Curious . Pragmatic . Simple

India | Singapore | US

Sunil is a digital design strategist with 10+ years of conceptualising, designing, building, and testing of digital products experience.

Despite being an individual design contributor, he has led design for local & global organisations. He brings a diverse design experience spanning across business design strategy, product visioning, consumer product design, strategic facilitation, design team management, design research & interaction design.

Speciality: Strategic Design, User Experience, User Research, Design management, Mentor and champion designers.

Experience: 10+ years

Over the last 10+ years, Sunil has led design teams, built practices & mentored designers. He has designed products & services in retail, healthcare, banking, travel, and he also has worked with schools & activists to design for social impact at scale.

He likes solving challenging design problems and is a big picture thinker obsessed with crafting elegant and audacious experiences.

Sunil is excellent at setting objectives, managing scope and deciding priorities for the design team.
Well versed with the Agile product development and user-centred design processes.
Working closely with leads across teams to efficiently execute the design that is cohesive, comprehensive, and well-informed.
Good at proactively identifying the team's needs and skill gaps to assure the design team is empowered to craft exceptional experiences.
Sunil has mentored school students who aspire to be designer and professional designers. He is currently mentoring designers through adplist.org and designed.org.

Skills

Strategic Design - User Experience - Product Design - Service Design - Design roadmap - User research - Interaction design - Information architecture - Visual design - Usability testing - Design management - Mentor and champion designers

Experience timeline

I’ve been lucky enough to establish relationships with amazing companies, through up-and-coming startups, to multinational companies. For more details, head over to my LinkedIn profile.

Product Design Lead
Grab | January 2021 - To date

Lead User Experience Designer
ThoughtWorks | January 2016 - December 2020

Associate Director, Experience
MutualMobile | December 2013 - December 2015

Manager, Experience Design
L&T Infotech | January 2012 - November 2013

Senior Information Architect
Sapient | August 2006 - January 2012

UI Lead
Tekriti Software | May 2005 - August 2006

Web Designer
IOD | June 2002 - May 2005

Software Engineer
SkyWeb | February 2001 - May 2002

Designed for

Over the years, Sunil has designed and delivered solutions for multiple platforms. Ranging from B2C, B2B, SaaS.

Few brands Sunil have worked with

He is honoured to have worked with some of the most amazing & innovative companies. He got not just work but lots of learning and experience from these clients primarily from the USA, Singapore and India.

Public speaking

He has been an active member in the design community and has given quite a few talks at the places like Google Dev fest, Google Developers Group.

More than talking at event or conferences Sunil loves teaching design to school kids. He started a program called 'Design Gyaan' for school kids <3 Covered in the personal section below.

Deep down

A son, husband and father who has been named "modern-day hippie". He likes to spend time in nature, socialising, teaching and travelling. Sunil is free-spirited and doesn't like to follow time in his personal life, especially when he is travelling or reading or cleaning his motorcycle. He is a petrol head and has a passion for motorcycles and cars.

It's easy to make him happy. Just take him to the 'art museum' or share some 'good music' or buy a ticket of any 'performing arts event' or invite him for a 'ride'.

He is always curious to learn new hobbies and new skills. Below is an unordered list of random things he has done or still doing. It’s still fun to learn :)

Photography / Cooking / Ukulele / Doodling

Design Gyaan_ giving back to society

Sunil always felt that why none of the schools teaches design? Why they don't talk about how to build a career in design?

After a lot of thought and discussions with his designer friends, he started an event called DesignGyaan, which aims to teach and foster design thinking skills among school students. The focus is to highlight the role design plays in the real world. The event showcases examples that help students channelizing their creative thoughts and apply them to think of better designs for existing products/technologies. The workshop provides an educating and learning platform that helps students think of “designing” as a viable career option.

Gyaan means knowledge in Hindi.

Inspiration. Experience. Learn. Travel.

Sunil has travelled to so many places in so many forms — whether he is backpacking, with his family on road trips, or business trip in a different country for a few weeks or months. He travels to see things, and sometimes he goes to do things. He always travels to learn. For him, travel is not only about experiencing other cultures, but it is also about experiencing one's self in an entirely new context. In a new world, surrounded by unfamiliar people and customs, Sunil always discovers strengths and weaknesses he never knew he had. Travelling has shown him how much every single person in this world has to offer every only other person. Everyone has a story and a set of valuable skills. Listening to any person's unique life path undoubtedly adds something to mine.

Out of 29 states and seven union territories in India, he has travelled to 20 states and 3 UT's by road with his wife and daughter. The most prolonged and the most memorable road trips he did with his wife and daughter were month-long cross country road trip.

One interesting fact is he and his family never plan a route for return. They target a date when they need to be at home, and decide the direction and places to see on the fly.

You can follow his travel on Instagram.