About
Engineer by training. Manager by consequence.
The short version
I'm a Product Design Manager interested in the space between product strategy, design craft and team leadership — which is a formal way of saying I like the problems where nobody has agreed what the problem is yet.
I studied electronics and electrical engineering at KIIT, then taught myself design because the questions I found interesting kept turning out to be interface questions. That route left me comfortable in the messy middle of a product: with engineers over data models, with revenue over pricing logic, and then working out what a person is supposed to make of it on a small screen.
Eight years across travel booking at Cleartrip and Flipkart, banking and engagement infrastructure at Zeta, fashion commerce at Newme, and now a quick-commerce platform I helped start at Firstclub. Alongside all of it, four years teaching design — first as faculty at Designboat, now as guest faculty at Pearl Academy.
How the job changed
As a designer, I learned to solve the problem in front of me — and that most of the difficulty in fintech and travel sits in the system, not the screen.
As a senior designer, I learned that the interesting leverage is upstream: influencing what the team decides to build, and defending a shorter list of things on a card against everyone who wants their field on it.
As a lead, I learned that handing someone the answer is the fastest way to make sure they never generate one — and that teaching is the most reliable way to find the holes in your own reasoning.
As a manager, the unit of work changed again. My output is no longer designs; it's the quality of decisions the team can make without me, and the conditions that make those decisions repeatable.
Career
Scope and what changed, rather than responsibilities.
Founding team member at a quick-commerce platform launched in Bangalore, heading product design. Leading N designers. Product direction, team development and cross-functional alignment with Product, Engineering and Business.
Fashion commerce for Gen Z. Rebuilt the shop page around product discovery: +15% conversion, −12% bounce rate, +32% filter usage.
Flights, bus and support. Led the international search redesign — +200% booking value, +23% transactions — and CT FlexMax, which won the Flipkart Innovation Award 2023 and introduced fare families to Cleartrip.
Banking and engagement infrastructure. Sole designer on Power Center and Report Center in the Luminos suite, plus the Sodexo Brazil app redesign.
Where the self-taught part stopped being self-taught.
Teaching
Run in parallel with full-time design. More on Leading.
- Design Guest Faculty Pearl Academy Dec 2024 — Present
- Design Faculty Designboat UIUX School Jan 2021 — Nov 2024
Education
- B.Tech, Electronics & Electrical Engineering KIIT University, Bhubaneswar