01

My Journey at Fyle (2019–2025)

I joined Fyle as a Senior Product Designer during its early days, when the company was focused on the Indian travel market. Then COVID hit, and everything changed. Fyle had to pivot rapidly to the US market, and to everyone’s surprise, demo requests started pouring in. I was still finding my footing in a repositioned product when the momentum picked up dramatically.

In response, I stepped up to lead the design team and strategy. Over the next four years, my work contributed directly to Fyle’s growth from $0 to over $8 million in revenue.

Snapshot

Role: Senior Product Designer → Associate Director
Timeline: 2019–2025
Design Team Growth: 0 → 7+
Business Model: B2B2C, SaaS

02

Increasing design org maturity from L0 to L4

When I took the lead, the culture was engineering-driven. Engineers led design critiques, made subjective calls, and designers had little voice. There was no structured design process, collaboration was limited, and designers lacked a support system.

To change this, I defined a foundational roadmap focused on three pillars

1. Building the team

2. Increasing design influence

3. Creating a strong product vision

   
   

It may sound very structured process here, but like Design, this path was messy, was filled with imposter syndrome and made me read various articles, books, countless 1:1s with my manager to manage team dynamics & hiring.

03

Building the team

3.1

Letting people go

When you move from being a peer to a manager, and your first responsibility—after discussions with leadership—is to let some team members go, it becomes an emotional rollercoaster. This being my very first task as a manager, it was an extremely difficult step and stayed with me for quite a long time.

However, I eventually chose to look at it positively. No matter how tough the initial phase seems, with time, it often turns into a win-win situation for everyone involved.

3.2

Rebuilding the team

The experience of building your first team was exciting one. My hiring fundamentals were focused on following aspects

1. Hard Skills

2. Soft Skills

   1. High Agency

   2. Culture Alignement

   3. Curious

   
   

Soon within 2 months, I was able to build a team of 7. Quite good. :)

3.3

Creating Team Rituals

These were mostly on the operational side to bring structure—be it Figma files, presentations to stakeholders, handoffs, or a structured critique process.

The formalised process included:

• Weekly catch-ups to share updates and get feedback

• Design reviews built into the product process

• End-of-week showcases and creative sessions

• A structured buddy system for onboarding

3.4

Team's initial Impact

While the product was going through a pivot, without a structured product team, our newly built design team contributed heavily to the product side e.g

1. Questioning a few initiatives and deprioritizing them

2. Finding out the gaps in PRD

3. Taking leads in various initiatives and delivering 5 star delights

All of these made a major contribution in building a strong base for a marketable product in USA. Fyle hit its $1M+ mark.

3.5

Hiring Early Birds

Being a teacher at heart, I show immense patience when mentoring others and strongly believe in bringing in fresh talent. They often offer valuable 180-degree feedback, as experienced minds may, over time, develop fixed notions about what works and what doesn't—sometimes overlooking new possibilities.

That’s why I brought in a few promising individuals who were later promoted to full-time roles and eventually grew into Senior and Lead Designer positions.

4

Increasing Design Influence

4.1

Visual Direction, Design System Implementation

Aligning core products visual as per marketing website was a deliberate decision to offer a consistent experience and treating both marketing and product design as one unit.

Before that, I did a quick audit of existing design system and found several inconsistencies. Going deeper I was able to uncover some of the other deeper pains e.g

• The sales team struggled to pitch a dated UI

• Top designers were hesitant to join

• Engineering time was wasted on redundant frontend builds

Example of early UI based on old design system

Hence defining a design language and overhauling the entire platform made sense and I got buy ins for the same. After design language implementation, it became the heart of the entire product overhaul.

Example of a new UI designed using the design system, aligned with the marketing website for visual and brand consistency.

05

Envisioning Product Excellence

5.1

Repositioning Existing Value

I observed, Fyle offered many valuable features, but users struggled to discover this value. A few basic changes like placements, different UI structure would have yielded a lot of value. Hence I identified those areas and made them part of the roadmap.

Our first ever release was repositioning the camera icon to the bottom which was used to capture the receipt. This change had a notably positive impact on feature adoption. The adoption soured from 40% to 82%.

5.1

The complete product overhaul - Delivering delights at scale

When I joined Fyle, I found much of product architecture didn’t align with users’ mental models. Hence through a planned roadmap, I was able to brought ~80% overhaul of product despite engg push backs.

The product overhaul was highly concentrated on consolidated flows, improved IA and better enhance experience for clarity through simplified interfaces. Platforms like Integration, we overhauled it entirely from the product perspective.

This contributed to our NPS increasing from 35 to 60+ over the period of time.

Before & after state of Fyle as a product

5.2

Industry first Innovation: Mastercard & Visa RTF

One of our biggest achievements was collaborating with Visa and Mastercard to reshape how company-issued card expenses were handled.

The design team delivered a quick designs for Visa and Mastercard RTF integration and that got approved by Visa on the very first submission. This innovation earned Fyle a feature in Forbes.

5.3

Fyle Co pilot AI

We are very much into entering into AI driven world and at Fyle, I got opportunity to lead its AI Co-pilot initiative. In its BETA phase, I saw an adoption rate of 23%.

06

Building Visibility and Trust

In my first two years of leadership, I consistently advocated for the value and impact the design team brought to the product—whether through company town halls or Slack threads. This helped bring design and designers into the spotlight, eventually leading engineering teams to proactively seek design input even for unplanned initiatives.

07

Outcome

• Contributed to $0 → $8M+ revenue growth

• 0% design attrition over 2.5 years

• Design team scaled from 2 to 7

• In embedded offerings alone, 1,000+ businesses onboarded, impacting over 800,000+ users

08

Looking back

This journey was deeply rewarding—filled with hard decisions, big shifts, and a lot of growth. I’m proud of the culture we created and the long-lasting design foundation we built together.