I design enterprise software — the kind used by people who did not choose it, to do work they would rather have finished already.
I started in Kerala in 2008, studying animation and graphic effects at a diploma course in Kottayam. Not product design — animation. Timing, weight, how a thing moves and why that makes it believable.
That turned out to be a better foundation than it sounds. Motion is the study of how attention travels, and most of what I do now is deciding where someone's attention should go and in what order.
Visual design came next, then a degree in Design and Visual Communications, then the slow drift that a lot of designers of my generation made — from making things look right to working out what should be there at all.
Since then it has been almost entirely enterprise: healthcare imaging, telecom, and for the last five years procurement — supply chains, approvals, contracts, spend. Domains where the software is dense, the users are experts in something other than software, and nobody is delighted to be there.
Consumer design competes for attention. Enterprise design competes with the user's actual job. That constraint is why I've stayed.
I spent them at a global Source-to-Pay platform, latterly as Manager, UI/UX — leading design for an agentic AI layer across a suite of more than twenty applications.
The work split three ways. Interaction patterns for software that acts on a user's behalf, in a function whose entire culture is approval and audit. A design system rebuilt from a legacy component library into tokens, variants and written governance. And internal tooling — including an icon generator built with Claude Code that encodes the system's rules, so a designer types a name and gets back something that already conforms.
That last one is the direction I've been moving in for a while: not just designing the product, but building the things the team designs with.
I joined as Lead UI/UX Designer in 2021 and was promoted to Manager, UI/UX in April 2024 — after three years owning design on the procurement suite, not as a condition of taking it on.
Design lead on the agentic platform surface, working within a distributed group of seven senior designers across more than twenty applications. Direction was set by proposing patterns, prototyping them, and defending them in design review before they reached engineering — which is the part that decides whether a pattern survives contact with a delivery schedule.
Most of the leverage came from working directly with Product Management, Engineering and leadership to get user-centred design into the roadmap rather than appended to it. That argument, repeated, is the difference between design shaping a release and decorating one.
On standards: WCAG conformance was written into the design system itself, so accessibility ships with the component instead of being retrofitted under audit. UX audits, heuristic evaluations and usability testing ran across both legacy and new modules — the mechanism for finding where the product actually fails people rather than where it looks like it might. And I worked with the other designers to make usability testing routine rather than an escalation.
I'm aware that "Design leadership is not headcount" is easier to write than to be assessed on. So, plainly: my leadership has been through craft, standards and cross-functional influence rather than a reporting line. If you're filling a role that needs someone who has run performance reviews and hiring loops, I'd rather you know that from this page than find out in week three.
In enterprise software the hard part is almost never what the system can do. It's whether a busy person can follow it. I learned this building analytics dashboards — the Pareto curve was easy; making a category manager understand it in four seconds was not.
In an approval-driven organisation, rejection isn't an edge case — it's where people spend their time. Designing the rejected state to the same standard as the successful one is usually the cheapest trust you can buy.
When you design on top of a model that is sometimes wrong, every certain-looking element is a promise you may not keep. Showing uncertainty costs adoption in week one and earns it permanently.
A model optimises for what reads as good design — fewer steps, less friction. What it can't see is the navigation model underneath. I learned that by accepting a suggestion I should have questioned, and having to revert it.
I'm relocating to Ireland, where my wife is based, and I'm available immediately.
What I'm after: Design Manager and Product Design Manager roles — ideally somewhere the interface has to negotiate with a system that acts on its own, or somewhere a design system needs to hold across more products than one person can hold in their head.
Remote, Ireland, UK or Europe — available immediately. If your problem is dense, regulated, and used by people who'd rather be doing something else, we'll get along.