About Surya
I grew up in Kanpur, studied IT in Pune, and started as a software engineer. The hardest problems aren't technical — they're human. Eight years later I design systems that serve real people: blue-collar workers who've never touched a smartphone, teachers managing students across 12 countries, coordinators trying to govern 40 schools at once.
On a ridge somewhere cold and worth it
Dec 2022 — Present
Senior Product Designer
Designed notification infrastructure, email communication layer, calendar architecture, and behaviour management for IB schools worldwide. Operated simultaneously as designer, PM, and technical communicator — because the problems demanded it. Introduced AI-augmented workflows that changed what one designer can produce alone.
2021
Product Designer
Designed for India's blue-collar workforce — 400 million potential users, many of whom had never used a smartphone. Onboarding: 20 min → 3 min. Built the design system from scratch across 4 product teams. Zero digital literacy as a design constraint is the hardest and most honest test of any interface.
2017 — 2021
Designer → Design Lead
First job. Walked in as a software engineer. 14 global clients, 3 Tata Trusts projects, company rebrand, scrum process redesign. Started junior, led client relationships 3.5 years later. Learned design by doing — the only way that actually works.
A screen is a symptom. The architecture — permissions, data flow, governance — is the real design surface. I start there, before opening Figma.
The most important person in any system is the one it wasn't designed for. Blue-collar workers. Families with three kids on the same platform. That's where the real work is.
A reliable next-morning sync beats a real-time promise that sometimes fails. I'd rather commit to less and deliver it than overpromise and damage trust.
Documentation, design systems, tooling, handoff artifacts. The best design work doesn't end when I stop touching it. It scales without me.
When a system fails without telling you, it's a trust problem before it's a bug. Every state needs a visible signal. Every error needs a path back.
PM work. Copy. Research. Technical documentation. The title on my badge doesn't limit the scope of the problem I'm trying to solve.
Mountaineer and Shiva devotee. Bruce Lee said be water — I add: be water that finds its way uphill. The mountains aren't a hobby, they're a metaphor. When the path is unclear, you go up anyway. That applies to design, to life, to everything worth doing.
Jack Ma wrote Never Grow Up. I agree. The day you stop being curious is the day you stop designing well. I swim, do martial arts, practice theatre, play guitar, grow plants, and send handwritten postcards — not as hobbies, but as ways of staying alive to the world.
Since May 2026 I'm on a 6-month physical transformation. ACL tears, flat feet, a fractured thumb — the constraints make the solution more interesting. Nothing breaks the system. Life events bend it, never break it. Adapt and overcome. Same approach, whether it's a redesign or a recovery.
That's the philosophy in its entirety. I don't do things to impress. I do them because they're right. The Belayer holds the rope so others can climb safely. I got into design because connecting with people through it felt like a blank cheque of learning. That's still true.
Senior Product Designer · 8 years · Remote-ready