Hello
About me
The best design decisions usually start with an uncomfortable question.
I'm Rishi, a product designer in London with over eight years of experience. I believe good design starts with clear thinking and honest conversations. I don't dress problems up or hide behind jargon, I ask the difficult questions, strip away what's unnecessary, and focus on what actually matters. It's the quickest way to build the right thing and avoid expensive mistakes later.
The projects I enjoy most start with a great idea and plenty of uncertainty. I like untangling messy requirements, challenging assumptions, and turning vague conversations into products that people can actually use.
Right now I'm doing that with Blue Door Fertility and Strange Tech, after spending the last eight years designing products at Kin + Carta, W12, Tranquiliti and Wondrous.
Off the clock
When I'm not designing I'm attempting to dance.
Approach
How I work
Design is the glue that knits a team together.
I'm not precious about process diagrams, and titles change with team size. In a four-person start-up, half of these roles are one founder, and sometimes one of them is me. The steps don't change: work out what actually needs building, agree what matters now, design what can genuinely be built, and stay until what ships matches what we designed. The designer is the one team member who's there from beginning to end for every design problem, so that's how I work.
Lately I've been rebuilding parts of this around AI, using it to synthesise research faster and get testable prototypes in front of people earlier. It hasn't changed the fundamentals: clear rationale, honest conversations, no fluff.
Find the real requirements
Sometimes the business hands them over. Often they don't exist yet, so I interrogate the problem and research with users until they do. The hidden requirements surface here, not in week ten.
Agree what matters now
With whoever owns the roadmap: a project manager, a founder, or the whole team around one desk. Not everything ships at once; we decide what does, what waits, and what was never really needed.
Design what can be built
Concepts and flows are explored with the people building them while everything is still cheap to change. Feasibility is a design constraint from day one, not a surprise at the end.
Stay until it ships
Where there's a QA team, I work with them through testing. Where there isn't, I'm in staging doing design QA myself. Either way, what ships matches what we designed.
Work
Play
A selection of my thoughts. Drag things around - I won't tidy up after you.
"Make it weird,
then make it work."
Contact
Leave a doodle before you go.
CV
Experience
- Leading the design of 4 products within a cross-functional health-tech start-up.
- Led the digitisation of the clinic.
- Running regular research and discovery sessions with patients and doctors.
- Created a flexible, tokenised design system to work across all digital products.
- Introduced AI ways of working into regular cycles.
- Leading UX strategy across the product portfolio, from ideation and user research to wireframes, prototyping, final build, and design systems.
- Ziva, a social dating platform that connects groups of friends for shared experiences.
- Forseti, a race sim companion app that enhances immersion and performance for competitive drivers.
- YourStory, a memory book creator helping families preserve personal histories.
- EstimAIt, a tool that streamlines project scoping and helps teams estimate creative work accurately.
- Worked collaboratively with engineers and stakeholders to re-design and release a new responsive coaching dashboard in 6 months.
- Created a new, flexible and tokenised design system.
- Co-led workshops with coaches and clients to implement new flows in preparation for public launch.
- Created a brand identity for a new dating platform.
- Produced end-to-end flows for the entirety of the product.
- Created a new, flexible and tokenised design system.
- Worked collaboratively with engineers to release the product in 3 months.
- Joined as the company's first product designer, leading both the mobile app and staff dashboard.
- Aligned stakeholders on product vision and brand positioning.
- Distilled existing research into personas.
- Re-designed the student-facing app and staff-facing dashboard with a consistent visual language.
- Created a flexible Figma design system for the team.
- Transitioned an existing Ionic app for a health-tech start-up into native iOS and Android products.
- Worked within a cross-functional squad for Santander to improve and add new features to the native mobile products.
- Mentored junior designers in best practices for creating and maintaining design systems.
- Involved with improving DesignOps for the practice, within onboarding and ceremonies.
- Worked on a variety of products for clients in different sectors, including Verizon, BPost, Citibank and Jio.
- Projects included vision pieces for the future of clients and built products working within cross-functional teams.
- Very high focus on visual exploration and craft.
- Promoted from Junior to Mid-Weight Product Designer.
- Designed the UI for an in-house data platform.
- Re-branded daughter content platforms and their websites.
- Created illustrations, infographics and decks for project proposals.
Education
- Accelerated one-week UX design course covering processes used in a typical end-to-end project, from creating personas and performing user interviews to rapid prototyping and usability testing.
- A course demanding both problem solving and creative thinking.
- Time management under pressure, speaking and presentation skills for group critiques, and both digital and manual design skills.
Tools & skills