Product & Design Leader · AI & Data-Intensive Products
Your model is right. Your users still won't bet on it.
The half-second of doubt is the only thing I design. Sixteen years, five industries, one problem — and the receipts for all of it.
Shipped for Talon Outdoor — five AI systems, agency to aggregator · PE & VC platforms — screening 60% faster · earlier: PTC (NASA, Boeing & Apple among clientele) and Telefónica O2 (4M+ users)
The receipts — four industries, baselines included
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
Who you'd be hiring
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.
On my first accessibility project I spent a week with my monitor switched off, navigating by screen-reader — designing for someone who isn't you starts by becoming them. That project started as my documented miss →
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
- Fabricated metrics
- 0 g
Allergen notice: contains one documented failure — disclosed in full in the PTC case. Contains no: logo walls, invented baselines, confident guesses.
Selected work — seven products, one job
The AI work is the headline. The rest is the range under it.
Get a professional to trust a system enough to act on it. The first three are AI — two of them LLMs reading unstructured documents. Two of the rest are public, so you can check them yourself; where a client is under NDA I walk the real artifacts on a call.
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.
Deal-Screening AI That Cites Its Sources
Analysts get paid to doubt confident numbers. So it shipped already able to name a source for every claim, and to say “I'm not sure” instead of bluffing.
Due Diligence You Can’t Rubber-Stamp
Partners stake millions on claims they'll never personally verify. So I made them do more work: sign-off stays locked until every signal's evidence has been opened.
The Redesign That Asked PTC to Kill Four Products
The brief said redesign the UX. I argued the contract was the broken interface, and asked PTC to kill four of its five products. Public numbers, full case — miss included.
Two O2 UK Products, Four Million People
Every screen designed with one co-designer, every screen coded by me — two O2 UK products on mobile web, at a scale where rounding errors have populations.
The Software That Replaced the Org Chart
Two hundred people, no managers. Eight modules doing an org chart's job — coordination that doesn't smuggle a boss back in through the side door.
The App People Broke on Purpose
A London transit app that answered “will I be able to breathe when I get on?” Users triggered errors deliberately, just to watch the little train look sad — the failure state became the reason they came back.
The contract I write when a capability needs a boundary
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.
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
How 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 →
Four people, four vantage points
Don’t take my word for any of this.
A client CTO, the engineer who built the platform, the manager who ran the team, and the designer 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 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.”
“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.”
Proof, not philosophy
The same rules, as running code.
loop.js
42 / 42 testsThe decision logic behind four trust patterns as tested functions. Zero dependencies, MIT — running in your browser.
trustlint
7 rulesA deterministic linter for the shape of an AI answer — runs in your tab, no network.
This site, torn down
0 build stepsHow the thing you're reading is built, measured rather than described — gaps included.
Act I · The wager
Is this bet worth anyone's doubt?
Desirable · feasible · viable — the overlap is the bet worth making. At PTC: four of five products killed to fund the one that worked.
Act II · The spiral
Listen → Structure → Prove → Land
In loops — and every loop ends in front of a user. Act / Review / Ignore was named after the same pattern kept recurring across the AI work.
Act III · The open loop
Shipping is the first honest data.
I argued for a three-option card; the A/B made the one-option version permanent — the ship taught me what the mock couldn't.
Writing
Three recent pieces on making AI products people actually act on.
Shorter pieces go out through my newsletter on Substack.
The Agentic MVP: Why Your Next Launch Will Be Lovable, Not Just Viable
Every founder knows the pit in their stomach on Launch Day. How the rise of agentic systems is rewriting what "minimum viable" means — and why lovability is now the bar.
The AI Fight Club: Weaponizing Claude and Gemini for Bulletproof Products
Pitting AI systems against each other to strengthen product robustness. A practical method for stress-testing your AI features before users do it for you.
The New Renaissance: How AI is Transforming Us from Software Operators to Digital Artisans
Ushering in a new era of digital entrepreneurship. How AI is changing what it means to build, and what designers must understand about the tools reshaping the industry.
Contact — available · 4 weeks' notice
One seat. Full-time. Yours to offer.
Staff / Principal product designer or founding product-design lead at an AI product company — open to hands-on Director roles. Fully remote, GMT+5:30, daily overlap with both US coasts.
A real conversation, no pitch deck. If you would rather read first: the one-page hiring brief, the pattern library, or my technical screen, already answered.
Prefer email? write to me directly · or book 30 minutes
— Arpit