- Six-person team
- Project-specific ways of working
- Interaction design sold inconsistently
04 Selected work / The Minimalist
Design leadership · Organisation building
2018—2022 · Interaction Design & Technology
The
Minimalist.
The product was
the practice.
I joined an established agency to build a capability it did not yet have in structured form. Four years later, Interaction Design and Technology was a 46-person practice with its own method, operating model, commercial proposition, and geographic reach.
Practice scale6→46people
01
The leadership mandate
I did not build
the agency.
I built its design capability.
The Minimalist already had strong brand and visual-design capabilities. What it lacked was a repeatable interaction-design practice: no shared method, no consistent quality bar, no standard engagement model, and no structured way to develop specialists across projects.
- 46-person multidisciplinary team
- Shared methodology and standards
- Repeatable commercial and delivery models
02
The designed organisation
One practice.
Four responsibilities.
Scaling meant answering four questions clearly: What do we own? How do we work? Who carries the capability? How does it reach clients?
IxDTInteraction Design
& Technology
& Technology
Scope and quality.
A shared design language.
A multidisciplinary team.
Pitching and deployment.
Leadership meant making good design less dependent on my direct involvement.
03
A shared decision language
A method people
could carry.
BUDV was not a process diagram for a deck. It gave designers a memorable way to reason across unfamiliar domains, and gave clients a business-legible explanation of why rigorous UX work mattered.
Start withBusiness
Goals, constraints, stakeholders, value and the reason the work exists.
UnderstandUser
Needs, behaviours, mental models and the evidence behind the problem.
Make throughDesign
Architecture, flows, interaction, visual hierarchy and documented decisions.
Prove throughValidate
Test assumptions with people before they harden into product decisions.
Inside the practice A common mental model for onboarding, critique, project planning, and quality.
With clients A persuasion tool that connected user-centred design to commercial outcomes.
04
Design expertise as a service system
Design expertise
had to travel.
Most studios sell finished deliverables. We also built a Resource Augmentation model: specialists embedded directly into client teams, extending their capability without requiring a six-month hiring cycle or a permanent new function.
Understand the business requirement, context, duration, and missing capability.
Match the engagement to the right skills, level, and multidisciplinary shape.
Embed people inside the client’s operating context rather than outside it.
Review quality, gather feedback, develop people, and sustain the relationship.
We were not only delivering design. We were designing how design capability entered and strengthened another organisation.
05
Scaling people and reach
From a team
to an institution.
Over four years, my role moved from leading work to building the structure around the work: hiring, standards, staffing, client education, multidisciplinary collaboration, and a second-city expansion during COVID.
Joined as UX Lead. The immediate task was to define the practice and establish a credible interaction-design offer.
BUDV, research standards, delivery rituals, client pitching, and repeatable ways of working took shape.
Planned and hired for Bangalore during COVID while the Mumbai practice was itself operating remotely.
A multidisciplinary IxDT practice spanning UX, UI, frontend, backend, and project management.
Established practiceMumbaiBuild the core
Remote hiringShared methodOne quality bar
New market and talent poolBangaloreExtend the system
06
Evidence the system worked
Projects were proof,
not the plot.
Ninety-plus initiatives across radically different domains tested whether the practice could preserve rigor while changing context. TATA AIG is one visible example; the leadership outcome is that the system repeatedly produced capable teams and credible work.
InsuranceEnterprise SaaSBankingHealthcareB2B commerceTravelLearning
Lead initiative · General insurance
TATA AIGA four-person embedded team redesigned insurance buying around how customers decide—not how products were organised.
The work combined line-of-business personas, mobile-first information architecture, reduced form input, and a connected agent experience. It demonstrated the practice’s full system: commercial framing, team assembly, research, design, validation, and client integration.
2clicks to a quote
3 minquote completion
1.8M+monthly visitors
175K+monthly quotes
Recognition · February 2020Three awards.
One redesigned experience.
One redesigned experience.
BFSI Stallion AwardsBest in General Insurance Sector19 February 2020
DOD Awards · GoldBest UX in a Website12 February 2020
DOD Awards · GoldBest UI in a Website12 February 2020
07
What four years taught me
Design leadership
is the design of
conditions.
It has users, interfaces, failure modes, feedback loops, and a lifecycle. A team does not become a practice simply by becoming larger.
A shared language lets people make aligned decisions without converting the leader into the approval layer for every project.
Pitching, scoping, and engagement design determine whether rigorous work gets the conditions—and time—to exist.
A process that works only when its author is in the room is not an operating system. It is personal craft disguised as one.
The most important thing I designed at The Minimalist was not an interface. It was a practice that could keep designing after the room became too large for one person to direct.
08
Leadership through-line
Build the system
that makes the work.
The Minimalist is where my unit of design changed. I entered thinking primarily about products and experiences. I left thinking about the organisations, methods, incentives, and decision structures that make those products possible.
That is the through-line into my work today: designing architecture and organisational capability together, so quality is not a heroic exception but a property of the system.
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