Apr 2018 – Mar 2022 · 3 yrs 11 mos · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• Helping build product and design teams and processes. Product strategy consultant to founders.
• Most projects I worked on were with companies that were in the market for at least 2 years and were looking for growth strategies and gap analysis. These included building a brand new machine learning driven platform in the ed-tech space, HR platform, video based shopping and money management among others.

Dec 2016 – May 2017 · 5 mos

• On deputation from Accel to help with management changes and product strategy.
• Primarily worked on long term new category launch strategies and the capability of the platform to scale and flexibility.

Aug 2016 – Mar 2018 · 1 yr 7 mos

• As Design partner to the portfolio companies of Accel, I work with the key stakeholders to help deliver top class services and products primarily focussing on product experience. I help the teams put together and institutionalize teams and processes for scale and sustainability. By working with the founders, CEOs, and folks across skills and responsibility, I help drive strategic decision making and facilitate the definition of product roadmaps.

Jun 2014 – Jul 2016 · 2 yrs 1 mo · Greater Bengaluru Area

• Design Ventures is an Accel-funded startup studio that works with entrepreneurs in transforming initial ideas to viable products and businesses. The studio connects entrepreneurs with experts in the fields of product management, user experience design, engineering and venture capital.
• It was a great experience to work with *every* market leader in insurance, commerce, fashion, hospitality, travel, personal finance and food delivery. Design Ventures also helped establish startups and get funding in augmented reality and community networking.

Apr 2013 – Mar 2014 · 11 mos

• Lead for Google Search with a mandate for all non-English (primary) countries excluding CJK. Several initiatives including onboarding Devanagari and other Indian language scripts with a free to use license were taken up. Research into usage of Arabic fonts led to several in-house font creation efforts.

Apr 2012 – Mar 2013 · 11 mos

• Emerging Markets was one of the first bets from Google to address the unique needs of the South Asian, African and Middle-east regions. Several products in shopping, content creation and music domains were built as lab products.

Apr 2009 – Mar 2010 · 11 mos

• Driving directions in India could not be launched for lack of highly local data. The launch of Map Maker brought in a useful amount of high quality user-contributed map data. Driving directions as implemented in the developed world was inappropriate for India since road signs were practically non-existent, people did not know road names and traffic rules were not consistent. Therefore an innovation in the form of last-mile and landmark based directions was designed and introduced in India - which was later adopted all over the world.

Jan 2008 – Dec 2009 · 1 yr 11 mos

• Designed the personalised Google News that allowed users to curate the news by sources, language, topics etc.
• Google News was launched in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada that provided a wider audience to local news.

Jul 2007 – Mar 2008 · 8 mos

• Content creation in Indic languages was always a challenge, and the Indic transliteration tool was meant to allows users to easily generate Hindi content by typing in phonetically equivalent English characters. The standalone Google Transliteration tool was one of the first steps in providing Indian users the platform to type in their native languages and grow the Indian web.

Feb 2007 – May 2014 · 7 yrs 3 mos

• At Google Bangalore, I have led design of many Google products. As the site lead for design I was also responsible for hiring and mentoring the User Experience team, evangelising design and mentoring upcoming designers at schools, working with colleagues and design faculty in furthering the need for quality design education and industry exposure.

Feb 2007 – Mar 2012 · 5 yrs 1 mo

• Map Maker was the first fully user-editable cartographic product for factual maps and local information, including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities. Detailed maps with roads and buildings, even in small villages coming online in countries like India was a turning point in accessibility to high quality maps. Map Maker was first launched in India and to 58 countries that never had digital maps and eventually to 190 odd countries including the US and European countries. The entire product was designed to run in browser to provide accessibility to any internet user.
• As the sole designer on the project, I also received the Google Innovation Award for the project.

Jan 2007 – Dec 2011 · 4 yrs 11 mos

• Worked on localization and search quality of Google Search in Indian languages. Worked on several unique initiatives such as the Google Internet Bus that helped 1.5 Million Indians experience internet, especially in the Tier 2 and 3 towns and villages for the first time in India.

Dec 2002 – Jan 2007 · 4 yrs 1 mo · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• At Tavant Technologies, as one of the first members of the company, I successfully built and managed a geographically distributed user experience team. In addition, I was also responsible for new product development (startups) incubation and development where I actively worked with startups to realize and build their vision.

Dec 2000 – Dec 2002 · 2 yrs · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

• Helped design the Stratify Internet Discovery System and the PurpleYogi client. PurpleYogi helped users discover relevant unstructured content across the web and the intranet. Initially designed as a consumer product, the company pivoted to providing solutions to enterprise customers such as Schlumberger, Ford Foundation, In-Q-Tel among others.

Sep 1999 – Nov 2000 · 1 yr 2 mos

• RightHalf.com was the first campus start-up In India. The idea behind the company was to create a market-place for creative work in art and literature such as doodles, poetry and such. The company was the first start-up to be incubated at IIT Bombay. RightHalf was funded by serial entrepreneur Rakesh Mathur. RightHalf was subsequently acquired by Stratify. My primary role at the company was to lead the design for the portal. Other work involved designing the logo, corporate website and stationary as well.

Jul 1996 – Apr 1998 · 1 yr 9 mos · Kozhikode, Kerala, India

• I primarily led the architectural design and construction supervision for the landmark Le Méridien Kochi.