorative work, staying close to users helps build strong intuition early.
I focus on driving purposeful outcomes. That means identifying real user needs and underlying problems, instead of jumping straight to building features.