I started with graphic design while learning to code, practiced brand design for a few years, and then ventured into digital product development. I soon realized that my background in computer science uniquely positioned me to bridge the technical and design aspects of products.

Initially, I worked in agency-based environments on short-term projects, dealing with tight deadlines and diverse clients. I had to listen to what they wanted, figure out what they needed, and present that in my designs in an easy-to-follow way.

I excelled in this role within a year, earning three raises within 10 months and being offered a lead role. However, I wasn't learning much due to the lack of mentorship.

When I joined my first product team at Motive (Silicon Valley's unicorn), this was my biggest opening role and I spent quite sometime learning and preparing for this position as it offered one of the best places to learn design around my area.

Here I realised following things between small agency vs focused product company:

• Agency vs. Product Success: I was working for the PM not the users. Unlike a small agency where client approval defines success, a win within a product means increasing conversion rates, improving NPS, reducing churn, and receiving good customer ratings.
  
  

• Design Approvals: My focus was on the PM not the product, when infact, approvals mean nothing if they don't meet design objectives or are incompatible with the technical constraints.
  
  

• Collaboration: Form needs to follow function and function is what engineering is responsible for creating. I needed to collaborate more closely with developers to create the design that not only look good but perform well.
  
  

• Integration & Performance: I was didn't understand how important performance is for users. How much time a feature take to load needed affects experience. How uninformative errors message affected user's trust and increases load on Ops.
  
  

• Process defines success: Consistent results require consistent habits. These habits form a process. Whether its a design system or a product journey, I need to be purposeful from the get go.
  
  

• Continuous Learning: Investing in improving my work ethic and knowledge is a must. To quote Lawis Carrol, "We must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that."
  
  

To explore this depth further, I joined IDEATE. It was still an agency but it worked on relatively long-term projects and offered more mentorship opportunity. These two factors gave me a lot more space to learn & experiment what I learnt at Motive.

This resulted in me quickly learning and what works and what doesn't and it resulted in a level where my manager trusted me to redefine their processes and manage multi-million dollar projects directly. This resulted in a great success for our team as my team got more done with less hassle and less management oversight.

I worked on enhancing these skills at Mello & SafePay before Cur8. Here I have been tested like nothing else before. I was the first design hire here and I got to shape everything and the core of my success can be tied directly to my learnings at Motive & IDEATE:

• Product Success: At Cur8, I relied on metrics instead of approvals. E.g I A/B tested different sections, different layouts and copy to improve conversion rates of our website using Hubspot. This lead to an increase in conversion from 6.2% to 20.3%. I also utilised this metric to increase our onboarding success. Even though our onboarding is extremely complex and even has a quiz (with only two chances to get it right before customer needs to wait 24hrs), the drop-off rates continuously stay below 20%. I interviewed a lot of users and this gave me a deeper insight to how diverse they are. Some were extremely new to investing and expected a lot of help while some were complaining that we don't have the advanced features. Our key factor has been to listen to users. Our whole team at cur8 listens to users and their complaints are prioritised as to the highest of levels.
  
  

• Design Approvals: While design approvals are part of the process. I now utilise learnings from user interviews and feedback surveys to design for our users. Due to our PMs also regularly talking to our customers, their approvals are shaped by users' sentiments. We still at met with technical constraints and have to make tough calls that might not result in the best of experience but not having these moment too often is the goal.

  
  

• Collaborations: Every bit of our designs goes through engineering reviews and we have details conversations on how a feature is supposed to work and they feel open to suggest ways we can reduce the dev effort while ensuring a smooth user experience. I have dabbled in the codebase too & we've engineering demos to make sure things work well.
  
  

• Integration & Performance: Since our product is live, I spend quite a lot of time in making sure every new feature integrates well with existing ones. Recently, we wanted to allow for individuals to invest from their company accounts as well, that feature touched every part of the platform through catering every edge case, now we have a lot of investors investing through multiple investors. We're monitoring e¿

  
  

• Process defines success: When I joined, we didn't have any design system or a proper design process.
  
  Design System
  With the help of product and engineering team, I got the approvals for the design system. I designed a new system from scratch & maintained it for 2 years and it supported 4 of our products and a white-labeled solution. I also launched a separate design system for our app.
  
  Design Process

  With time, we've iterated on our product process a lot and these days we have resorted to 3 different processes depending on the nature of the requirements. This helps us avoid wasting time doing stuff that isn't valuable.

  
  

• Continuous Learning: At Cur8, I have learned how to get product insights using Mixpanel, Looker, and Hubspot insights. I've recently integrated variables in Figma when they were launched.
  
  I also contributed 2 PRs to the repository and am currently planning to learn TypeScript to better equip myself to solve smaller UI issues myself. Latest learning point is using semantic design tokens into the existing design system.