Design leadership is a service job. The team does the work; my job is to make sure they have the trust, the context, and the cover to do it well, and that the organization notices when they do.
Every designer on my team owns a product area outright and speaks for it in front of product and engineering. When they run their own research and their own reviews, they stop waiting for direction and start setting it.
Weekly design reviews are honest and specific, and nobody leaves one without knowing what good looks like. Feedback that is vague or late is a failure of the leader, not the designer.
I have joined three teams that saw design as a service. In each, the way in was the same: ship something that changes a number, tell the story well, and let the invitation to the roadmap follow.
Two of my designers have moved into leadership roles, and several more lead product areas on their own. I count that above anything my teams have shipped.
Okta · 2025 to now
I joined Okta's India Innovation Center as Director of Product Design and Design Site Lead, when the practice was eight people and, like most remote sites, mostly took input from product.
Automation Anywhere · 2021 to 2025
I was the first UX design hire at the India site, asked to build the practice from nothing while the platform shipped around us.
Cisco · 2019 to 2021
I joined the Cloud-Connected UC team as its first designer. The engineers were excellent and had never worked with one.
SAP Labs · 2013 to 2019
At SAP in Palo Alto I learned that influence comes before authority.
Every team I've led has climbed the same ladder. The rungs are the same everywhere; only the speed changes.
Design receives requirements and makes them usable. Necessary, and nobody's ceiling.
Design is in the room when scope is set, and research shapes what gets built.
Product and engineering come to design with problems, not tickets.
Design sets the vision and the roadmap follows. This is where the Automation Anywhere team ended and where Okta India is heading.
The process is not the point, but every team I lead runs the same one, so here it is. Name the goal first, then work backward from it.
Sit with the users and the work.
Insights, personas, a journey map, a problem statement.
Agree on one point of view and one way to measure it.
A brief, the opportunities, the success metric.
Go wide on purpose.
Many sketches, a few real alternatives.
Pick, refine, prototype.
Flows, high-fidelity screens, a clickable prototype.
Build it with engineering, not before them.
Production designs, guidelines, design QA.
Every team runs two tracks at once. One fixes today's product: usability, known issues, the next release. The other draws tomorrow's: a vision far enough ahead that the roadmap has something to steer toward. Teams that only do the first become a service; teams that only do the second become a slide deck.
Fix today's product.
Draw tomorrow's, far enough ahead to steer toward.
The calendar is the culture. Four things every team I lead does, without exception.
Every project, every week, product and engineering welcome. Where the bar gets set.
About the person, not the project. Delivery has other meetings.
Nobody on my team designs for a user they have not met.
Relationships are the infrastructure everything else runs on.
He creates environments where standards are high, feedback is honest, collaboration is real, and people feel deeply connected to both the mission and to one another. The engagement and cohesion on his teams are not accidental; they are the direct result of intentional leadership.
He leads with real integrity, there's no gap between what he says and what he does. He creates space for people to take on meaningful challenges while making it clear he has their back.
He led our design strategy for key initiatives in our transformation to Agentic Process Automation, including the groundbreaking Mozart Orchestrator, which required a complete reimagining of the design experience.
What impresses me most about Ashish was he is always a champion for UX. He partnered with the PM and dev teams to lead them to create solutions which truly elevated our products, and stretched the product team's ideas of what we could (and should) offer an infrastructure admin.
Under his guidance, I learned not just design skills, but also the values of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. I am forever grateful that my first job gave me the chance to work with a manager like Ashish.
Hands down one of the best managers I ever had. He has always backed us at every point and also has pushed us to achieve new frontiers.
He has the knack of communicating fluently with cross-functional teams, facilitating healthy debate, breaking barriers, and getting stuff done.
A design team's influence ends at its own edge unless someone pushes it out. Some of the ways I have:
Workshops for product, engineering, and customers at SAP, Cisco, and Automation Anywhere.
Five years on SAP's Fiori design language, and Cisco's Momentum system.
The ladder above, used as a roadmap with leadership at two companies.
Every designer runs studies; research findings go to leadership, not just to the team.
Chaired the UX quality management council that took Automation Anywhere to ISO 9001 readiness, and set UX governance and accessibility standards across a multi-product suite.
20+ designers through ADPList, where I'm a Top 50 mentor in Design Ops.
I'm always up for a conversation about building design teams, AI in enterprise products, or growing designers into leaders.
