Grow the people. Protect the culture. Ship the right thing.
I came to design from engineering, shipping full-stack products before any formal design education, then grew through every level of the craft, designer to lead to VP.
Having done the work at each of those levels, I lead with a team, not above it.
A decade, craft to VP · 99acres & Naukri · Noida / remote
On record
Leaders are measured by the success of their people.
The talent was never the problem. The setup was.
A few designers came to my team carrying a reputation they had not earned, capable people stuck in the wrong setup. What changed was the conditions around them: clearer scope, honest feedback, work worth caring about. They did the growing themselves, into the highest-impact people on the team, and some now hold senior design roles at larger product companies. Nothing about this job beats that.
The team was built one interview at a time.
Across the leadership years at 99acres and Naukri I hired 60+ designers, with 300+ interviews behind them. And hiring was the start, not the job: the same designers were then grown, ICs into leads, and leads into managers.
Mentoring runs on a loop, and it runs both ways.
The relationship works like a design process: a shared goal, tight iterations, honest feedback. They hear where they can grow, I hear what they need from me. Coming up through every level makes that exchange easier. It is simpler to unblock people once you have done the work they are doing.
Make the work visible, even when it makes people poachable.
A strong portfolio makes a designer easier to leave with. I push for one anyway: a team that can articulate what it made is a more confident team, and the trust that builds runs both ways.
He does his homework. He thinks ahead about how he can support you, what guidance to give, and what direction to suggest.
Prerna ChhajerSenior Product Designer, Proximity Works · ADPList mentee, 2025Culture is the operating system.
When the how is broken, the output breaks with it.
People only aim high when it is safe to miss. How a team works is what the results stand on.
Own the losses out loud.
The methods are not fixed. Some calls go wrong, the mentoring misfires, the approach needs rebuilding, and saying so plainly, in front of the team, is what keeps the culture honest, and safe enough for everyone else to be honest too.
Transformational Leadership Recognition, Info Edge, 2024 · for raising creative culture and quality without slowing delivery.
Design is judged the way the business is judged: by what changed.
The hardest push is upstream.
Most projects show up with the answer already decided. Everyone wants their feature on the homepage, their banner above the fold. The more useful question comes earlier: is this even the right problem to solve?
Put stakeholders in the room and let them play the parts.
The exercise is simple: the people who own the product argue from the user's side. Felt first-hand, the gap lands harder than any amount of pushing from me. It is how a channel-conflict standoff on the B2B recruiter suite got untangled: offer and upgrade flows rebuilt for a healthier revenue mix, the outcome taken to the C-suite.
Read the Resdex Lite caseFluent in the business, not just the screen.
The engineering years left a habit: get the team speaking the same language as everyone else in the room, metrics, trade-offs, the business case. That fluency is what turns design from a service into a seat at the decision.
The rules, written down once.
A cross-platform design system shipped under the same push: the craft decisions made once and reused everywhere, so the teams ship faster with the quality already in. The conversion work that came out of this way of working is in the cases, proven by experiment before anything rolled out wider.
Read the search caseThe part that transfers.
Teams stay with the company. The way of working travels. What a next organisation gets is the system under these pillars: people who grow, a culture safe enough to be honest in, and design that answers for outcomes.