Headline

🚀Senior Product Designer with 5 years of experience crafting exceptional user experiences and enabling groundbreaking products | Research-led, System Thinker | Cashfree · PhonePe · Instawork

About

From journalism + fine arts to fintech design: I craft products where storytelling, psychology & design meet scale and usability. I’m a Senior Product Designer with 4+ years of experience shaping products at leading fintech and tech-based companies like Cashfree Payments, PhonePe, and Instawork. With a Master’s in Experience Design from NIFT Mumbai, I bring a strong academic foundation combined with hands-on product design expertise across high-growth, high-impact environments. Before design, I trained as a journalist and fine artist- a background that gives me a distinctive edge. Journalism sharpened my ability to understand people, uncover insights, and tell compelling stories, while fine arts nurtured a deep sense of aesthetics, composition, and cultural psychology. Together, these skills allow me to design experiences that are not only functional and user-centered but also emotionally resonant and visually refined. Over the past few years, I’ve: ✨Designed and launched merchant-first fintech experiences that scale to millions of users. ✨Led research-driven product design that improved onboarding, growth, and retention metrics. ✨Built design systems and operations practices that sped up collaboration between product, design, and engineering. ✨Mentored junior designers and shaped team culture, preparing myself for future design leadership roles. At the intersection of storytelling, psychology, and product design, I thrive in solving complex problems with clarity, creativity, and impact. My goal is to continue crafting trustworthy, scalable, and delightful digital products.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

aistudio

antigravity

claude

gemini

grok

openai

Work experience

Senior Product Designer at Cashfree Payments, Oct 2024 - Present · 1 yr 11 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I’ve taken on end-to-end ownership of complex, ambiguous problem spaces like Pulse: Cashfree's Mobile App, Cashfree Dashboard 2.0 and Sage: AI Assistant, driving structure, alignment, and long-term thinking. ✨AI Assistant (Sage) – Business Insights Interface- Led the end-to-end experience definition for Sage, an AI-powered business assistant embedded within the merchant dashboard, shifting the paradigm from dashboard-led navigation to conversational access to business insights. ✨Pulse Dashboard Revamp (Web + Mobile)- A system-level redesign driving structure, scalability, and merchant engagement. This was not a redesign of screens, but a restructuring of how the product works, scales, and evolves. • Led the redesign of the Pulse dashboard as a foundational product overhaul, transforming it from a fragmented interface into a structured, insight-led, and scalable system across web and mobile. • Led the entire information architecture by introducing a clear hierarchy, shifting navigation from org-driven structuring to merchant intent and usage patterns ensuring for mobile constraints and behaviour of engagement and scanability of information and positioning it as an on-the-go product. ✨Cashmere Design System – Foundation for Scale & AI Readiness- Actively contributed to building Cashmere, the design system for Pulse, as a parallel initiative to ensure consistency, scalability, and faster execution across app and dashboard surfaces.

Product Designer at PhonePe, Sep 2022 - Aug 2024 · 2 yrs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, • Worked on 0 to 1 business initiative by PhonePe ‘Pincode’ app launch, focusing on user journeys for ratings & reviews, item customisations, pre-ordering, and design operations. • Designed products for 37 million merchants across 99% of postal codes in India at PhonePe • Pitched and conceptualised services to enhance PhonePe Merchant's management of payment services and devices. • Designed the organic discoverability, seamless registration, and 100% self-serve onboarding journey for merchants on the PhonePe Business Dashboard. • Conducted research studies on service design, product usability, concept testing, and customer journeys for Olympus: Identity and Access Manager, delivering actionable insights to address user challenges. • Developed solutions for PhonePe Agents to perform daily tasks efficiently, with a focus on accountability in inventory management across diverse demographics. • Collaborated with product and business stakeholders to review and approve all designs before public release.

Product Designer at Instawork, Sep 2021 - Aug 2022 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, • Contributed to product strategy and design for the Business Dashboard and Instawork's worker app. • Developed integrated courses and training shifts for workers, enhancing skills, gaining partner trust, and increasing long-term employment opportunities and pay. • Designed the system for businesses to hire quality professionals, leveraging robust data collection methods and assisting them to make informed decisions. • Designed an incentive structure for businesses to attract high-quality professionals, offering competitive pay and benefits compared to other platforms.

Product Designer at Upstox, Jun 2021 - Sep 2021 · 4 mos, Remote

Product Designer at Furlenco, Feb 2021 - May 2021 · 4 mos, Remote, Responsible for the Product Design of the Mobile Application - including Interface design and Product Illustrations for the Onboarding flow and the Product Detail Page while always considering the B2C aspect and the user of the product in mind. The process included UX research- conducting user interviews & surveys, competitor analysis, information architecture & come up with potential workflows where Furlenco currently displays a lot of information leading to cognitive overload for the user. The objective was to identify the complexity of achieving this goal - this includes encouraging the user towards taking steps to achieve the goal, empower the user with information required to traverse through the funnel effortlessly. And finally, design a solution to improve conversion rate and reduce/eliminate the need for users to reach out to people teams for support.

Education

Master of Design, Design and Visual Communications, General, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF FASHION TECHNOLOGY, MUMBAI

Master of Arts - MA, Fine Arts, Post Graduate Government College for Girls, Sector-11

Public links

linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/ishita.sarkar