Staff / Principal Product Designer · AI & LLM Products · fully remote (GMT+5:30)
Your AI model is right. Your users still won’t bet on it.
I design the half-second before a person acts on it. Sixteen years, five industries — and the receipts for all of it.
Talon Outdoor — six AI systems, 2 wks → 3 hrs · PE & VC platforms · PTC — NASA, Boeing & Apple among clientele · Telefónica O2 — 4M+ people
What changed when they trusted the machine.
Receipt — campaign planning, 2 wks → 3 hrs
Receipt — deal screening, 60% faster
Receipt — $1M / yr, and a business model shifted
Receipt — 4M+ users, co-designed then coded
Selected work — seven products
The products behind those numbers — three of them are AI, two of them LLMs reading unstructured documents. Where a client is under NDA, on-screen numbers are synthetic and the client unnamed; the public work shows what shipped. Open any door — I walk the real artifacts on a call.
Start here
2 wks → 3 hrs
AdTech · Named client
An Ad Agency Became the Market’s Aggregator
Traders watched an algorithm beat them and played their hunches anyway. The fix was letting them argue back — plans they could reshape in one click, every edit teaching next week.
Brand awareness · £100,000 · London, 30+ · video
The range under it — six more products, same job
60% faster
FinTech · NDA
Deal-Screening AI That Cites Its Sources
0.82grounded
- Commit history · 24 months
- Founder interview · run 2 of 2
- Filing · audited accounts
3 sources behind the number, inline — not in a tooltip
3 wks → 4 days
VC & PE · NDA
Due Diligence You Can’t Rubber-Stamp
- A-140.86
- B-020.71
- C-090.79
- D-050.68
12 further findings stayed below the bar
VerdictB+Commit
$1M / yr
EdTech · Public
The Redesign That Asked PTC to Kill Four Products
- Learning Connector
- LearningExchange
- Precision LMS
- Digital Guides
- IoTU
AfterOne platform
4M+
Telecom · Public
Two O2 UK Products, Four Million People
- Landline, anytime60:00 left
- International0:20 left
- UK data49.80 MB left
Your next billToday£9.31 since your last
0 managers
Org Design · NDA
The Software That Replaced the Org Chart
18 to 80
Consumer · 0→1
The App People Broke on Purpose
I’m not sure about this one.
ConfidenceLow
Numbers survive scrutiny; a person ships them. Who you’d actually be getting, and how I run a room.
By Friday of week one I’ve read your evals and sat in on your customer calls; by launch, the interface I drew is the code I shipped.
I read the model at the eval layer. I shape what gets measured. I ship the front-end.
Designing for someone who isn’t you starts by becoming them. That project started as my documented miss →
Before rebuilding this site I went looking for the study behind the famous six-second portfolio scan. It does not exist — the closest real figure is a 2012 eye-tracking study of résumés. What twenty-three practitioner and eight academic sources actually describe is four readers with four different budgets, and this site is built for them. The audit, and what I changed → (opens in a new tab)
Candidate Facts
Serving size: 30 minutes · Servings: 1 seat
- Experience
- 16 yrs
- Industries
- 5
- Patterns in production
- 8
- Act / Review / Ignore
- 1 rule
- Users shipped
- 4M+ · public
02 · 2How I lead — come argue with me
I lead the way I design: evidence before opinion, overrides as signal.
With engineering
Eval design before interface design
The front-end I own ships in the PR — commented and ready for review. When we disagree on feasibility, the cheapest experiment goes first and settles it.
With product / founder
Outcomes, not deliverables
I’ll contest the roadmap when the numbers contradict it. The design doc is mine to write; the spec is yours.
With customers
Five calls in week one
One a week forever after, and I read the raw support tickets myself. No AI feature ships until I’ve personally watched someone fail to use it.
My first accessibility pass buried screen-reader users in verbose labels. I spent a week with the monitor off, navigating by screen reader, then rewrote the front-end. The full account, in the PTC case →
A language model has no edges. So I draw them.
Ask one anything and it answers — fluently, in or out of its depth. A user’s trust does not erode slowly; it dies in a single confident wrong answer. So before launch I write a capability contract — a one-pager the whole team signs — and it goes in the interface, at the point of use.
In scope
It’s for
The job stated narrowly — “score deal risk from the data room,” not “analyse documents.”
Declines
It can’t
A named limit, not a hedge. “I can’t price illiquid assets” — never “results may vary.”
Hands back
Ask a human
A visible route to a person, designed with the care of the happy path. Never a silent, confident guess.
The full library — the Act/Review/Ignore rule and 8 patterns, citable →
live — the contract, workingsigned
It can’t: price illiquid assets.
Hands back: anything else → your analyst.
answers openly canned — the contract is the demo, not a model
03 · 2How I build with AI — the workflow, not the tool list
The quality bar is code.
Contrast, overflow and legibility are measured from rendered pixels on every push that touches a page, its styles or the tooling — the same gates that ship this site. Prototypes are working HTML/CSS/JS from the start, usability-tested as real code, and that same code is what goes to production. A client’s design system is encoded as an installable plugin: two shipped across client orgs, one public.
The judgment stays mine: no AI feature ships until I’ve personally watched someone fail to use it. The teardown is below — this site, torn down →
- Contrastrendered pixels, not tokens
- Overflow41 pages × 5 widths
- Legibilitynightly, every diagram
- Prose59 pages
When a gate and my eye disagree, the pixels win.
Proof, not philosophy: loop.js — 42/42 tests · trustlint — 7 rules · this site — 0 build steps
Two client-side voices, the tech lead who sat beside him for five years, two engineers, two colleagues across product streams, the manager who ran him, a designer — then three essays, and one form.
Don’t take my word for any of this.
The engineer built the platform, the manager ran the team, the designer sat on the next desk — none of them owes the others agreement.
“Over the past four years at Talon, Arpit has been instrumental in shaping four distinct products from the ground up. His user-focused designs are remarkably intuitive yet adept at handling complex workflows… If you need a designer who excels at combining strategic vision with practical execution, Arpit is the person to call.”
“Arpit is a thorough, detail oriented designer who leaves no stone unturned. Having Arpit on the team meant that we understood the full context of every user flow or design decision made.”
“I worked with Arpit for over 5 years as Tech Lead on Talon’s Atlas and Plato platforms… Arpit consistently asked the right questions early, translated ambiguous business goals into concrete user flows, and turned those into rapid, testable prototypes well before requirements were fully locked down. That speed let engineering and product validate direction early instead of building in the dark.”
“Arpit consistently demonstrated exceptional speed, creativity, and attention to detail… his ability to present multiple design options along with clear pros and cons made it much easier for different stakeholders to make informed decisions and align quickly.”
“We were part of the same account and worked across multiple product streams… What stood out to me the most was the impact his thinking had on the product. His ideas were not just about improving the user experience they often made the team step back and rethink the problem itself. In some cases, his ideas even changed the direction of the product… I see Arpit as someone who brings true product leadership with a strong foundation in UX.”
“I was amazed at the speed with which he refined and redefined business processes through process engineering, quickly turning ideas into a working prototype to validate the solution… Watching him use AI to redefine how discovery and ideation can be done was a big learning for me. Coming from a dev background, he’s able to wear the hat of both a developer and a product designer — one of his biggest strengths.”
“Arpit has worked with me for years and I value his honesty and hard work. He’s been an integral part of my staff… involved in all facets of the team, from design to development to hiring and onboarding of new members.”
“Arpit teams up with designers very well, not only does he flawlessly execute the UI implementations but he pushes back on design decisions using his UX expertise… I’d recommend Arpit to any team looking to improve their final product.”
These are excerpts. The full set, unedited, on LinkedIn ↗ (opens in a new tab)
04 · 2Writing — three recent pieces
Three recent pieces on making AI products people actually act on.
Shorter pieces go out through my newsletter on Substack (opens in a new tab).
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01The Design System Playbook: How Great Teams Turn Taste Into Infrastructure (opens in a new tab)
Design Systems · Teams · Infrastructure September 4, 2026
A practical handbook for leaders who want their product to look and feel like one product — written from the trenches of actually building one.
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02The Prompt I Paste Before Every Single Prototype (opens in a new tab)
AI · Craft · Workflow September 2, 2026
It says almost nothing about the product. Why the order of your brief matters more than its words — and what I put in before the thing I am actually building.
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03Nobody Reads Your Portfolio. Fifteen Strangers Skim It. (opens in a new tab)
Design · Hiring · Evidence August 29, 2026
The six-second scan is a myth — I traced it to a 2012 eye-tracking study of résumés, not portfolios. Twenty-three practitioner sources and eight academic ones describe four readers instead, and I rebuilt this site around what they actually say.
04 · 3Contact — available · 4 weeks’ notice
One seat. Full-time. Yours to offer.
Staff / Principal product design, or a founding design lead — often the first AI designer a team hires.
Indore, India · GMT+5:30 · fully remote · daily overlap with both US coasts · 4 weeks’ notice
Book the 30-minute call ↗ (opens in a new tab) · Resume (PDF) ↓ · Email · LinkedIn ↗ (opens in a new tab)
Gate open — book the 30-minute call ↗
Rather read first? The pattern library, the free resources, or paste the role into the fit check.
— Arpit
P.S. If you scrolled all the way here: the part I’d most like you to remember is the errata. Everything else is receipts; that part is character.