A product team I know spent six weeks building a feature nobody asked for. The brief came down from leadership. Design got pulled in. Research got skipped. The designer assigned to it had concerns early on but figured the decision had already been made, so she focused on making it good. The feature launched. Usage was negligible. Three months later it was removed, and nobody mentioned it again.

I keep thinking about what would have happened if someone had killed that project in week one. Not made it better. Killed it. Six weeks of engineering time, design time, QA time, and opportunity cost, all recovered. That would have been worth more than any interface she could have designed in the same period. But there’s no portfolio piece for “stopped the company from wasting a quarter.”

10x Was Never About Design

The 10x idea came from engineering. A 1968 study found that some programmers were roughly ten times more productive than others during debugging tasks. The number stuck. It became shorthand in Silicon Valley for the person who does the work of an entire team.

Design adopted it without questioning what it meant. And because design is visible in a way that backend code isn’t, “10x” became about volume. More screens. Faster turnarounds. More projects running simultaneously. The designer who could produce the most work in the least time became the one everyone wanted to hire.

But productivity and value are not the same measurement. A designer who produces ten screens a day is productive. A designer who figures out that eight of those screens shouldn’t exist is something else entirely. The industry just doesn’t have a clean word for it yet.

The Output is Getting Cheaper

Figma released AI features that let anyone generate interface layouts from a text prompt. Canva crossed into professional territory years ago. According to a joint report by Designer Fund and Foundation Capital, 91% of designers now use AI in their workflow at least weekly, up from 54% a year ago.

The practical meaning of this is straightforward. The thing designers were paid to produce, polished visual output, is becoming easier for more people to create. A product manager can now generate a reasonable-looking screen in minutes. A founder can mock up an app without opening a design tool at all.

This doesn’t make design less important. It changes what’s scarce. When making things gets cheaper, deciding which things deserve to exist gets more expensive. That’s where the value is migrating, and most designers haven’t followed it there.

Fix the Question First

Most designers enter a project after the important decisions have already been made. Here’s the feature. Here’s the audience. Here’s the timeline. Make it good.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s honest work, and someone has to do it well. But the constraint it creates is that the designer’s impact is capped by the quality of the decisions that came before them. If the brief is solving the wrong problem, a beautiful interface doesn’t fix that. It just makes the wrong answer look more convincing.

The designer who starts questioning those assumptions before opening Figma is doing something different. They’re not refusing to execute. They’re asking whether the execution is pointed at the right target. Sometimes the biggest design contribution in a quarter is a conversation that redirects the entire roadmap. That never shows up in a sprint review.

The Cost of Being Available

There’s a version of being a designer where you become the person everyone calls when they need something made. Need a deck designed? Call Sarah. Need the onboarding flow updated? Call Sarah. Need a quick mockup for the investor meeting? Sarah’s fast.

Sarah is useful. She is also trapped. Her value is tied entirely to her ability to produce things on demand. If she stops producing, her perceived value drops immediately.

The 10x designer creates a different kind of influence. They change how the product team frames problems. They change what questions get asked in planning meetings. They change how the founder talks about users when designers aren’t in the room. Their impact shows up in decisions they never personally made and deliverables they never personally touched.

That’s harder to measure. It’s also harder to replace.

Great Design Sometimes Means Less Design

The industry has created an incentive structure where design is expected to justify itself through visible output. New pages. New flows. New systems. A redesign every eighteen months, whether the product needs one or not. When a design team isn’t shipping something visible, it can start to feel like they’re not earning their keep.

But sometimes the strongest design decision is subtraction. Don’t build the feature. Simplify the product. Remove the flow that’s creating confusion. Stop the redesign that was initiated because someone new joined leadership and wanted to put their stamp on things. Jony Ive built an entire philosophy around this. Not minimalism for aesthetics. Removal of everything that doesn’t serve the purpose.

The 10x designer gets harder to measure precisely because their best work is increasingly invisible. You can’t screenshot a feature that never got built. You can’t put “convinced the team to not do the thing” in a case study. But the company felt it. The engineering team felt it. The users who never had to deal with an unnecessary feature felt it.

The 10x Designer Changes the Company, Not Just the Product

The real question is whether one designer can make the organization around them better at making decisions.

If a designer leaves and the team immediately goes back to building whatever gets requested without questioning it, that designer was productive. They were probably very good at the work. But they were still mostly a pair of hands.

If a designer leaves and the way the company thinks about customers, products, and problems has permanently changed, that’s different. The product team still asks “Should we build this?” before “How should we build this?” The founder still talks to users before writing a brief. The engineering lead still pushes back on features that add complexity without adding clarity.

That designer didn’t just make things. They changed how the company decides what to make. That’s the multiplier. Not ten times the output. Ten times the judgment.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.

Until next time.
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreakin.

— Dipaq

Ask any agency to walk you through a project that went sideways. Not the case study, the one where the timeline slipped, the client hated round one, or the strategy fell apart halfway through. Listen to how they talk about it.

Every agency has those projects. The honest ones can describe what happened without shifting the blame to the client by the third sentence. The others tend to reach for familiar explanations: “the brief kept changing,” “they weren’t ready for what we were proposing,” or a smooth redirect to a project that went well. Watch for the redirect. That’s useful information.

It’s more revealing than almost anything in the deck they sent you. Which is unfortunate, because the deck is probably what you looked at first.

The Portfolio Problem

Every case study you’ve looked at was made under assumptions you can’t see from the outside. A budget you don’t know. A timeline that may have been unusually generous or brutally tight. A client who was exceptionally clear or a team that had already done three rounds of strategy before the agency arrived. A lead designer who has since left. A brief that was rewritten four times before the work began.

The portfolio is a highlights reel edited by the agency for the purpose of winning work. It is not a neutral document. Treating it as the primary evaluation tool is a bit like hiring a chef based on the photos they chose for their Instagram.

The Pitch Team and Execution Team are Often Different People

This is one of the most common sources of client disappointment in the design industry, yet it rarely gets discussed because it’s awkward for everyone involved.

The senior creative director presents the vision while the co-founder talks you through the strategy. Someone else handles the process questions, usually the person most comfortable explaining how the team works. The pitch feels polished because they’ve done it many times and genuinely believe in the work they’re selling.

Then the contract is signed and the project moves to the actual team: a capable mid-level designer, a junior still learning, and a project manager coordinating across three other accounts. The senior creative reviews the work on Fridays, assuming the week hasn’t gone sideways.

“The people in the room for the pitch are frequently not the people on your project. Nobody lies about this. It just doesn’t come up unless you ask directly.”

Ask directly. Who is actually on my project? What percentage of their week? Will the person presenting today be reviewing the work, and at what intervals? If the answer is vague, or if it requires a follow-up to pin down, and you have just located it before you signed anything.

Process Either Exists or It Doesn’t

Ask to see a mid-project artifact from something recent. Not the final presentation or the case study. Ask for the messy Figma file with the explorations that didn’t make it, the strategy document with comments still in it, the brief that has been revised and annotated, or the internal Slack thread where the team disagreed on a direction.

Most agencies won’t have an immediate answer. The ones with a genuine process will know exactly where to look. The ones improvising will offer a polished deck instead and explain that they can’t share client work without checking. That’s reasonable, except real work can usually be anonymized quickly if it actually exists in a shareable state.

What to look for in the working files:

1. Dead ends: Directions the team explored and eventually abandoned.

2. Reasoning: Notes explaining why certain directions were dropped.

3. Disagreements: Evidence of different opinions that were worked through and resolved.

4. Multiple voices: Comments and input from people beyond the lead designer.

5. The mess: A working file that is too clean has probably been cleaned for your benefit. That tells you something about what the agency thinks you want to see and suggests they’re still in pitch mode when you’ve asked to see something real.

Three Questions Before the Verdict

Ask these. Listen carefully to how they answer, not just what they say.

Question 01

“What have you talked a client out of?”
An agency that only takes orders will happily sell you the rebrand you don’t need, the campaign that’s more exciting than strategic, or the full identity overhaul when what you actually need is a clearer proposition. A genuine answer here, specific and slightly uncomfortable to recount, is one of the clearest signals of strategic value you’ll get in a pitch. An agency that can’t remember talking a client out of anything probably hasn’t tried.

Question 02

“How do you handle it when we disagree on a direction?”
You’re listening for a mechanism, not a temperament. “We’d talk it through” isn’t a process. We’d listen and try to understand the concern, but it isn’t one either. You want to hear something more concrete: how decisions are documented, what happens when a creative direction is challenged without a clear rationale, and how the team separates personal preference from strategic misalignment. If the answer focuses on tone rather than structure, disagreements will ultimately be settled by whoever is most persistent in the room.

Question 03

“What happens after the handoff?”
Brand systems decay when they meet real marketing teams, social managers, and developers who never attended the brand presentation. An agency with no answer here built you an artifact, not a system. The case study photo looks great. Six months later, the guidelines are being ignored, and nobody knows who to call. An honest answer should feel slightly uncomfortable, because it involves acknowledging all the things that can go wrong after the agency hands the work over, many of which it can only partially control.

The Red Flag Nobody Names Out Loud

An agency that agrees with everything on the first call.

You came into that call with a problem, a budget, a rough idea of what you need, and a set of references to explain your taste. An agency that responds with enthusiasm and agreement at every point has decided to win the work before it has understood the work.

What You’re Actually Paying For
You’re paying for an outside perspective. An opinion that arrives already aligned with yours adds little value because you already had that opinion before the call. The agency that pushes back in the pitch, asks the question you weren’t expecting, or says, “We don’t usually recommend that approach, and here’s why,” is demonstrating the thing you came to buy. The one agreeing with everything is selling comfort. Comfort is cheap, and it doesn’t ship.

The pushback doesn’t need to be confrontational. Often, it’s just a question you hadn’t asked yourself: “What does success look like twelve months after we hand this over?” Or, “Have you tested whether your current customers actually experience the problem the way you’ve described it?”

Small redirections. The kind that happens when someone is thinking about your problem rather than their proposal.

The Agency Side of the Same Argument

If clients are evaluating agencies on the wrong signals, some of the responsibility sits with the agencies for letting them.

The agency that leads with the sideways project story shows the working file before the final or asks, “What would make this a failure for you?” before discussing the timeline the client isn’t expecting. It’s changing what gets evaluated before the client has even realized the frame has shifted.

Most agencies don’t do it because it feels risky. The safer move is to lead with beautiful work and let the client project their hopes onto it. That same approach is why many client relationships start well and then deteriorate, while the same conversations about expectation gaps keep repeating across the industry.

Ask them about the project that went sideways. Watch whether they can tell the story without turning it into a story about the client. That answer will tell you more about what working with them will actually be like than everything else they showed you combined.

Until next time
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.

— Dipaq

A founder obsessed with scaling might look at that and see wasted potential or a lack of ambition. Twenty-five years of work, a business that almost runs itself, and an exit offer met with indifference.

I keep turning it over. I’m not sure that’s the right way to see it.

Imported Definition of Winning

Over the last fifteen years, the creative industry absorbed startup culture’s definition of success. Bigger teams. Bigger clients. An exit at the end, with some number on a spreadsheet turning years of work into a liquidity event.

Most design studios were never built for that. Someone was good at making things and wanted to build a living around it. The goal was to create something sustainable and worth being proud of. That’s a different business, with a different idea of winning.

But startup culture got loud, and LinkedIn got louder. Studio owners with profitable, self-directed businesses started feeling like they had to explain why they didn’t want more. The ambition that built the business stopped looking like ambition.

“Scale became the only acceptable goal. Everyone running a smaller, calmer, more profitable business started to feel like they were doing something wrong. Most of them weren’t.”

The Numbers Behind Growth

Most studio owners skip this calculation when they start feeling the pressure to scale. Not because it’s hard to do. Because nobody told them to do it. Here’s a version of it.

The numbers are illustrative, not universal. But the underlying math holds. Growth costs money before it makes money. Overhead often rises faster than revenue in the early stages of expansion. A founder who doubles their team usually doubles the management burden before doubling margins, if those margins ever arrive.

Most studios expand before asking whether being bigger actually makes the business better than being the right size. The right size is not a failure condition. For many design businesses, it is the most profitable one available.

Two Types of Studio Founders Who Don’t Want to Grow

This is the part I want to be precise about, because the argument is easy to misread as permission for avoidance.

Knowing which one you are is the most honest question a studio owner can sit with. And most people, if they're being straight with themselves, already know the answer.

“Lifestyle Business” Is Not an Insult

In startup culture, “lifestyle business” often means not serious, not scalable, and not interesting to investors. It suggests the founder chose comfort over ambition and deliberately kept the business small because they couldn’t turn it into something bigger.

In practice, it describes a business designed around the life of the person running it, rather than investor expectations or the logic of compounding growth. For many design studio owners, that isn’t a consolation prize. It’s the goal. They have simply spent enough time around startup culture’s vocabulary to feel embarrassed admitting it.

The Trap of Becoming a Bigger Studio

The creative industry is full of this story, but it rarely gets told because it’s uncomfortable to admit.

A studio starts small. It does good work. Gets noticed. Wins bigger clients. Hires more people. Brings in a studio manager. Moves into an office with a kitchen and a branded espresso machine. Wins an award. Pitches for a retainer. Hires to service it. The retainer ends. Redundancies follow. The founder spends most of the week on management, HR conversations, cash flow projections, and new business calls, barely touching the work that started the whole thing.

The studio became something else. Not necessarily worse, but different from what it was built to be. The transition happened gradually, rewarded at every step by the usual signals of success, until the founder realized three years in that they no longer enjoyed running it and couldn’t easily reverse course.

Growth is expensive to undo. Downsizing a team, losing clients who came for the larger operation, and rebuilding a reputation around a smaller, more focused offer can take years. People talk about growth as the default path. They rarely talk about what it takes to come back.

The Question to Answer Before You Grow

Almost any studio can grow if it’s willing to take on the added overhead and complexity. Growth is usually available as an option. That doesn’t make it worth choosing.

The more useful question is one most studio owners skip because it can feel too soft for a business conversation: what does this studio need to be for it to be worth running?

The person who gets to answer that is the one who built it. Not the LinkedIn post about 10x thinking. Not the founder who scaled their agency and now thinks everyone should do the same. Not the investor looking at a creative business and wondering what it could become with capital behind it. The person who built it knows what it cost to get here and what they were actually trying to make.

Before you hire the next person, sign the bigger office, or take on the client that requires you to staff up, ask what the studio needs to be for it to be worth running.
Not worth growing. Worth running. Those are different answers for almost everyone who has built one of these businesses honestly.

Until next time
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreakin.

— Dipaq

Before I judge the craft, I try to spot the reference point behind it. Not the logo or colour palette. The assumption underneath all of it: what does this team believe good design looks like? Where did that idea come from?

Usually, the answer is obvious.

The reference point is somewhere in San Francisco and Copenhagen. The ambition is to look familiar to a Western audience. Success is measured by whether someone from Pentagram, Stripe, or even a devoted Linear fan would approve.

That standard has settled so deeply into our thinking that it rarely feels like a decision anymore. It simply feels like taste or ‘the standard.’

That’s the part that deserves attention. The work itself is often excellent. But the assumption beneath it deserves far more scrutiny.

Good Design, According to Whom?

1947 solved the political problem. The flag changed, borders were redrawn, and colonial administration was dismantled over the decades that followed. The deeper hierarchy remained.

Nobody really had a playbook for dismantling the belief that “standards coming out of the West were the standards,” while everything else belonged somewhere lower on the ladder: regional, kitsch, or waiting for approval.

Design reflects that belief in subtle ways.

You see it in the studios that Indian design schools place on reading lists. You see it in what the awards agencies chase. You hear it in briefs that ask for something to ‘feel global,’ even though everyone in the room already knows what it means.

“Make it feel global” is not a design direction. It’s an anxiety dressed up as an ambition. And most Indian founders say it without hearing what they’re actually saying.”

There’s an easy version of this argument, and it isn’t very useful.

India is producing exceptional work today. Packaging, digital products, type, and spatial design. Some of the strongest visual thinking I’ve seen this year came from studios in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, and Mumbai. The question is whether we’re building on it or treating it like an exception.

What “Designed in India” Stands For

There’s a reason every Apple product says “Designed in California” on the back instead of on the invoice.

It’s a proud declaration of authorship. The thinking came from California.

Part of this story belongs to Indian companies themselves.

For years, we competed on price because that was the opportunity available. Technology services, creative services, and consulting. The pitch was simple: we can do the same work for less. It built businesses. It also trained clients across the world to associate Indian work with savings rather than authorship.

That strategy built the industry.

It also made it a ceiling.

The catch is simple. If price is the first thing a client remembers about you, it’s difficult to convince them later that your thinking deserves a premium.

Indian studios charge less than the quality of their thinking deserves. Anyone who’s worked across different markets can see it.

Raising prices isn’t enough. The way the industry presents itself has to change first.

Some studios have already begun to break through it. Their pitches now focus more on how they approach problems, make decisions, and develop a point of view than on how quickly they can produce the work.

Apologetic About Ownership

There’s a pattern that keeps appearing in brands targeting premium or international markets.

The visual language shifts toward a kind of placeless modernism. Enough local signals are removed that almost nothing remains to suggest where the company comes from. The identity becomes increasingly detached from its place of origin.

Founders usually have sensible reasons for making those choices. If your customers live in Europe or North America, you’re thinking about recognition and recall. That’s practical. Nobody should dismiss it.

Still, one question remains.
When was the last time you saw a Scandinavian company erase every trace of Scandinavia before entering another market? Or would a Japanese brand flatten its identity because someone in the West might find it unfamiliar?

The design cultures people admire don’t arrive asking permission. They arrive carrying their context with them.

The Xerox Problem

I use this phrase often, so it’s worth explaining what I mean.

A brief arrives asking for “something like Linear,” “the Stripe look,” or “that clean European studio aesthetic.”

The brief usually starts with the design, but what gets copied is the visible result, separated from the decisions that shaped it.

Linear looks the way it does because it’s the result of countless deliberate choices made within a specific company for a specific audience under a specific set of constraints.

Once those decisions disappear and only the visual language remains, what you’re left with may look familiar at first glance, but it rarely feels convincing.

The result is a copy of a copy.

Every year, hundreds of Indian startups launch with brands that borrow a Western visual language almost entirely while adding very little of their own.

The execution is often polished. What feels absent is an original perspective.

Founders aren’t wrong for admiring companies like Linear. They’re wrong if admiration becomes a substitute for having a brand positioning of their own.

What the Last Piece of Freedom Actually Looks Like

I’m not arguing for nostalgia. I’m not asking designers to reject ideas that began elsewhere or to wrap every project in visible Indian references. That argument collapses as quickly as the imitation it criticises.

The point is much simpler.

1. Know where your perspective comes from.

2. Stop treating the place that shaped your thinking as something that needs explaining away.

3. Stop pricing your work as though the distance between Mumbai and San Francisco automatically lowers its worth.

4. Stop letting someone else’s coordinates define what “global” means.

The studios producing original work already share this instinct, even if they don’t describe it that way.

They build from a clear way of seeing the world, with little concern for whether that perspective fits a Western gaze. People remember work like that because it carries a distinct point of view and feels like it belongs to someone.

Eighty years is a long time to wait for the second part of independence. Waiting isn’t the problem anymore. Choosing to wait is.

The next time someone asks you to “make it feel global,” try answering with a question instead of a lecture. Global according to whom? Whose standards are we using? Did we choose them, or did we inherit them?

Until next time.
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.

—Dipaq

It was one of those rare occasions when a client tells you the actual reason they’re hiring a design studio rather than tiptoeing around it.

Most of the pitch talk is about the same old questions. Your portfolio? Show me. What’s your process? How long is the project going to take? Who will be part of the team? They’re fair questions, but they rarely get to the core of what a client is trying to measure.

Those questions are usually stand-ins for something that’s much harder to ask.

Clients want to know whether they’re going to be working with people who can help them make better decisions. They want someone to tell them when the brief is incomplete, when the direction is wrong, or when the obvious answer isn’t the strongest answer.

Execution is no longer the scarce part of design as it once was. Polished brand systems, well-crafted presentations, and great interfaces have never been more accessible. Tools improved, the talent pool grew, and the price of doing quality work kept coming down.

Those changes didn’t make judgment more frequent. If anything, it is easier to see how rare they are.

The strongest relationships rely on five things that have very little to do with execution, per se.

1. Clients Value Clear Judgment

Most clients don’t come in with the language to request judgement.

They want reassurance. They want to see past work. They ask about process because they’re trying to understand how decisions get made. They ask about timelines because uncertainty costs money.

Underneath those questions is a simpler one.
Can you help us make decisions that we would not have made on our own?

Not many studios ever get a brief that honest.

2. Will You Challenge the Brief?

Having an opinion does not mean being loud, difficult, or contrarian.

It’s about knowing when the brief is taking you to the wrong problem before you start the project. It’s about telling a client that the direction they’re excited about is not likely to deliver the outcome they want and then explaining why, with enough clarity that the recommendation earns trust instead of resistance.

Sometimes the most valuable deliverable is not a design at all. It is a better definition of the problem.

Most studios aren’t equipped for that kind of work. Their proposals suppose the brief is right as it is. Execution begins, and their process starts. Their pricing prioritises production time over strategic thinking.

As a consequence, they tend to get involved only after the most significant decisions have been taken.

3. Thinking > Deliverables

Someone from our team said something recently that captured this perfectly.

Clients forget the deliverables but remember the judgement. They remember the conversation that changed the direction of the business or the advice that saved them from investing in the wrong idea.

That’s why you rarely hear referrals saying, “They did beautiful work.”

They more often sound like the following:

“They just got what we needed.”

Or,

“They helped us to think about the problem differently.”

4. Designers Who Are Comfortable Having Opinions

Most designers learn to carry out the vision of someone else.

Design school rewards craft. Being responsive is rewarded in early client work. Junior designers spend years optimising decisions that have already been made, instead of questioning if those decisions even deserve to exist.

That’s the default way of working, eventually.

Most designers have spent years learning to keep their judgement to themselves by the time clients are looking for it.

That’s not going to change with confidence. It needs to change how studios operate, the responsibilities designers take on, and the conversations they have at the beginning of a project.

5. Studios That Sell Their Thinking

If it’s judgement that clients are ultimately looking for, it should be evident long before the first design concept.

A portfolio shows you’ve solved problems in the past.

You know this one! A diagnosis

The studio that recontextualises the client’s problem in the first meeting is proving itself before any work is even shown. The conversation is natural because the client has been exposed to the kind of thinking they are paying for.

It’s a hard skill to duplicate and harder still to replace.

It’s also becoming one of the biggest reasons clients are choosing one studio over another.

The Real Deliverable was Never the Design

The client in that meeting likely didn’t know they’d just summarised one of the biggest changes happening in professional services.

Execution is getting abundant. No judgement.

All industries eventually reach a point where the technical work is easier, faster, and more widely available. When that happens, value goes somewhere else. It goes to the people who see things that other people don’t. Who asks better questions and makes decisions when the answer isn’t obvious?

Design is coming to that moment now.

As management guru Peter Drucker used to say:
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”

The best studios are figuring out how to do something like that. They listen beyond the short term, look past the deliverables, and solve the problem the client didn’t quite have the words to articulate.

That’s always been the harder job. And it’s the more valuable one too.

Until next time
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.

— Dipaq

She started in media and communications, drifted into consulting, circled back into to design school, became a design faculty member, and somehow ended up designing culture for companies that didn’t know they needed it yet.

What We Uncovered

• How Aparna became a “very accidental designer” working across transformation strategy, learning, and organizational design.

• The real unlearning: why designing for people unlike you is a preference, not design.

• Aparna’s Venn diagram framework for design need, strategy, and aesthetic.

• Why she refuses to use the word “empathy” in her practice.

• The TikTok beautician story that reframes who design is really for.

• How redesigning classroom seating became a design act.

• The ROI question: when should a fast-moving startup actually invest in culture?

• Why Anthropic’s “People Scientist” job listing signals where design careers are headed.

Where it Got Interesting

Why “Empathy” is a Dirty Word
Ask most designers what they’re taught to do and “empathise with the user” comes out almost on reflex. Aparna doesn’t say it anymore. Not because she skipped the step, but because the word stopped meaning anything.

“I refrain from using the word empathy because it has been beaten to death, thanks to design thinking being the only framework of design that the large-scale corporate world has understood.”

Neither she nor I was ever taught “design thinking” as an actual subject in design school. What we were taught was design; messy, contextual, and a lot harder to put on a slide. Somewhere between design school and the corporate world, the word got flattened into a framework. She’d rather just do the thing than keep saying its name.

The Number That Hides the Truth
I asked her the question every founder eventually asks: What’s the actual ROI of culture?

Aparna’s answer started by taking apart how organizations measure happiness in the first place.
“We conduct surveys and people say, ‘we’re very happy,’ or ‘we’re very engaged.’ We turn that into a number. Then we happily peg the organization to that number, close the conversation, and say: people are really happy here.”

Meanwhile, she points out that attrition may be rising and health outcomes may be deteriorating even as that same score remains stable. Take a nursing institution, for example. It’s a high-pressure environment, largely staffed by women whose work and lives are shaped by pressures that a satisfaction score can never fully capture. Once that lived experience is compressed into a single number, the organization has less reason to keep asking the harder questions, not because they’ve been answered, but because the number creates the impression that they have.

Listening vs. Interviewing
She draws a hard line between the two, and it’s the line most researchers blur without noticing.

“When I interview someone, I’m already going in with an agenda and a set of questions I want answered from my frame of reference.”

Ask someone, “Do you want a yellow screen or a blue screen ?” and you’ll get an answer shaped entirely by your own options. Ask “what apps do you use, what bores you, what are your friends using,” and you get something closer to the truth, because you’re not the one supplying the frame. The unsaid things underneath, she says, are where the actual personas live.

Design as a Venn Diagram, Not a Poster
Aparna’s working definition of design has three overlapping circles: need, strategy, and aesthetics. Aesthetics is deliberately last.

Once you understand the need and the strategy, she says, the aesthetic space opens up on its own, and it stops being limited to a screen or a poster. It could be a huddle. It could be how a classroom is arranged.
Design stops being an artifact and starts being a decision about how people experience something.

Culture Isn’t a Phase-Two Problem
I pushed her on this one directly: why should a four-year-old, fast-moving startup care about culture when it’s still fighting for survival? Her answer didn’t flinch.

“If you don’t set your cultural course early, eventually you’ll be firefighting when everything caves down. And when cultures collapse, one of the first things you lose is trust.”

Most founders treat culture like a maturity milestone, something you afford once you’ve got the revenue to spare. Aparna argues that by the time you can afford it, you’re usually already rebuilding it from the rubble. The economic path and the cultural path aren’t sequential. They’re the same road.

The Job Title That Made Her Stop Scrolling
She’d been thinking about where all this qualitative, human-first design work eventually lands as a career, and then she saw a role posted at Anthropic.

“They called the role 'People Scientist'. In a world where we treat qualitative data as full of emotion and subjectivity, Anthropic has put listening and human beings back into the conversation and said: that is a scientist’s job.”

An AI company, of all places, formalizing listening as a scientific discipline. Even as AI eats into the jobs everyone assumed were safe, some of the biggest AI labs are hiring specifically for the human skills that came before any of it. That’s not a contradiction to her. It proves her argument.

I Want You to Remember This

When I asked Aparna what matters most in all of this, her answer was immediate.

It’s easy to mistake design for the thing you can screenshot; the poster, the brand identity, the Instagrammable facet of brands. Aparna’s whole career has been a slow walk away from that idea, toward the harder, less visible work: the process, the listening, the culture underneath the product. Most people chase the tangible elements because it’s provable. She’s betting on the process, because it’s the only part that outlasts everything else.

Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,
Stay curious, stay Groundbreakin’.

—Dipaq

In this episode of The Groundbreakin, we sit down with Aparna Vinod, a transformation strategy and organizational design practitioner currently pursuing a PhD on the changing nature of leadership. Aparna has spent her career unlearning the idea that design means designing for people like yourself  working instead across factory floors, classrooms, and boardrooms where the “user” looks nothing like a typical UX persona.

From why she refuses to use the word “empathy,” to the story of her beautician who built an entire identity and income on TikTok, to why she believes one person should hold strategy, culture, and design instead of three separate roles  this is a conversation about taking design out of the artifact and putting it back into people, process, and power.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:

How Aparna became a “very accidental designer” working across strategy, learning, and culture (0:47)

The real unlearning: why designing for people unlike you can just be preference in disguise (5:19)

Aparna’s Venn diagram framework for design  need, strategy, and aesthetic (8:09)

Why she refuses to use the word “empathy” in her practice (13:50)

The TikTok beautician story that reframes who design is really for (19:37)

How redesigning classroom seating became an act of design (24:40)

Why one person should hold strategy, culture, and UX instead of three separate roles (27:25)

The ROI question: when should a fast-moving startup actually invest in culture (36:39)

Why Anthropic’s “People Scientist” job listing signals where design careers are headed (55:06)

THIS EPISODE IS FOR YOU IF:

You’re a designer or product leader designing for users unlike yourself

You want to understand what “design beyond the artifact” actually looks like in practice

You’re curious how culture, learning, and UX are converging into one discipline

CONNECT:

Check out our Substack: dipaq.substack.com
Supported by Syqi: https://syqi.design/

Email us at [q@groundbreak.in]

But the gap between the two, between holding the Director title and actually leading design, is wider right now than it has ever been.

A Design Director is a job description. A design leader is someone the organization decides you are based on whether your judgment actually changes outcomes. These two things used to be correlated. The role came with enough structural weight, taste authority, team ownership, and production oversight that the title and the influence arrived together. Right now, all three of those pillars are being hollowed out simultaneously, and the title is arriving without the weight it used to carry.

The Three Pillars

None of this happened gradually. That’s the part worth talking about sitting. Gradual change gives you time to adjust your identity alongside the role. This happened all at once, and the industry is still pretending it’s the natural progression.

The Silence Around the Prompt Director Problem

A new class of people has positioned itself between the Design Director and the output.

Creative technologists, generative design leads, Art directors, etc. They speak the language of the tools fluently. They move before the brief has been fully written.

A Director who can’t operate at this level rarely gets called out directly. There isn’t a difficult conversation or a performance review pointing to the gap. Instead, the flow of work begins to change. Decisions are taken in rooms where the Director is no longer present, not because anyone deliberately excluded them, but because the people in those rooms can keep the work moving while the Director struggles to keep pace.

“Nobody tells you you're being bypassed. You just notice fewer meetings on your calendar, more decisions being made before you're involved, and eventually hear about them in the debrief.”

More than 80% of designers now say AI skills will be essential to their future roles. What's more surprising is how many Design Directors read that stat and still mentally file it under "something to think about later."

Who Trains the Next Design Director?

The role of junior designers has changed in many organisations. Increasingly, they’re acting as AI editors, evaluating output, spotting what the model missed, and refining what it almost got right. Much of their time is spent curating rather than creating from scratch.

That’s a valuable skill, but it develops differently from the path that traditionally turned junior designers into mid-levels, seniors, and eventually directors.

Design expertise has always accumulated through repetition. Small mistakes sharpened judgment, repeated decisions built confidence, and years of hands-on work gradually formed a point of view. That apprenticeship model relied on thousands of iterations. As AI takes on more of the execution, many of those repetitions are simply no longer part of the learning process.

Which leaves the current generation of Design Directors with something they haven’t fully named yet: nobody to mentor the way they were mentored. The people coming up don’t need the same things. And the Directors who built their leadership identity around developing junior talent are finding that the job has shifted underneath them before they noticed.

The more difficult conversation remains largely absent.
What does this shift mean for the people who will lead design teams ten years from now? And if the foundations of design expertise are changing today, will the next generation of leaders have the experience and judgment the role has historically required?

A Different Kind of Design Leadership

The Design Directors still relevant today aren't necessarily the most technically fluent people in the room. They're the ones who recognize what’s changing and are ready to upskill themselves.

The difficult part is that their work is almost invisible.

1. Framing the right problem before the brief exists doesn’t show up on the portfolio.

2. Killing a bad idea in a strategy meeting rarely gets attributed to anyone.

3. The stakeholder alignment that saved a quarter disappears into the process.

So even Directors who see the shift often default to the work everyone can see: reviews, approvals, and late-night brainstorms.

Not because they don’t understand what’s changing. Because visible work gets measured and invisible work doesn’t. When your role is under pressure, it’s easy to optimize for the work you can point to.

McKinsey has found that the biggest obstacle to AI transformation isn’t adoption itself, but leadership’s ability to adapt the way organizations operate. Design Directors are experiencing that shift firsthand, often without a shared language for what the role is becoming.

The Companies Already Rewriting the Role

Most companies are still evaluating Design Directors by the metrics that made sense when the role was about managing execution.
Number of reviews conducted. Team headcount. Delivery speed. Those metrics aren’t wrong exactly; they just describe a version of the job that has significantly less leverage than it used to.

The companies adapting most effectively are asking a different set of questions.

• Can this person bring together business strategy, product vision, engineering constraints, and customer needs, then make sound decisions when those priorities conflict?

• Can they create alignment where there isn’t an obvious answer?

Those responsibilities have little to do with team size, and they don’t show up in a sprint review.

The One Question Worth Sitting With

I've been in enough conversations with Design Directors in the last eighteen months to notice a pattern.

The Question
Set aside the org chart, the review meetings, and the approvals for a moment.

• What is the specific decision that consistently depends on your judgment?

• What makes your perspective necessary, and why does the organization rely on you to make that decision well?

The Design Directors who can answer that question clearly and have shaped their work around it are the ones still gaining ground. The ones who can’t tend to be the ones who will be told, at some point in the next two years, that the role is “evolving.” Which is the word organizations use when they’ve already decided something but haven’t finished the paperwork.

I don’t think the Design Director role is going away. I think it’s being split into something more strategic on one end and something more technically hybrid on the other. The people who survive that split will be the ones who picked a side before they were forced to. Or found a way to hold both, which is the harder and rarer thing.

The ones who are still waiting for the role to stabilize on its own are going to be waiting for a while.

Until next time
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.

— Dipaq

The work looked professional. It looked considered. It looked like the output of a process.

The output existed. The thinking behind it didn’t.

The Full Collapse of Design

There’s a number that should be unsettling to anyone working in brand design right now. In 2023, the median price for a complete visual identity package: logo, palette, typography, brand guide was around $4,800. By early 2026, it had dropped to $2,100. That’s a 56% compression in under three years. Not because the work got easier to think through. Because AI made it effortless to produce.

Production cost approaching zero changes the market in a specific way. When anyone can generate a logo that looks credible in 20 minutes, “competent” stops being a qualifier. It becomes the baseline. The floor. And the floor, right now, is very crowded.

Competitive audits still take time. Positioning still demands difficult conversations. Deciding what a brand refuses to become still requires patience and conviction. AI changed none of that. What changed was the willingness to do the work. Today, many brands and designers simply move forward without it.

The Missing Generation of Designers

In March 2026, a branding agency in Portland laid off two junior designers. The creative director was honest about it: the work hadn’t disappeared. It had changed shape. The part where a junior designer spends three days exploring typeface pairings, learning through repetition, building the kind of judgment that only comes from doing something badly and then doing it again- that’s 20 minutes of AI output now.

Some agencies are already redesigning the entry role. Not “junior designer” anymore. “AI editor.” Your job on day one is to critique what the model produced. You need taste before you’ve built it. You need to walk in with judgment that used to take three years of grunt work to develop.

Which raises a question nobody in the industry is answering cleanly: where does the next generation of senior designers come from, if the reps that built every senior designer working today no longer exist?

“You used to earn judgment through repetition. Now you’re expected to arrive with it. That gap is going to show up in the work before anyone admits it’s showing up in the industry.”

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 report ranked graphic design as the 11th fastest-declining job category over the next five years. Its previous report had described the field as moderately growing. The sharpest decline is happening in entry-level roles, which means the pipeline into the profession is narrowing much faster than many people realize.

Jaguar Exposed a Bigger Pattern

The story told about Jaguar’s 2024 rebrand was polarization as strategy. The CEO said, “If we play by the same rules as everyone else, we’ll drown.” The agency, Accenture Song, built a campaign around “Delete Ordinary.” No cars in the ads. A new wordmark. A complete departure from the growler logo that had existed for decades.

What got less coverage was a leaked letter. Jaguar’s internal design team wrote to the chief creative officer, signed it, and sent it before the rebrand launched. They said the logo disconnected from the visual identity of the products. They felt the work had been outsourced over their objections to people who didn’t know the brand from the inside.

They were overruled. The people who overruled them had no accountability for what happened next.

The Jaguar rebrand exposed a problem that goes well beyond heritage or reinvention. Focusing the conversation there misses what actually happened.

The people with the deepest understanding of the brand had little influence over the decision. The people driving the decision were largely insulated from its consequences. That separation between expertise and accountability isn’t unique to Jaguar. It’s becoming a familiar pattern across brand work.

The Texture of AI Design

There is a distinct texture to AI-generated brand work in 2026. It’s difficult to define, but easy to recognize once you’ve seen enough of it.

The colour palette feels harmonious without revealing why those colours belong together. The logomark hints at meaning but never quite arrives there. The corner radius feels familiar. The sans-serif is clean, confident, and impossible to remember.

Merriam-Webster chose slop as its Word of the Year in late 2025, describing content that is polished yet strangely lifeless, produced by systems trained on the output of other systems. Brand design has drifted toward its own version of that aesthetic. Everyone in the review meeting senses it, even if nobody says it aloud. The designer notices it. The founder reviewing the deck notices it. The user notices it too, even if all they do is scroll past without remembering what they saw.

The visual language rarely changes. Categories fill with the same geometric sans-serifs, familiar earth tones or saturated primaries, and asymmetric grids that signal contemporary taste without expressing much conviction. As more teams rely on the same tools, the same models, and the same pool of outputs, brands begin to resemble one another.

Technical quality is no longer difficult to achieve. That means competence alone does very little to create distinction. In many categories today, a design can be flawlessly executed and still disappear into the background.

The Brief Got Thin First. The Design Followed.

I keep watching this conversation get blamed on the tools. The tools are not the problem. The tools are fast, and they’re good at producing things that look like brand work. But a tool produces what you put into it, and what’s going into it right now is thin.

No real positioning. No clarity about what the brand refuses to become. No competitive audit that actually looked at the category. A brief that says “modern, trustworthy, approachable” and considers itself finished. That brief was producing average work from talented designers five years ago. It is producing invisible work from AI today. The output got worse. The brief was already the problem.

The question that cuts through it
Before the first visual gets made, who in the room is accountable if this brand is forgettable in six months? Not accountable for execution quality. Accountable for whether the output is strategically distinct from everything else in the category. If nobody owns that question, the answer is already written. You just won’t see it until the brand is already invisible.

The agencies doing the sharpest work right now aren’t the ones who refused AI. They’re the ones who kept the discovery process intact, the stakeholder interviews, the competitive audit, the positioning work, and used AI for production after the hard thinking was done. The strategic phases still take two weeks. The production phases went from eight weeks to two. That’s the right structure. Most brands skipped the two weeks and called it a process.

When production became effortless, and accountability left the room, the design didn’t get better or worse. It got weird. Technically fine. Somehow completely absent. And the brands wearing it are going to feel that absence before they understand what caused it.

That’s where we are.

Until next time
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.

— Dipaq

He grew up in Kerala wanting to design cars. Then he found out there’s something called product design, wore his parents down about the risk of it, and landed at design school, where footwear wasn’t even a specialization. It became one anyway, mostly by accident, mostly through Instagram DMs and being at the right after-party with the right people. Seven years, two companies, and one destroyed set of Nike molds later, he’s trying to build a shoe brand India can point to and say: designed here, on purpose.

The Debrief

• Why Nike quietly exited manufacturing in India and paid to physically destroy the evidence.

• The blunt financial test Ajaaz runs before he’ll design a shoe brand for anyone.

• What Fila taught him that design school never could and why he calls Ludic “learning judgment.”

• How a wide-fit slider became a 65,000-pair-a-year problem solved by actually looking at Indian feet.

• Why owning a mold matters more than owning a logo.

• The fictional bunker-dwelling world built just to sell a shoe and why going viral was never the goal.

• The “Made in India” label, he thinks, is mostly a scam, and the one part of it he still believes in.

Where it Got Interesting

The Molds Nike Paid to Destroy
Ajaaz’s first real factory visits happened at Fila, tagging along with the footwear developer just to see how things actually got made. One of those factories used to produce for Nike. Used to.
“They had spent around 50 lakhs on a laser machine to destroy the molds into four. So the factory can’t use it. That’s the amount of mistrust they have in Indian factories.”

Nike didn’t just leave. It paid extra to make sure nothing was left behind that could leak back into the market. That’s a verdict, and it’s the exact backdrop every Indian footwear brand is silently designing against.

The Art of Saying No
Two years working with a factory system taught Ajaaz something design school never covers: the gap between a sketch and a shelf is where the real design happens.
So now, when someone comes to him wanting a shoe brand, he doesn’t start with mood boards.
“I’ll ask you: how much, let’s say, bank balance do you have? You might say 1 CR. Like, put it into an FD. Chill.”

Eight out of ten times, the answer is no. Not because the idea is bad, but because most people asking for a designer actually just want a curator, someone to pick a mold from China and slap on a logo. Ajaaz has learned to tell the difference and to say so, even when it costs him the project.

Fila was School. Ludic is Practice
He put it simply: design college taught systems. Fila taught reality. Ludic is where the two collide, and he has to make the call himself.
“Fila was the learning ground, and Ludic is where I’m learning judgment.”

At Fila, briefs started with a price point, not a concept, which felt backwards to a design-school brain trained to start with the problem. It took a year of frustration before it clicked: the price *is* the problem. Everything he does at Ludic now runs through that same filter, just with nobody left to blame if it goes wrong.

Designing for Real Feet, Not Instagram
Ludic’s slider took a year and a half to make. The decision that shaped it was anatomical.
“The decision to make Ludic sliders a bit wide fit was based on the research and the knowledge of Indians having broad feet. We’ve been consuming western brands which are...”

Narrower is the unfinished thought. Ajaaz knew the risk: more exchanges, more replacements, more sizing conversations nobody wants to have. Then the number came in. 65,000 pairs in twelve months. The market had been waiting for someone to look at the foot first.

When Mold is Moat
Most young brands go to China, pick an open mold off a shelf, and print a logo on it. Ludic spent 50-60 lakhs upfront building its own tooling before it had any brand recognition to justify it. Ajaaz doesn’t see that as overspending. He sees it as the entire point.
“Toolings are basically your souls, right? Nike has Pegasus, Adidas has Boost and Puma has Nitro. These are all IPs. These are all things which compound value for a footwear business.”

Nobody can rip off a slider Ludic owns the mold for. That’s not branding. That’s a moat, built one expensive decision at a time.

Fuo, the World-Building Team
Every Ludic ad campaign is under pressure to perform the way performance marketing wants it to, chase the algorithm, chase the trend, chase the ROAS. Instead, Ajaaz and his in-house creative team built Fuo: a small, strange, bunker-dwelling world with its own odd characters, none of whom are obviously selling a shoe.

“We wanted to establish Future Works as a world rather than a product. The product comes from that world.”

It’s made to be recognizable campaign after campaign, even if that means the sales team occasionally asks why they’re not chasing the trend everyone else is chasing. Ajaaz’s answer to that pressure, in his own words, is to keep “grounding people”, reminding the team that consistency, not virality, is what makes a brand impossible to copy.

Before You Go

Ask Ajaaz what winning looks like, and he doesn’t reach for a revenue number. He reaches for a feeling, the one you get when a product you’ve used for three years suddenly goes out of stock.

“India should be known for modern footwear and modern product designs being built and designed in India, like how Apple is designed in California. It should be a thing.”

That’s the real ambition underneath everything Ludic is doing slowly and stubbornly, not to out-fund the well-capitalized brands chasing the same category, but to prove that a shoe engineered for an Indian foot, made with Indian-owned tooling, can still stand next to anything the West exports to us. Ajaaz is optimizing for the next decade and for what true vision looks like.

Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,
Stay curious, stay Groundbreakin’.
—Dipaq

Getting people in was never the hard part. The hard part is what you make them feel once they are inside. There is a design pattern running quietly through a significant portion of Indian lending and BNPL.

Not aggressive, not cynical, not the result of any single bad decision. But it has slowly trained an entire category of users to associate their financial apps with one specific emotion.

Stress.

How it Became the Default

Nobody is supposed designed to stress continuously. That is almost the point.

Each decision was easy to justify. The red indicator on the credit limit? It drives action. The urgent push notification before an EMI date? It reduces defaults. The carefully worded collection message? It gets collections.

But none of this was designed to earn trust. It’s not human.

I have been that user. There was a lending app I used for about fourteen months. Functional product. Did exactly what it said. I found every possible reason not to open it.

The Short Game and Why Everyone Plays It

I am not going to argue that stress-based design does not convert. It does.

But the user who associates your app with stress is managing their relationship with your product the way they manage a difficult obligation. Meeting the minimum requirement, waiting for it to be over, looking for any credible reason to leave.

Their exit is inevitable, even if delayed.

So… What’s The Way Forward?

There is another way to make fintech apps in India and gain long-term trust. We got to test it directly with Boltpe, a payments app built for users in Tier 4 to Tier 6 India; the exact demographic that fintech apps have spent a decade training to feel anxious.

The strategy wasn’t to make the app friendlier. Friendly is easy and forgettable. The strategy was to make it feel like the one person in your life who actually knows how the world works and shows up when it breaks.

It tells you exactly what is happening in your language, without making you feel stupid for asking. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Warmth as performance, the exclamation marks, the “you’re almost there!”, the confetti language, reads as manufactured within seconds, and users in low-trust financial contexts smell manufactured warmth immediately. So we stripped it out.

Trust-building design is the only thing that wins the user back tomorrow, and the one after that, until opening the app stops being a thing they dread and just becomes a thing they do.

Apps That are Changing the Narrative

A few products have made a different bet, and it is worth being specific about what they actually changed.

Fi Money reoriented its language around growth, not deficit. It does not tell you how much you have spent. It tells you how your money is working. You leave the app feeling slightly more capable than when you entered. That is not a small design decision. That is a complete reframing of what the product believes its job is.

Groww made a bet that most fintech teams were not willing to make. That the first time investor in India did not need more information. The app stripped out the noise, mapped products to goals people already understood, and explained every step of onboarding not because regulation requires it but because trust requires it.

The result is India’s largest digital investment platform by active users, and an IPO in late 2025 that validated something the industry spent years treating as a soft variable. Simplicity is a business model.

Smallcase built a narrative layer over portfolio performance. This narrative is doing more retention work than any feature on the roadmap.

None of these is a perfect product. But they’re a breath of fresh air for sure.

The Business of Trust

Here is where the pushback usually comes, so let me get ahead of it.

The argument will be that calm design is a values play, and values do not thrive in close quarters. Anxiety converts. You cannot build a company on making people feel good.

Run the numbers differently.

The user who feels in control of their finances recommends the product. The user who feels stressed every time they open it just endures it. There is a measurable difference between those two cohorts. It shows up everywhere if you look for it.

Designing for the user’s peace of mind is a long-term strategy. And in a market where every lending product looks roughly the same, the longer strategy is also the better one.

Let’s do Better Briefs

If you’re a founder, looking to start something in fintech I have a guide for you to sharpen your design studio brief. So your app doesn’t feel like another tool of an anxious economy.

1. What specific emotion does this create in the two seconds after the user sees it? Not urgency as a category. The actual feeling. Shame? Panic? Relief? Confidence? If the team cannot name it precisely, they have not thought about it precisely enough.

2. Is this communication serving the user’s understanding of their own situation, or is it serving the product’s need for an action? These are not always in conflict. But when they are, the answer reveals the actual design philosophy. Not the one written in the documentation.

3. What is the user’s emotional state at the moment they are most likely to see this? A 9 am Monday notification hits a different person than an 11 pm Friday one. Context changes the feeling entirely. Design for the context, not just the content.

4. If this were the only thing a new user ever received from this product, what would they believe about it? That question tends to cut through the reasoning very quickly.

I Want You to Remember This

Getting people through the door is a solved problem. Every fintech team has the same playbook, the same channels, the same incentives. You can buy your way to a user. You cannot buy your way to trust.

The relationship that we are building right now, in notification copy and dashboard colours and the specific shade of red chosen for a credit limit indicator. Most of the industry is not paying attention to it. The ones who do will have an advantage that is genuinely difficult to replicate, because it lives inside the user’s memory, not inside a feature.

I know which product I would rather build. I suspect some of you do too.

—Dipaq

He prefers to be called Durani. There are too many Abhisheks. He’s not wrong.
He also has ADHD. He calls it a superpower. After 45 minutes with him, I’m not going to argue.

Durani co-founded Studio Sorted: a branding agency in Bangalore that treats play like it’s a line item on the P&L. Their website says “We take our play seriously.” Not many agencies say that and mean it.

He studied architecture at CEPT, where he met his co-founder and now wife, Netra. What started as freelancing for some extra money turned into a love for Photoshop, and eventually, the discovery that design could be his escape from boredom. He never looked back.

Seven years later, Studio Sorted has built brands for Theka Coffee, Food Pharmer’s Only What’s Needed, Smash Guys, and a growing list of clients who share one thing in common: they didn’t want to be boring.

Things We Uncovered

• Why ADHD became his unfair advantage and how most people kill the very thing that makes them interesting.

• The architecture training that makes him look at branding differently.

• How Studio Sorted built a brand led by the community for Food Pharmer.

• That “Last Supper” mural he made using AI and why he’s not embarrassed to say it.

• Why does he check your Instagram before hiring you (and whether that’s fair).

• The type foundry, Panic Press, and the other experiments nobody asked him to start.

• Why “scale for the sake of scale” doesn’t excite him and what he wants instead.

Where it Got Interesting

ADHD as a Superpower
The first thing you notice about Durani is the energy. It’s not performative. It’s the kind of energy that runs a studio, plays cricket (fast bowler and he started as a spinner), makes music, and still finds design exciting after seven years.

The second thing you notice is he’s not pretending.

He told me branding and design started as a hobby. A side thing. An escape from the structured life of architecture college. And that origin story hooked me in.

“When you start something as an escape, it can never be boring.”

Most designers I know who burn out started with purpose. They wanted to change the world or build something meaningful. Durani started because he needed money for things he “probably can’t mention here” and wanted an excuse to play with Photoshop.

The ADHD diagnosis came later. Three years ago. Properly diagnosed. And instead of treating it like a limitation, he reframed it.

“If you know ADHD, there’s that anti-boring aspect to it. There’s no space for boredom or dullness.” It’s not just a personal quirk. It dictates the work the studio takes on, the clients they attract, and the culture they build. When you’re pathologically anti-boring, you don’t accidentally create boring brands.

The Architecture of Everything
Durani studied at CEPT University in Ahmedabad. One of India’s best architecture schools. And he credits that training for almost everything Studio Sorted does today.

“Architecture trains you to look at things from a 360-degree perspective. If something goes wrong with the foundation, the entire building could fall. That fear trains you to look at everything at once.”

Most branding agencies come from graphic design. Studio Sorted comes from buildings. That changes how they see problems.

Durani says his biggest contribution to every project is vision and that comes from being trained to think three steps ahead, about structure, foundations and how everything connects. This is why Studio Sorted doesn’t feel like a typical design agency. The thinking is different because of the cross-pollination of these two subjects in his head.

The Brief That Said “Make it Boring”
When Food Pharmer came to Studio Sorted, his brief was unusual. He wanted the most boring packaging in the world. Clean. Transparent. No gimmicks.
Durani’s response was on the tip of the tongue: “Boss, I can do everything you’ve asked for except the boring part. Nobody likes boring.”

What followed was a masterclass in participatory design.

Studio Sorted had already developed a strong practice in involving communities in the design process through social-impact projects. They brought that same approach to Food Pharmer.

They collected input from his community. They built trust. They used that input to shape the brand. By the time the product launched, the community already felt ownership.

“When the brand launched, instead of us selling the brand to them, they already had a seat at the table while the brand was being created.”
That’s the difference between designing for people and designing with them. Most brands do the first. The second takes more work, but it builds something that templates can’t.

The AI-assisted Last Supper
Smash Guys wanted a mural. The space was awkward: extremely horizontal, very low height.

Durani’s team borrowed the composition from ‘The Last Supper’. The idea: put everyone who worked on the brand around the table. What makes this interesting is how they made it.
“Illustrator first created rough sketches. Then we collected photographs. The way we worked with AI surprised even me.”

“As artists, we could have created everything manually, but it would have required a huge amount of effort. There were also many rounds of changes because real people were being represented, and naturally, everyone had opinions.”

The mural is up at Smash Guys in Indiranagar. You can see it. And the process behind it is more interesting than the old arguments about whether AI belongs in creative work.

Beyond the Portfolio
If you apply for a senior role at Studio Sorted, he will find your Instagram.
“I openly tell people this. I check their Instagram. It gives me a sense of their personality. What people post on Instagram reflects what’s exciting them at that moment. A lot of those things never appear in their portfolio.”

He’s looking for obsession. For senior roles, he needs people who care about the margins on their CV: literally, the layout. If you’re going to lead design at his studio, you better be the kind of person who can’t turn it off.
For juniors, the bar is different. “If there’s just one thing about you that’s exceptionally good, that can be enough.”

The Ideas That Don’t Need a Client
Studio Sorted has started spawning side ventures. A full-fledged type foundry called Panic Press (publishing and printed matter). Other experiments that don’t fit neatly inside a client brief.

This isn’t diversification for the sake of revenue. It’s a philosophy about how a studio should work.

“When someone on the team has a strong interest or passion for something, we should create space for them to explore it.”

Durani wants Studio Sorted to be more than an agency: a platform where people can build ideas they care about.
“Client work pays the bills. But if you only do client work, you become dependent on somebody else giving you permission to create.”

The Vision Beyond the Agency
“I don’t want Studio Sorted to become predictable.” He wants it to become larger than an agency. A platform. A space for ideas. A place that produces brands, products, experiences, conversations, and culture.

“Scale for the sake of scale isn’t interesting. I’d rather create something that has influence. Something people want to participate in. Something people want to be associated with.”

And when I pressed him on what he wants people to think when they hear “Studio Sorted” ten years from now, his answer was telling: “Maybe it’ll still be an agency. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll become a collection of different businesses. Maybe it’ll become a space. Maybe it’ll become something completely different.”

Most founders would find that uncertainty uncomfortable. He finds it freeing.

Don’t Skip This

“We still often represent India using outdated visual languages. India doesn’t need to constantly look backward to prove that it’s Indian. We can create contemporary Indian design.” Durani said.

This is the thread running through everything Studio Sorted does. Not rejecting where they come from. Not copying what the West is doing. They are making something that feels new and still feels Indian.

Most agencies know where they want to be in ten years. Durani is more interested in making sure Studio Sorted still has room to become something nobody saw coming. And if you’re building an agency in 2026, that might be the harder ambition to protect.

Also listen to us on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,
Stay curious, stay Groundbreakin’.

—Dipaq

In this episode of The Groundbreakin, we sit down with Ajaaz, Principal Designer and Co-Founder at Ludic, a footwear-first lifestyle brand built from scratch in India. From his early years designing for Fila to working on KL Rahul’s Puma collab, to investing 50-60 lakhs in proprietary tooling instead of an open mold, Ajaaz breaks down what it actually takes to design, manufacture and sell a footwear product in one of the toughest production landscapes in the world.

From a college kid sketching shoes in Kerala to co-founding a brand selling 65,000 pairs a year, this is a conversation about craft, conviction, and saying no more often than you say yes.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:

1. How a Kerala kid obsessed with cars ended up in footwear design instead (1:53)

2. The DM that landed him India’s first dedicated footwear design role at Fila (4:35)

3. Getting shortlisted top 8 in the world at the Spensole Sneaker Championship (7:02)

4. How a chance meeting led to Fila’s first-ever India collab with Veg Nonveg (8:06)

5. Why he tells most prospective clients not to start a footwear brand at all (19:39)

6. What working on KL Rahul’s Puma collab taught him about brand pricing (3:26)

7. Why Ludic spent 50-60 lakhs on its own molds instead of buying off-the-shelf from China (14:04)

8. The real story behind why Nike pulled all manufacturing out of India (5:40)

9. Building Future Works  Ludic’s experimental product world with filmmaker Don (18:56)

10. What “winning” actually means to a designer who doesn’t think in revenue numbers (14:48)
    
    

CONNECT:

Check out our Substack: dipaq.substack.com
Supported by Syqi: https://syqi.design/

Email us at [q@groundbreak.in]

The best product leaders are arriving at the same conclusion, and it’s not what the “experts” are selling. Scale doesn’t come from adding more. It comes from protecting the core usability, the single thing that gained trust and made users comfortable using it.

The Feature Factory Problem

There is a particular flavor of delusion that infects product teams around month eighteen. The base narrative of the all is working. Customers are paying. And then someone in a leadership offsite says the magic words: “We need to expand our addressable market.”

Let me translate that for you. It means: we are scared of running out of revenue, so we are going to bolt a bunch of shit onto our product until it looks like a Frankenstein monster.

I have been in those rooms. I have watched otherwise intelligent people nod along while someone sketches a roadmap that solves seventeen different problems for twelve different customer segments. They forget to ask the real question: “if we build all of this, will the users recognize us?”

The truth is this feature-fever is almost never a response to genuine customer ask. It is a response to internal pressure. Sales needs something to close the quarter. Investors want to see everything up to speed. The team is bored and wants to build something new instead of maintaining what exists.

Less is More

Allow me to be blunt about something.

The idea that adding more features equals innovation is one of the most destructive practices in modern product development. It is the kind of thinking that produces software that does three hundred things poorly instead of three things brilliantly.

Some of the most innovative companies I have studied do the opposite. They have lesser updates. They let competitors race ahead into the bloat zone while they stay focused on the one thing they actually do well. And guess what happens? The competitors burn out. Their products become unusable.

But this turn of events doesn’t make for a swanky keynote speech.

Who Bears the Cost of it All?

Here’s the whole story.
First, someone has to build it. That is only the beginning. Every feature demands testing, documentation, customer support, ongoing maintenance, onboarding changes, interface updates, and a new place in your product story. The work never ends once the code is written.

Features added just for the sake of it are like recurring taxes.

Teams obsess over what a feature could earn and ignore what it will cost. Complexity accumulates far faster than value.

I watched a product go from “the easiest way to manage team tasks” to “a project management platform with AI writing assistant, video conferencing, document collaboration, and a CRM integration.” Do you know what that product became? Nothing. It tries to be everything, and everything does not stand for anything.

Radical Subtraction is Not Lazy

There is a phrase floating around the founder community: radical subtraction. The “experts” are starting to catch on, though they are, predictably, turning it into another buzzword to sell their courses.

Here is what radical subtraction actually means. It means looking at your product roadmap and deleting half of it. It means killing features that paying customers use because those features are dragging down the experience for everyone else. It includes telling a salesperson that the deal they want to close requires a customization you will not build, even if it means losing the deal.

It is not lazy. It is harder than adding. Making the right choice is the real deal.

Subtraction requires conviction. It requires saying to your team, to your investors, to your customers: we believe in this specific thing so much that we are willing to turn down money to protect it. That is not lazy. That’s the vision for the long-term future.

The Branding Parallel

Let me draw a line that most product people miss.

Brands die the same way products do. They start with a sharp, clear idea. Nike is for athletes. Volvo is for safety. Apple is for creative thinkers. Then growth anxiety sets in. Nike makes golf shirts. Volvo makes a compact SUV. Apple makes a subscription service for news.

Each of these moves makes sense in isolation. Each one adds revenue, captures a new segment, blurs the edge of what the brand means until it is forgettable.

The same thing happens to products. You add a feature for enterprise customers, a feature for individual users, a feature for the education market. Each one has a business case. But the cumulative effect is a product that no one would describe as “perfect for what I need.”

The best brands and the best products share one thing: they are comfortable excluding people. They would rather be loved by a few than tolerated by many.

I reject the idea that growth means more. It means deeper. It means better. It means more valuable to the people who already trust you.

The Question: Does It Earn Its Place?

Here is a simple test.
Ask yourself one question: does this feature make the core promise of the product stronger or does it just make the product bigger?
If it makes the core promise stronger, make it. If it just makes the product bigger, kill it.

That is it.

But let me be more specific because I know someone will ask for a checklist.
First, name the exact job your product does. Not the mission statement. The job. “We help freelancers send invoices that get paid faster.” That is a job. If a feature does not serve that job, it does not belong there.

Second, count the hidden costs before you count the potential revenue. Map out the support burden, maintenance overhead, onboarding complexity, and positioning dilution. If you cannot make a credible case that the feature is worth all of that, you already have your answer.

Third, ask what you would remove to make room for this feature. If the answer is nothing, you are not taking the decision seriously.

Fourth, let the feature prove itself after shipping. Set a timeline. If the feature does not hit adoption, retention, and satisfaction targets within a defined window, remove it.

The Bottom Line

Product teams have been sold a lie. The lie is that more is better.

I am not buying it.

The products that endure are not the ones with the longest feature lists. They are the ones that do one thing so well that everything else feels like a distraction.

If you are building a product and you cannot articulate exactly what it is for, in one sentence, without listing features, you have already lost. It does not matter how many customers you have.

The discipline is not in what you build. It is in what you refuse to build.

Until next time,
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.
—Dipaq

I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

Pradeep has spent 27 years inside the companies where this is supposed to be playing out: Intel, Bosch, Honeywell, Google. And his read on where we actually are does not match the conference talk version.

“At one point in time, they had come a little closer,” he told me. “But today, if you look at it, I believe they are moving a little apart.”

That sentence hit different. Because the person saying it is not some random LinkedIn post complaining about design not being valued. He led teams at Google Cloud. He hired hundreds of designers. He is currently writing a book on connecting business and design.

If the bridge is breaking, he would know.

This week on Groundbreakin’, I spoke with Pradeep Joseph. Mechanical engineer. Masters in product design from IDC IIT Bombay. Started his career designing a defibrillator for BPL, a model still in the market 25 years later. (Yes, 25 years.) Spent the last decade building and leading design teams at Google.

And somewhere along the way, he realized the gap he needed to close wasn’t between design and engineering anymore. It was between design and the people who make the decisions that actually matter.

What Actually Came Up

Here’s what we broke open together:

• Why business and design are drifting further apart and whose fault it really is.

• The “ignorance and confidence” paradox that kept Praveen alive across six different industries.

• What sustainability looks like when you stop talking about straws and start looking at software.

• Why “design deeper” is not a platitude, it’s a survival strategy.

• The one thing he ignored from HR to hire a BA in History who became one of his best design leaders.

• Why reversible decisions matter more than right ones.

• How he hires for divergent thinking, not portfolios.

Where it Got Interesting

The Bridge Nobody is Building
Pradeep said something that reframed the whole thing for me. The first bridge was between design and engineering. That used to be the big war. Designers would hand off wireframes. Engineers would say this is impossible. Everyone would be frustrated.

That bridge is mostly built now. Better tools. Better workflows. Engineers who actually get design.

“The biggest gap we need to bridge now is between business and design.”
And it’s getting worse, not better. Because business is acting under tremendous pressure. Market uncertainty. Quarterly everything. Budget cuts. Mergers that drop features overnight.

When business is reactive, it becomes more dictative than collaborative. And design, which needs context, space, trust, gets pushed further out.

Pradeep’s take is not sympathetic to either side. It’s more honest than that.

“Designers need to start taking more ownership in terms of driving things rather than being told.”

The Mark Twain Paradox
I asked Pradeep how he survived moving across seven different verticals, consumer durables, consulting, aerospace, cloud. I expected him to talk about adaptability or learning agility or something you’d put on a performance review.

The answer was a quote.

“To succeed in life you need two things: ignorance and confidence. Ignorance to say I don’t know enough. Confidence to say I can still do it.”

Not the standard career advice. The standard advice is to pick one thing and go deep. Pradeep went wide and relied on a very specific kind of fearlessness, the willingness to not know and the belief that you’ll figure it out anyway.

He failed many times. He says that casually. “That’s okay. It’s part of the learning journey.”

Sustainability Is Not About Straws
This was the part I kept thinking about.
We all nod when someone talks about sustainability. But Pradeep is doing a PhD on sustainable software development. And his take made me think twice.

Nobody talks about this. We talk about electric vehicles and recyclable packaging. But software, running on billions of devices, powered by data centers that consume staggering amounts of energy, is invisible.

His research asks one question: can UX be a catalyst for more conscious choices in how software is made?

Not the end user’s choices. But the developer’s choices of course.

He brought up the Jevons Paradox. When car engines became more efficient, people didn’t use less fuel. They drove more. Efficiency gains don’t reduce consumption. They enable more of it.

AI is going to do the same thing to computing. Make it cheaper and easier, and consumption goes up. Which means the sustainability problem is not going away. It’s compounding.

The Tag Doesn’t Matter
I had to ask about hiring. Because Pradeep has hired hundreds of people, and his track record includes bets that HR actively fought.
He hired a BA in History from Kolkata who didn’t even have his degree certificate. HR said no.
“I made this person travel back to Kolkata, get a certificate, and I hired him. He turned out to be one of the best we have.”

He hired someone with a BCom, second class, for the same reasons.

“What do they have in common? It’s not the institute. It’s how they think. How they relate to the problems you’re trying to solve. Can they help you change your thinking?”

This is rare. Most hiring is a filtering exercise. Tags make it easy. IIT, NID, IDC, check the box, move on. “I don’t want anybody who thinks like me in the team.”

I want you to remember this

Every design leader I know has said some version of “we need a seat at the table.” I’ve said it myself.

Pradeep said something different. He said don’t wait for an invitation. You show up, you act like you belong, and eventually the table adjusts.
“You act, you own up. You’re already there.”

That distinction matters. Because the conditions that made the old model work, predictable roadmaps and annual planning cycles are gone. Business is making decisions in quarters, sometimes weeks. And design, which functions in longer cycles- weeks and months, has not caught up.

Pradeep’s relative runs a small business making natural food coloring. Completely organic. Premium product. And now customers are asking for a blend, cheaper, less pure, because the economic pressure is real. That’s the same pressure Google’s cloud division is facing. Nobody is insulated anymore.

The gap between business and design is not going to close because business gets more patient. It will close because designers learn to operate in the same reality business does, reactive, pressured, uncertain, without losing what makes their perspective valuable.

That’s what Pradeep means by ownership. Not a title. Not a reporting line. The willingness to be a forcing function when nobody is handing you influence.

If this conversation changed how you think about the gap between design and business, or what it actually means to be a strategic designer, I’d love to hear from you.

Also listen to us on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,
Stay curious, stay sharp.
And as always, keep breaking ground.

—Dipaq

Xaver Lehmann built e-bot7 from a student apartment to a $60M exit. 130 employees. Five offices. Forbes 30 Under 30. Spoke at the UN. And for years, his body was sending him signals he was taught to ignore.

Headaches that didn’t lift. Sensitivity to light. Exhaustion that sleep couldn’t fix.
The advice in his head, every single time: push through. He pushed through until his body stopped recovering at all. By then it was too late to undo.

This is not a story about weakness. It is a story about a piece of advice so widely accepted that nobody stopped to ask whether it was actually true.

Why “Push Through” Has Never Been Seriously Examined

Survivorship bias is the reason.
The founders who pushed through and failed, you never hear from them. They don’t write books. They don’t keynote. Their cautionary tales don’t circulate.

The founders who pushed through and won — those are the voices on stage. And because they won, the damage gets reframed. The burnout becomes a “learning experience.” The health collapse becomes a “sacrifice that was worth it.” The story gets cleaned up in retrospect.

Nobody speaks for the version of Xaver who sat at the notary’s table and felt nothing. Who drove to the coast and doesn’t remember the drive. Who got three speeding tickets in the mail weeks later with zero memory of the road.

That was supposed to be the best night of his life.

The ecosystem defines success by the outcome and never the cost. We celebrate the number. We never ask what the number took.

What His Body Was Actually Telling Him

Let’s be specific about what “push through” looks like in practice.

Xaver’s symptoms didn’t arrive as a dramatic collapse. They arrived as a slow escalation over years. A headache here. A sensitivity to light there. Exhaustion felt normal because every founder around him was also exhausted.

Push-through culture taught him to read these signals as weakness. As evidence that he wasn’t trying hard enough. As something to overcome rather than something to listen to.

“Just push through” sounds like grit. It sounds correct. Every founder nods at it.

But here is what it actually does: it disconnects you from the only feedback system you have that can tell you something is wrong before it’s too late.
Your body is not your enemy in this equation. It is your earliest warning system. Push-through culture teaches you to disable that system and keep going.

Xaver’s body sent the signals for years. He ignored them until his body stopped recovering at all.

By then, “pushing through” one more time meant pushing through one too many.

The Structural Problem Nobody Wants to Name

This is not just individual bad advice. It is embedded in the structure of how startups operate.

VC culture rewards visible endurance. The founder who works 80-hour weeks, replies to emails at 2 AM, and never takes a vacation — that founder gets funded. That founder gets featured. That founder gets the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong.

Pitch culture rewards the same thing. Investors want to see obsession. They want to see that you will stop at nothing. The founder who says “I need to protect my health” is not the founder who gets the term sheet.

Hiring culture rewards it too. Early employees want to join something that feels all-in. The founder who models balance signals that the company might not be the one. The entire ecosystem is structurally aligned against stopping. Every incentive points toward more. More hours. More rounds. More growth. More sacrifice.

And so the founder who needs to stop — not quit, just stop — does not have a single structural incentive telling them that it is okay. They only have the internal signals that push-through culture has taught them to ignore.

The difference between walking away and collapsing is usually about three months of ignored signals that nobody told you were signals.

Grit vs. Learned Self-Destruction

This is the distinction that matters most.

Real grit is knowing when to hold and when to stop. It is the capacity to sustain effort over time without breaking. It requires judgment, not just endurance.

Push-through culture surgically removes the second half of that equation. It defines grit as pure persistence — the ability to absorb infinite damage without changing course. That is not grit. That is learned self-destruction dressed up as virtue.

“Sometimes the right move isn’t pushing through. It’s stopping. But nobody puts that on a conference stage.” — Xaver

Xaver didn’t fail because he lacked grit. He succeeded because he had it — and then nearly died because he had too much of the wrong version of it.

The founders I see building sustainably are not the ones who push through everything. They are the ones who know the difference between a signal and a distraction. Between a genuine obstacle that requires persistence and a warning that requires a pause.

That judgment cannot be outsourced to a framework or a coach. It has to be rebuilt from the inside, because the ecosystem has been training you out of it since day one.

But there is a starting point. And Xaver found it.

What Stopping Actually Looks Like

Xaver left. He went to South Africa. Spent four months doing manual work — building, cleaning, carrying — things with physical beginnings and ends. Helping local families. Working for NGOs. Not as a retreat. Not as a sabbatical. As a survival response that his body finally forced him to take. And the quietest surprise was this: for the first time in years, his mind stopped racing. No pitch decks. No board updates. No investor anxiety. Just the next task and the sun.

This is what stopping actually looks like. Not quitting — pausing. And that pause made space for something that pushing through never could have been delivered.

Clarity. Not the kind you manufacture in a productivity system. The kind that arrives when you stop moving long enough for your own thoughts to catch up with you.

In that pause, Xaver realized he couldn’t build another company the same way. Not because he was broken. Because the old operating system had been proven false.

Push through had taken him to $60M and then to the edge of his own capacity.
The pause didn’t end his career. It changed its trajectory. He started writing.
The Honest Founder grew to 30,000 subscribers. He now coaches founders, speaks, invests — without the headaches, without the collapse, without the slow dismantling of his own health.

“I didn’t know writing would become my purpose when I started. But somewhere along the way it rebuilt an identity that had been there since I was a kid.” — Xaver

The pause was not the end of his ambition. It was the precondition for a different kind of it.

What the Pause Actually Looks Like

Here is the specific, non-motivational version.
Build the pause in before your body forces one. The signals are not complicated. They are just easy to ignore when everyone around you is modeling the opposite behavior. Unusual fatigue that rest doesn’t fix. Headaches that show up consistently. Irritability that feels like it’s coming from outside you. A sense that you’re going through motions you used to feel. Loss of interest in the work itself — not the grind, the actual craft.

These are not signs that you need a better morning routine. They are signs that your operating system needs a reboot, not a patch.

The founders who get this right don’t wait for the crash. They build the pause into the cadence before they need it. A week off between funding rounds. A month between companies. A day a week where the laptop stays closed. Not because it’s comfortable. Because the alternative is a body that makes the decision for you, and it does not negotiate.

Push through is not grit. It never was. It is survivorship bias in a blazer, handed down from one founder to the next, editing out the cost every time it gets retold.

The next generation of founders doesn’t need more endurance.

They need better judgment about what deserves it.

If this landed somewhere uncomfortable — good. That means you’re paying attention. Hit reply. I read every one.

Until next time,
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.

—Dipaq

In this episode of The Groundbreakin, we sit down with Abhishek Durrani, founder of Studio Sorted, a Bangalore-based branding and strategy agency behind some of India’s most talked-about consumer brands. From Theka Coffee on Shark Tank to a participatory brand built with a food community, Durrani’s approach to branding is bold, strategic and anything but boring.

From a Kashmiri migrant kid from Chandigarh to running a multi-vertical creative studio, this is a conversation about building with intention, leading with culture, and why every brand  B2B or B2C  deserves to be exciting.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:

1. Why architecture training gives designers a 360 vision (03:42)

2. How Theka Coffee became a cult brand and put Studio Sorted on the map (04:25)

3. The participatory design process behind Only What’s Needed (15:44)

4. Why ADHD is Durrani’s creative superpower (08:48)

5. How Studio Sorted gets featured on ChatGPT and Gemini (08:42)

6. Why he checks every candidate’s Instagram first (14:03)

7. Panic Press and Type Foundry  building verticals from within the team (02:57)

8. What it’s really like running a studio with your life partner (08:08)

THIS EPISODE IS FOR YOU IF:

1. You’re a designer or creative thinking about starting your own studio

2. You want to understand how brand strategy and culture work together

3. You’re building a consumer brand and want it to actually stand for something

4. You believe good design should never be boring  no matter the industry

CONNECT:

Check out our Substack: dipaq.substack.com
Supported by Syqi: https://syqi.design/

Email us at [q@groundbreak.in]

This week on Groundbreakin’, I spoke with Mohan Vijay. He studied industrial design, spent 19 years at BSH, Pentair, and Xerox, and today leads design and UX operations for BSH in India. When he says “user experience,” he means something most of the digital world has moved past.

“When I say user experience, it has nothing to do with screens,” he told me. “User experience in the true meaning is about managing the experience of users with the brand.”

That sentence doesn’t just expand what UX means. It rewires it. Mohan doesn’t design interfaces. He designs the full journey, from the moment a consumer walks into a store, to the way a technician fixes a machine, to how a dealer explains a feature on a shop floor. And one of those touchpoints, he argues, is worth more than all the usability tests combined.

What This Conversation Explores

This wasn’t a conversation about design systems or usability heuristics. It was about understanding UX as a holistic discipline that includes everyone — not just the person pressing a button.

Here’s what we broke open together:

• Why “the user” is actually three different groups — and most companies only design for one.

• What customer service technicians know that no focus group will ever tell you.

• How BSH reduced product development time from 21 months to 7 months.

• Why confidence without humility is the one thing Mohan refuses to hire.

• What European designers bring that Indian designers don’t — and vice versa.

• How proprietary AI is changing home appliances without marketing it.

• Why physical design is coming back after a decade of digital dominance.

Catch The Full Conversation

Stories Worth Sitting With

The User Is Three Different People
In most companies, the word “user” means one thing. The person who buys and uses the product. In Mohan’s world, it means three.

“We have external users, our end consumers who pay for us,” he explained. “Then there are customers — dealers, Kirana stores, Vijay Sales. And then there are employees — the people who design, engineer, and manufacture the products.”

Each of these groups experiences the brand differently. A dealer needs product information that is easy to demonstrate. An employee needs tools that don’t slow them down. A consumer needs a washing machine that actually works for the way they do laundry in India. Mohan’s team designs for all three. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.

Most companies don’t think this way. They design for the end user and assume the rest will sort itself out. But in Mohan’s experience, ignoring the dealer or the technician creates a gap that no amount of consumer research can fix.

“User experience in true meaning,” he said again. Not screens. Not interfaces. The whole thing.

Your Best Researcher Drives a Van
Mohan said something that stopped me mid-conversation.
“If you ride with a customer service technician for a day, you understand so many things. The trouble they go through. Meeting a customer in a frustrating situation. Facing that misery along with them. It gives you a lot of empathy to solve that problem.”

He didn’t say this as a side note. He said it as a core principle. Customer service technicians are the people who see your product fail, in real homes, with real families. They know which parts break, which features confuse people, and which design decisions create the most service calls. And most design teams never talk to them.

“They’re a gold mine, We don’t have to do a lot of fundamental research. We can just go on a ride with a service technician for a day.”

This is the kind of insight that sounds obvious in retrospect but rare in practice. Most design teams look for answers in usability labs and surveys. Mohan looks for them in a service van.

“It’s not about doing a lot of talking,” he said. “It’s about observing and then inferring.”

Speed Is a Design Constraint
When Mohan’s team designed their first India-for-India product at BSH, the cycle took 21 months. Today, the same kind of product takes 6 to 7 months.

“We’ve reduced the time by three times,” he said. “We’ve become faster.”

That didn’t happen by working harder. It happened because the team integrated itself into the business rather than operating as an external studio. Mohan’s team doesn’t receive briefs from product management. They sit with business leaders, brainstorm roadmaps, and understand challenges before they become requirements.

“We don’t see ourselves as a design studio doing work. We are very much integrated into the business. We work along with the people who manage the business on a daily basis.”

This is the difference between design as a service and design as a practice. When design is embedded, decisions don’t have to travel through layers of approval. Trade-offs happen in conversation, not in email chains.

“Designers are not seen as people who make beautiful sketches anymore, They are seen as problem solvers. Catalysts to solve business challenges.”

The Confidence-Humility Paradox
I asked Mohan what he looks for when hiring a designer. He didn’t mention portfolios or tool proficiency.

“I look for somebody who is confident, but also values humility. Sometimes people confuse these two aspects. The right balance is a great asset for any person to work in a bigger organization.”

He also categorizes designers into two types: problem explorers and problem solvers. The explorer has a research mindset — curious, open, able to connect with people and bring stakeholders along. The solver has deep craft skills — materials, sketching, form development. They work in pairs.

And both need to navigate the reality of a large organization. Not every decision gets made by design. Not every battle is worth fighting. Knowing when to push and when to collaborate is, in Mohan’s view, the difference between a designer who makes an impact and one who makes enemies.

“You need a person who’s confident but also values humility,” he told me. “Sometimes people confuse these two aspects.”

The Post-Digital Return to Physical Design
Mohan acknowledged what many have observed — the last decade belonged to digital. Between 2010 and 2020, a wave of industrial designers moved into screens. The digital experience needed that talent.

But the wave is turning.

“I see the waves changing now. I think beyond a point, you will also become just physical. We are a little bit early in the curve where we will start glorifying our physical objects again.”

He pointed to India’s heritage of craft, sculpture, and material culture — much of it still treated as “art” rather than design. The mass adoption of physical design excellence, he believes, is still ahead.

“When every home has one washing machine and one appliance, it’s about solving a functional need. Then it’ll be about solving an emotional need.”

That shift, from function to emotion, from mass production to meaning, is where the opportunity lies.

What This Episode Leaves You With

There’s a question that kept coming back to me after this conversation.

If the best design insight at BSH comes from riding along with a service technician, why do most design teams spend their entire budget on usability labs and surveys?

Mohan’s team cut a 21-month product cycle to 7 months. Not by hiring more designers. By integrating design into the business instead of keeping it in a studio.

But here’s what’s really uncomfortable.
Most design leaders talk about “seat at the table.” Mohan doesn’t talk about it. He just sits there. His team doesn’t wait for briefs. They sit with business leaders, understand the roadmap, and identify problems before they become requirements. The difference between Mohan’s approach and the average design team isn’t talent. It’s proximity to the business.

That one sentence separates the teams that drive impact from the teams that get outsourced.

And the same applies to how he hires. He doesn’t look for the best portfolio. He looks for confidence balanced with humility. He looks for people who can explore problems and people who can solve them. Two different mindsets. Both equally valued. Most design teams hire for craft and hope for strategic thinking to appear later. Mohan hires for the mindset first. The craft can be taught.

At Groundbreakin’, we uncover the less obvious truths behind the careers and companies shaping what gets built next.

If this conversation changed how you think about user experience, design leadership, or what it actually means to design for a billion people, I’d love to hear from you.

Also listen to us on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,
Stay curious, stay sharp.
And as always, keep breaking ground.

—Dipaq

Most brands spend months perfecting their logo.
They debate colours, photography and brand identity. They build entire systems around how the brand should look and feel.

Then they pick a font.

That is strange when you consider how much work a typeface actually does.
Your logo appears in a handful of places. Your photography shows up in campaigns. Your color palette lives across marketing and packaging.

A typeface lives everywhere.

It lives in your product UI. In your marketing emails. On your packaging. In every slide of the brand deck. In every support ticket. It is the only brand asset that works across every touchpoint simultaneously, carrying your identity wherever your brand exists.

Typography is invisible precisely when it’s working. The smoother it runs, the less credit it gets.

A billboard campaign reaches people on one street for one month. A custom typeface reaches everyone who interacts with your brand, everywhere, every day, for years.

The billboard gets the budget.

The typeface gets a Google Fonts link and a shrug. That math does not add up.
And the brands that understand this are quietly building an advantage that compounds every time a customer reads a word.

An Unfair Advantage in a Templated World

Every other piece of brand identity is increasingly easy to replicate.

You can commission a logo from any designer on the internet for five hundred dollars. You can pull a colour palette from a billion AI-generated suggestions. You can license a photography style from a stock library that a dozen other brands in your category already use.

A custom typeface is different. When a brand owns its type, it owns something that travels with the product wherever it goes and in a world where everything else is commoditized, that is a genuine moat.

Try copying how Airbnb feels. You can take the logo. You can approximate the photography. But without Cereal, their custom typeface, the system breaks. The same is true for Dropbox and Sharp Grotesk. For Figma and Söhne. For Netflix and its internal type system. These brands are not distinguishable because of their logos. They are distinguishable because every single piece of text they produce, every word on every surface, carries their identity with it.

Three Typefaces That Became Identities

GT Walsheim for Dropbox: When Collins redesigned the Dropbox brand in 2017, they didn’t just pick a new font. They licensed the entire Sharp Grotesk family, 249 styles spanning 21 widths and 7 weights, and built a custom logotype on top of it. The result was a visual system that could go from “standard Dropbox blue” to “whoa” depending on context, while remaining unmistakably Dropbox at every weight.

The flexibility was the point: a single typeface had to handle investor decks and product UI and billboard campaigns and error messages. Sharp Grotesk did all of it. 259 fonts, one brand, infinite contexts.

Sharp Grotesk for a dozen DTC brands: Sharp Type’s neo-grotesque superfamily became the de facto choice for a generation of direct-to-consumer brands that needed range. Its ink traps — small indentations in letter corners — improved clarity on screens. Its numeric naming system (widths from 05 to 25) let designers interpolate on the fly. Lucas Sharp and Chantra Malee built a foundry that understood that modern brands don’t need one typeface. They need a system. Sharp Grotesk delivered it.

Söhne for the entire Figma generation: Kris Sowersby’s Söhne, released through Klim Type Foundry in 2019, captured something specific — the analogue materiality of Standard Medium used in the NYC Subway wayfinding system, reframed through the reality of Helvetica. It became the typeface of the modern design era.
Stripe uses it. OpenAI uses it. Rivian uses it. The entire fintech and startup ecosystem reached for it because it felt familiar but was actually proprietary. Söhne looked like Helvetica’s smarter cousin which meant it worked immediately in product UI while still feeling distinctive. That balance is almost impossible to achieve with a retail font.

The Consistency Problem

Every brand has a style guide. Almost no brand follows it consistently.

The reason is not a lack of discipline. It’s that brand guidelines are aspirational documents that real teams, under real deadlines, will always bend. The sales team needs a one-pager by Friday. They don’t have time to figure out which secondary typeface pairs with the primary one. They use Arial. Or they use what the last person used. Or they ask Canva and Canva suggests something that looks close enough but isn’t.

A custom font solves this problem at the infrastructure level. If there is only one typeface in the system, it is physically impossible to use the wrong one. The consistency is not enforced by a PDF — it’s enforced by the fact that there is no alternative.

This sounds trivial until you have worked inside a brand with fifteen thousand employees. At that scale, consistency is not a design problem. It is a logistics problem. And a single proprietary typeface is one of the only brand assets that scales logistically. It gets installed once. It lives everywhere. It cannot be mistaken for something else.

When Do You Actually Need a Custom Font?

Not every brand needs one. Most brands don’t. A custom font is expensive decoration if your brand operates in one channel, communicates in one tone, and doesn’t have a consistency problem.

You need a custom font when:

• Your product has a UI that needs to feel like an extension of your brand, not a separate thing.

• You operate across multiple channels (product, marketing, packaging, environmental) and consistency is breaking.

• Your brand is entering a phase where distinctiveness matters more than efficiency.

• You are refreshing your identity and want the investment to compound over a decade, not one campaign cycle.

You do not need a custom font when:

• You are a pre-revenue startup and every dollar needs to go to product-market fit.

• Your brand currently has no consistency problem because you barely have a brand.

• You just think it would look cool.

The difference between a strategic investment and an expensive indulgence is timing. A custom font commissioned at the right moment pays for itself over years. Commissioned at the wrong moment, it is a PDF on a hard drive that nobody opens.

The Indian Brand Typography Problem

Here is the gap that most people outside the industry do not see.

India has some of the richest typographic traditions in the world. Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia — each script has centuries of calligraphic history, each with its own logic, rhythm, and aesthetic rules. The Indian Type Foundry (ITF), based in Ahmedabad, has designed fonts for Apple, Google, Samsung, and Sony. Ek Type, a collaborative studio in Mumbai, builds multi-script typefaces across all Indian languages. WhiteCrow, also in Mumbai, has been creating customized typefaces in Indic scripts since 2005.

And yet, most Indian consumer brands are typographically invisible in their own language.

Walk into any Indian retail space. The English logo is carefully designed. The Hindi or regional language version underneath it is an afterthought — often the same Devanagari font that every other brand uses, often stretched or compressed to fit a space it was never designed for, often illegible at scale.

This is not a capability problem. The talent exists. The scripts are beautiful. The gap is that brands simply do not think about their regional language typography as a brand investment. It is treated as a translation problem rather than a design problem.

This is what makes the situation particularly strange.

In the West, brands routinely experiment with typography as a strategic asset. Airbnb commissioned Cereal. Netflix built its own type system. Dropbox invested in Sharp Grotesk. Even relatively young startups are willing to treat typography as something worth owning.

India has access to far richer typographic traditions than most Western markets, yet very few brands are making comparable investments in their own scripts. Despite having dozens of distinct regional writing systems and world-class type foundries capable of supporting them, most brands still default to whatever font happens to be available.

The result is a market filled with linguistic diversity but very little typographic distinctiveness.

A brand that commissioned a custom Devanagari companion to its Latin typeface would own something that no competitor in its category has. In a market of a billion-plus people where most purchasing decisions happen in regional languages, that is not a typography choice. It is a market strategy.

Why Most Brands Won’t Do it

Because it is easier not to.

That is the honest answer. It is easier to open Google Fonts, pick Inter or Poppins or whatever is trending on Dribbble this month, and move on. It is easier to spend the budget on another campaign that produces a link you can share in the Monday standup. It is easier to tell yourself the logo is the identity and the font is just the font.

Easier is not better. Easier is just easier.

Commissioning a custom font means convincing leadership to spend money on something that does not show up in next quarter’s metrics. It means having a spine when everyone around you is asking “but why can’t we just use what we already have?”

Most brand teams will not make that argument. They do not have the conviction. They do not have the leverage. They do not want to be the person who fought for a font and then had to explain it at the next board meeting.

But here is what happens to the brands whose teams do make that argument.

Their typeface becomes inseparable from their identity. You see a word set in Söhne and you think Figma. You see Sharp Grotesk and you think Dropbox. You see Cereal and you think of Airbnb. The font stops being a delivery mechanism for text and becomes the brand itself.

If your brand is going through a refresh. If you are building something new or have been looking at your product and feeling like it does not quite feel like you — stop looking at the logo. Start thinking about the typeface.

If this made you uncomfortable — good. That means you are paying attention. Hit reply. I read each one.

Until next time,
Stay curious. Stay intentional. Stay Groundbreaking.

—Dipaq

In this episode of The Groundbreakin, we sit down with Pradeep, a mechanical engineer turned design leader who has worked across consumer durables, consulting, aerospace, and cloud  most recently leading design for Google Cloud. From a defibrillator still in market 25 years later to a PhD on sustainable software using UX as a change agent, this is a conversation about learning by doing, bridging business and design, and staying relevant when nothing stays predictable.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:

1.Why ignorance + confidence is the formula Pradeep swears by (03:58)

2.Designing across 7 industries what actually changes and what doesn’t (04:33)

3.What sustainable software development means and why designers should lead it (06:26)

4.The Jevons Paradox why efficiency doesn’t mean less consumption (08:40)

5.Why the business–design bridge is more broken than ever (01:41)

6.How Google’s hiring process is more democratic than you think (12:40)

7.Why reversible decisions are the only safe ones right now (06:37)

8.What external design agencies should actually be offering enterprises today (09:01)

CONNECT:

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Supported by Syqi: https://syqi.design/

Email us at [q@groundbreak.in]