About
Twelve years in.
And still most interested in the unglamorous systems. The work I keep choosing is the kind nobody screenshots: portals, dashboards, the internal tools a business is actually run from.
I lead the design team at EY FCUX, EY India’s design practice. I joined Fortune Cookie UX as a designer in 2016, led the studio’s integration into EY after it was acquired, and have since managed up to twenty direct reports inside a practice of eighty.
What I work on
Government services, banking, supply chain, procurement. The common thread is that these are systems people have no choice about using. A citizen filing a work permit, a planner running a factory, a procurement analyst clearing a backlog. Nobody chose this software and nobody will praise it, which is exactly why the design decisions matter more than they do in products people can walk away from.
Most of it is also genuinely constrained: regulated, multilingual, built on platforms somebody else owns, delivered to dates set before the work started. I find that interesting rather than frustrating. Constraint is where judgement becomes visible.
How I lead
I own hiring, reviews, staffing and design quality across concurrent engagements. The part I take most seriously is matching people to work they can actually grow in, which is a harder problem than it sounds when projects arrive on their own schedule.
I stay close to the work. When a team is stretching I am stretching with them, and I still design with my own hands when that is what the project needs. I do not think a design manager who has stopped designing stays useful for very long.
I wrote the practice’s 6D process, which exists mostly to stop teams designing before they understand the problem.
Why I am looking to move
Two honest reasons.
The first is that consulting gets heavier on selling as you get more senior, and I want to stay at the core of the UX work rather than drift away from it.
The second matters more to me. Consulting projects run three to six months. You hand over, and then you leave. There is no long-term feedback loop, no way to find out which of your decisions were right, no chance to fix the one that was wrong. I have designed things used by millions of people and I genuinely do not know how most of them performed. I would like to work somewhere I get to find out.
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Sketch, Miro, Jira, Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. I also use Claude Code and Codex in day-to-day work, for design system and template work, prototyping, and assembling project content and deliverables.