Every job I've had taught me the same lesson: watch what people do, not what they say.

I studied economics and public policy at IIT Madras — an integrated bachelor's and master's — and later a master's in design at Srishti in Bangalore. Neither of those is where design actually started for me.

It started with copywriting. I interned at ad agencies through undergrad and worked on ads for Jabong, a Myntra clone that Rocket Internet was running at the time; one of mine ended up on the front page of the Hindustan Times. My proudest work was a Facebook campaign for a dating app called Woo — fake horoscopes with terrible puns. A photo of an electric socket: "Today, sparks will fly." A banana peel: "Somebody will sweep you off your feet." I loved it. But I could feel that writing clever lines wasn't the whole thing. The full story of how I worked that out involves an Audi test drive I was in no way qualified to conduct — that one's an essay.

In my final year I bullied a professor into an internship at his consulting firm. I showed up at the office every day telling him I'd love to be part of the work, until he gave up and made me an intern. The firm consulted on climate resilience and renewable energy for the Chennai government, and my job was going door to door in Sriperumbudur asking households how many fans and appliances they owned, so we could model future electricity demand. That was my first UX research. I just didn't know it had a name.

My final-year project was a disaster-response interface for the Chennai Municipal Corporation's cyclone response — mapping the worst-hit areas from field reports. I user-tested it, showed it to people in government, and by my own honest account I was designing out of my ass: no process, no theory. But the research underneath it was real, and it worked.

I applied to NID, made it to the interview, didn't get in. So I joined Kantar in a market-research R&D team in Calcutta for about a year. One project has stuck with me ever since. Research firms were losing ground to Facebook and Google, because those companies had behavioral data while we had surveys — and people say one thing and do another. So we built a fake crowdfunding website, put clients' product concepts on it, drove real traffic, and measured what people actually clicked and tried to pledge money to. Not what they claimed in a focus group. What they did.

The division got sold, so I left and went to study design properly at Srishti. While I was there I cold-pinged the founder of Obvious — one of India's best product design studios — on Twitter, asking to intern. I interned three times and joined full time in 2020, working on Pause, their B2B SaaS tool for automating HR processes. I also volunteered for everything unglamorous nobody else wanted. I was the little support-chat bubble in the corner of the site. I did onboarding, wrote the product manual, posted on every channel. Keeping a product alive is mostly unglamorous ops, and there's real craft in it. Obvious also taught me a strong writing and documentation culture — their design playbook was public — honest critique, and that the real alpha comes from helping other people and sharing what you know, not from hoarding it.

From there: Gojek in 2021, working on merchant growth and consumer ads. Then Wayground, on enterprise readiness and moderation tooling. Now Sitetracker, as Lead Designer on B2B software for telecom and energy infrastructure. The case studies for most of that are on this site.

Ten years later I'd compress all of it into one line: design decisions should be proven, not debated. The fake crowdfunding site in Calcutta was already that idea. So was going door to door in Sriperumbudur. I just needed a decade to find the sentence.

Writing is my operating system

I'm a written-word person more than a spoken one. When something is written down, it's easy to see which logic doesn't hold up. Writing forces clarity, documents the reasoning behind a decision so nobody has to guess later, and kills the ambiguity that makes handoffs go wrong.

Most of the job is plumbing, not art

I mean that as a compliment. One of the highest-value things I shipped at Gojek in a given year was a document — ad content guidelines. Boring output, enormous outcome. A lot of good design work looks like that.

Publish at 80%

An 80% version that exists beats a 100% version that doesn't. Getting something real in front of people is worth more than polishing something that never ships.

Proof of work over claims

Shipped things beat concepts. A prototype that actually runs is more persuasive than a case study describing one. And I'd rather be honest about scope — here's the part I worked on — than take credit for the whole.

Breadth is load-bearing

Economics, advertising, research, design craft. The interesting problems sit at the seams between disciplines, so I've bet on building genuine competence across several rather than going deep in one and hoping the rest sorts itself out.

I review books for Hindu Businessline, a national newspaper. I play guitar and piano, mix cocktails, and play competitive racket sports. I read military history, critical theory, and science fiction — seriously, not as background noise. I volunteer with non-profits, and if money were no object I'd design for that sector full time; it gets completely screwed in the digital age by the drain of product talent toward better-paying work.