I'm Divya. 10 years in product and UX research, currently designing in code, growing junior designers, and shaping strategy with leadership. This site is where I mess around. Cheers 👋🏽
Ten years across hiring platforms, enterprise ops, fintech, and supply chains — the kind of products where a bad design costs someone their livelihood, not just a tap.
Today I'm Principal Product Designer at Naukri (Info Edge), building the next-gen Premium and AI recruitment product lines. Before that I drove AI-Ops and product-led growth at Freshworks (Freshservice — ITSM), and built Udaan's Enterprise UX function from the ground up — powering nationwide supply-chain platforms used by 4,000+ operators daily.
I'm also exploring Design Process 2.0 — folding AI-generated, code-first workflows into traditional design methods to ship faster without trading away quality.
Design research to service/product/strategy — field research with diverse user groups, inclusive design thinking, and co-creation. Set up NID's Universal Design news channel, UD Express.
Exchange at Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin. Major project on AI-assisted mobility for elderly citizens, in collaboration with Opel.
Strategy and research across medical innovation, mobile-first banking, future studies and semiotics — spanning field research, service design and UX.
Research and design for 'Business with Paytm' — UPI/card payments, micro-loans and store management for millions of merchants.
Research-led design for Capillary's Loyalty/CRM platform. First researcher in the group — built the case for UX research in product.
Founded and led Enterprise UX from scratch. Service design for supply-chain ops used by 4,000+ field and facility users across India.
Owned product-led growth, AI-Ops and research for Freshservice ITSM. AI capability design inside IT operations workflows.
Leading recruiter experience for Naukri's core revenue platform — premium search, job posting, subscriptions and next-gen AI-assisted hiring.
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AI agents that assist recruiters with all aspects of hiring. Next gen offering for Naukri's $7.5 Billion business.
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Upgrading Naukri's revenue driver Resdex with a flagship variant for Premium recruitment.
Tools and automations I've built where design meets AI. Things I actually use.
Explore WritingOn design systems, product strategy, and figuring it out in public.
Read PodcastLong-form conversations with designers and product leaders building at scale.
Listen
Designing and delivering end-to-end supply chain management and productivity tools for Udaan's pan India operations.
Udaan · 2021–24
Agent-led incident handling for Freshservice's global customers riding the wave of Agentic workflows in IT service management.
Freshworks · 2024–25
Helped Paytm engage holistically with merchants beyond its superpower of payment collections.
Paytm · 2019
Systemised Udaan's entire vendor engagement with gamification to nudge productivity through social competition.
Udaan · 2023
Helping Udaan systemise its entire warehouse operations into one platform across form factors for productive staff management.
Udaan · 2023Research, strategy, design, delivery — the four moves never changed. The real shift happened inside each one.
Used to be direct user interviews and scattered web searches to build a holistic view. Now NotebookLM assimilates everything I learn — from users and the internet — through RAG analysis.
Used to live in decks and Miro boards built on past learnings. Now Claude and Codex sit inside the thinking — visualising the opportunity space and setting the metrics for success.
The biggest shift — from manual canvas experiments to designing interactions directly in code, stitching the whole experience bit by bit instead of static states. Stitch, Lovable and Figma's agent prototype fast and drive alignment before the refined concept is built in code.
Ten beliefs I wrote down a decade ago to guide my practice.
Design may be celebrated today as a tool for innovation by industry, but its origins are to be found in shaping social behaviour. Hence one can't ignore its pivotal role in our contemporary society, which is suffering from bouts of disparity and disruption of all sorts.
This is where my philosophy of design originated — my skillset of being attentive to human diversity and its strategic application in the design of inclusive experiences. Experiences which are not meant for one but shared by many. It's important to note here that you can't design one thing for everyone. But you can certainly try to expand the user group one step at a time, trying to encompass as many people as possible.
In the hyper-connected world of today, where every action has layers upon layers of functioning at the back-end, it sometimes becomes difficult to isolate a challenge into its fundamental elements. Most of the time it's because we lack the right systemic framework — a framework to understand inter-dependencies and value exchanges in the system.
This is where I find most of my interest in design. To be able to decode any complex situation into its fundamental elements. To give tangible form to abstract ideas.
Ideas we have plenty; more critical is their execution. Specifically, ideas which have the potential to make a difference to people's lives must be materialised in entirety.
This is a cornerstone of my philosophy, wherein I believe design is the right medium to translate all my creative instincts into tangible products that ultimately contribute to people's lives.
What language represents for humanity is the ability to share thoughts from a person to a community. This simple act creates a million potential avenues for our society. From conveying simple emotions to writing complex algorithms, a million languages surround us and empower us to express and understand.
I believe design — or rather 'designed objects', be they digital or physical — is one such language, which empowers every user to make the best use of their potential. To think of design this way also expands my belief in the amount of impact I can have with my work.
Every object in our environment shapes our behaviour. Some of those behaviours are desired while some aren't; likewise, some of those objects are liked while others aren't. This interpretation of design in terms of shaping human behaviour is fundamental to my practice.
A quick example of this would be not to create another chair for the sake of creating, but to think of human behaviours around objects of sitting and re-imagine a new experience for it.
To see the present reality and design something around it is just a way to shape the future. Whatever we create today is going to transform our lives in times to come.
Hence I believe my current practice of design to be just another medium to contribute towards a better future. Between the probable and the preferred future lies the true potential of design, and that's where I see my role too.
Great things fail to exist because the people behind them failed to express the right thing at the right time. But how would that be if we don't experiment at all? Out of 99 average iterations, one great thing might emerge. But if one doesn't take the steps for those iterations, then nothing happens.
This is where I believe design, as a way of practice, has made me comfortable experimenting with every aspect of my life. A space where I'm not judged every second. A space which allows attempt after attempt to add value to my ideas at every stage.
Walking down any street you may see, but then you don't see. Talking to a friend you may listen, but then you don't truly listen. In all this you may pay attention to a few things which were loud with respect to their surroundings, but end up ignoring a million other avenues which were peripherally existing.
Design is a lens which empowers me to understand everyday things from a million points of view simultaneously. It enables me to interpret things better and ask relevant questions around them for an expanded vision.
This is by far the most important aspect about design. Although it is practiced as a profession by many, its fundamentals of enquiry, creativity and creation are inherited by everyone. It's just that a few acknowledge these qualities for their right purpose while others don't.
For me, I do believe everyone to be a designer of their own life, and hence a source of inspiration.
As iconic designers like Dieter Rams used to say, good design is as little design as possible — I follow this philosophy as fundamental to my work. Added to this perspective is another view from across the globe, from Naoto Fukasawa, who prescribes the importance of letting the 'object environment' dictate the nature of an object instead of the external designer doing it.
Hence I believe my role in this profession is to be conscious of the beauty of the existing system and its role in shaping any forthcoming object.
Built to explore where design and AI start to blur into each other. Each one a probe into that periphery — part curiosity, part practice. Still building on them.
The site you are reading. Built with Claude Code on an iterative editorial workflow — brief in chat, deploy in minutes. Proof that AI-augmented design practice can run end to end without a handoff seam.
Fed structured interview transcripts and domain knowledge into NotebookLM to identify patterns and generate RAG-grounded insights. Research stopped decaying in folders and became a living, queryable repo the team could build on.
Built Hiremate's entire design system in code — tokens, components, patterns — while shipping the product itself. No Figma-handoff lag: devs pulled tokens in minutes and built in two days.
A nudge for product thinkers to complete every dimension of problem discovery, then converge it into a design.md an LLM can build from holistically. Stops the "narrow prompt, shallow answer" trap before it starts.
Took my code exploration into personal finance — expenses, earnings, investments and a health score in one place. Helped my partner and me collaborate and see the full picture clearly. Designed and built in code.
Divya stand out from others is his ability to abstract and visualize ideas rapidly (even documentation), once he is convinced. These abilities make him a great fit for any design team
Divya is an exceptional designer, bursting with energy and passion. His dedication to user needs and creative problem-solving left a lasting impression. I eagerly look forward to the opportunity to work alongside him again.
As an engineer Divya is joy to work with. He understand product and business and is a great partner. As a leader he has mentored multiple junior designers at udaan. He also brought in design sensitivity, appreciation and understanding among engineers.
Ability to question and bring alternate ways to think is fundamental for being a good design thinking practitioner. Divya is one person I know who has that
Divya brought both excellent practical thinking and academic rigor to our projects. He would probe to get to the basics and that level of enquiry helped me deepen my knowledge and understanding of our users as well.
One thing which is good about him is his ability to quickly grasp the ask and put together a detailed background document, which is a boon for someone who is managing projects.
Articles, threads and notes shared along the way — thinking out loud as the craft kept shifting.
Open to design leadership and advisory. Or just a good product conversation.
