Why this role caught my eye
A short note on how I think, work and design
I'm Shreyas, a designer and engineer with a background in HCI, data and enterprise systems. The work that has stayed with me lives at the edge of the interface, where user routines, institutional constraints and trust decide wheather a product really works.
This is why Karya's lead product designer role really struck a chord. I put together this page for the team to learn more about who I am and how I work.
Research and Fieldwork
At the HCI Lab at the University of Gothenburg, I chose a tricky research problem for my thesis,"how do you study family technology habits at home without turning the home into a lab?" Through extensive fieldwork amidst COVID-19 and by building artifacts to understand screen time, I designed non-intrusive ways to study those patterns without physically disrupting the home.
It changed how I design, made me more attentive to space around the products I built - constraints, social dynamics and field realities.
Leading AI product work
At Wayground I led a small team of two engineers and a designer to rethink workflows that help teachers digitize years of curated offline material into platform-native artifacts. We talked to teachers across the US to encode years of judgement into our AI system: intent, difficulty, exceptions and pedagogical methods. I also led design for the creator tools pod, rethinking how AI can assist teachers in creating assessments.
Our work was based on a simple principle: use AI to reduce ambiguity, not remove agency.
My operating system
I'm comfortable navigating the ambigious parts of product work, a lot of which is storytelling - helping the team see the vision clearly, asking questions that clarify tradeoffs, and collaborating across design, engineering and product until the direction can hold up in practice.
I believe one can learn anything in due time, and operate as a people-oriented generalist, who happens to be great at systems and design. A few people I've worked with describe my working style better than I can.
"You had this way of cutting through the noise in design reviews. While everyone else would go off on tangents, you'd bring it back to the core by asking simple but sharp questions. It forced everyone to pause and actually think about the decisions we were making."
Suyash Agarwal
Product Designer, Wayground
"Your design sense and craft really inspires me, to always ask the deeper questions, the depth of opinion and clarity you bring, looking at design beyond screens."
Darshita Patankar
Visual Designer, Wayground
"Shreyas has consistently given his 120% to any product areas or modules he owns AND made contributions to both company and design team culture. He pushes himself and the rest of the team to adopt better design practices, & doesn't shy away from sharing feedback when he feels something isn't working."
Anonymous feedback
Atlan
"I just wanted to say how inspired I have been by your bias for action and fearlessness to question! Thank you for continously raising the PM-design bar."
Vaidehi Dalmia
PM at Atlan