Work — Firstclub, as Product Design Manager
Three stories about decisions, not screens.
One about changing what the team was solving. One about coaching a designer through a problem instead of solving it for them. One about getting Product, Engineering and Design to a single call on something contested.
The shipped, hands-on record lives on Craft — seven case studies with the outcomes they moved.
Firstclub
Firstclub is a quick-commerce platform that launched in Bangalore. I joined as part of the founding team and head product design.
That means my responsibility runs past design execution: helping the team identify which problems are worth solving, establishing product direction, supporting designers through work I'm not doing myself, and getting Product, Engineering and Operations to a decision early enough that the design survives it. At an early-stage company nobody hands you a defined problem — figuring out what the problem is is the job.
Company context deliberately kept short. What matters for reading these stories is the scope below.
- Role
- Product Design Manager
- Team
- N designers
- Product areas
- N areas — name them
- Partners
- Product · Engineering · Business
- Focus
- Strategy · product experience · team leadership
The thesis I'm working from
A point of view about the category, not a project outcome.
Speed is the easiest thing to measure
and the easiest thing to copy
Indian quick commerce competes almost entirely on three axes: delivery speed, discounts, and GMV. All three are legible on a dashboard, which is why everyone optimises them, and all three are trivially matched by a competitor with the same dark-store footprint.
The blind spots sit elsewhere — in proof of quality, expectation management, the post-delivery experience, and the compound of those three: trust. A ten-minute delivery of the wrong produce is a fast way to lose someone. So the interesting design question in this category isn't how do we shave two minutes; it's how do we make someone confident about what is going to arrive, and recover well when it doesn't.
A quick-commerce interface is not only a transactional surface. It's an expectation-setting system, and most of the trust in the category is won or lost in the gap between what the product implies and what actually turns up at the door.
What that changes about how I read a design
- Does the experience increase certainty, or just speed?
- Is the product transparent about what it can actually guarantee?
- Does it help someone understand the trade-off they're making?
- Does it reduce anxiety, or move it further down the funnel?
- Does it build confidence before the action, where it's cheap?
- Does it recover trust after something goes wrong?
- Does it communicate quality — not only availability and speed?
Confirm this one
- The thesis above is drawn from your own Firstclub strategy thinking, so it's yours. The seven questions are my derivation from it.
- Tell me if that isn't how you actually read a design in review, and I'll rewrite them — or cut them. A claimed ritual that doesn't survive an interview question costs more than it earns.
Leadership stories
Currently frames waiting for your material — each one has the structure and the questions in place.
Earlier work
Seven shipped case studies with real outcomes, as an individual contributor and lead.