Introduction
Mr. Raghu is a product designer from Stockholm with a decade of hands-on design experience. An engineer at his core, Raghu loves to partner up with cross functional teams that solve technically complex problems at scale.
He brings in a combination of the right amount of research with iterative, systematic design chops and a love for simplicity. He believes great products follow a balance of form and function. He also believes that he is absolutely clueless most of the time, and that's okay.
Outside work, Raghu spends the majority of his time in other creative endeavors around interior design and photography. You might find him picturing the streets of Stockholm. He uploads them often to Studio®.
Belief system
Consuming and driving research builds a strong intuition: Raghu is a strong proponent continuous research by either establishing research efforts, or, ideally, consuming explorative research being carried out at the organization to build a strong intuition that, if done right and consistently, is reflected in a designer's everyday work.
Prototyping is the designer's ultimate superpower: Raghu believes that there is no better way to effectively make use of a designer's time than it is to constantly be prototyping, both while exploring the problem space as well the solution space. He doesn't believe that prototyping is a state of a design process, but is the design process.
Understanding one's strengths and weaknesses: Raghu believes in the skills of the collective group and that not all designers (including himself) are good at everything. Good shit happens when designers are in tune and play with their strengths, and involve other competencies when the skills go outside their comfort zone.
Focus on the outcome, tie it to the output: Raghu tries his best to focus on relentlessly striving for establishing and driving outcomes (clarity, simplicity or delight) and tying it to the output of his work (design deliverables, experiment design or metrics).
Work experience
2021 — Current
Senior Product Designer, Mentimeter
2018 — 2021
Product Designer, Epidemic Sound
2016
ClearTax (YC — 2014)
2015
BrowserStack
2014
Researcher, Industrial Design Center, IIT Bombay
2012 — 2013
Contract Developer, Google
2012
Software Engineer Intern, LinkedIn (form. SlideShare)