Design leadership for financial trust, clearer decisions & stronger teams.
I bring 20+ years in design and 10+ years leading teams across payments, lending, commerce and travel. My work connects customer understanding, product decisions and business outcomes. Currently Head of Design at Reward360; previously Senior Product Design Manager at PhonePe.
My role is to improve the decisions a team can make, the quality it can sustain and the outcomes it can influence. Here is how I put that into practice.
I align customer needs, business goals and constraints before committing to a direction. In financial products, that means asking what people need to understand and trust before asking them to act.
At Reward360, I lead seven designers across three squads. Weekly critiques, career frameworks and quality gates make expectations explicit. I coach through questions so designers can explain and own their decisions.
Research with 20+ users informed the travel work, which reported a 34% increase in bookings. I treat this as a shared product outcome and connect design reasoning to what we can observe and learn.
Shared patterns and handoff standards supported a reported 40% reduction in design-to-development effort. My aim is consistency where it helps, with room to question a pattern when the customer problem demands it.
Leading an end-to-end flight experience: clearer fare trade-offs, policy decisions and post-booking communication across bank travel journeys.
Four connected merchant journeys. Prioritising everyday money tasks while making settlements, lending and device commitments understandable.
Making digital ownership understandable: the decisions behind purchase clarity, savings progress and access to gold.
Protecting a familiar payment habit through clearer plan choices, honest failure states and explicit fallback trade-offs.
Defining a coherent travel identity through colour, typography and an embedded mark, with a clear distinction between design output and launch results.
A toaster that tells you the truth.
Pick your bread, pick your burn level, push the lever. The coils glow, and a slice pops out with a prophecy burnt into it. Sourdough for work. Rye for situationships. Bagel for chaos. Pale is gentle. Cremated is not.
It came from one question: why do the most satisfying interactions online vanish the second you close the tab? Because they never hand you anything. This one does — you leave holding something.
Burn me a prophecyA tea shop you can sit inside.
Growing up in Kerala, walking to the local chaya kada with my grandfather was just part of the day. While the tea master worked, an old Malayalam song played somewhere behind you. Someone read the newspaper. A few uncles argued politics and cricket. Beedi smoke in the air. And you just sat there, waiting for your tea.
Nothing extraordinary — but it stayed with me. So I rebuilt a small piece of it: sit back, let the songs play, change the track. An experiment in whether design, storytelling, AI and code can make something that feels less like a website and more like a memory.
Pour me a chaiA channel about the design nobody notices.
The tagline came first, and it is the whole thesis: design is everywhere. In the signage you walk past, the packaging you throw away, the forms you fill in badly because someone else laid them out badly. Most of it was decided by a person, and most of it goes unexamined.
So the channel is where I point at it and take it apart — the good decisions, the lazy ones, and the ones that quietly shape how a million people behave without any of them noticing.
Watch the channelResearch-led experience improvements
Systems, governance & AI workflows
Products led at PhonePe
Connected merchant experience
Team and organizational leadership
I'm most useful where design has real influence over product direction, team quality and business outcomes: Head of Design, Director and senior design leadership roles where product, people and systems need to scale together.
