How I lead
Grow the people. Protect the culture. Ship the right thing.
I came up through every level of design, and into it from engineering, shipping full-stack before I had any formal design education.
Having sat in nearly every seat the work passes through, I lead with a team, not above it.
Nine years, craft to VP · 99acres & Naukri · Noida / remote
On record
Leaders are measured by the success of their people.
The designers everyone else gave up on.
Talented, passionate people, stuck in the wrong setup, with a manager already counting them out. A few of the designers who reported to me came in that way, and after some real mentoring turned into the highest-impact people on the team. Some have gone on to 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 300–400+ interviews behind them. And hiring was the start, not the job: the same people were mentored on, 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.
Most managers quietly avoid pushing their designers to document and show their work; a strong portfolio makes someone easier to leave with. I push for it 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.
Nobody reaches when a miss gets punished. So how a team works is not a soft concern sitting next to the results. It 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. Safe enough that everyone else can be honest too.
Transformational Leadership Recognition, Info Edge, 2024 · for raising creative culture and quality without slowing delivery.
A design that does not solve a real problem is just art.
The hardest push is upstream.
Most projects show up with the answer already decided; homepage syndrome is real. The harder, more useful question comes first: is this even the right problem to solve?
Put stakeholders in the room and let them play the parts.
The owner, the user, argued from the inside. Made to sit in the user's seat, people feel the gap for themselves, and that 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. And the time to grow into it gets protected, because that is what compounds.
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 case