About Akash Kumar
I am Akash Kumar, known online as akashshivanand. I am a product designer with around nine years of work, based in Gurugram, in the Delhi NCR region of India.
How I got here
I trained as a computer science engineer, but design found me. I started tinkering with it as a teenager, drawn to digital products that felt clean and easy to use. Because I came in through engineering, I speak both design and development, which is a big reason the work actually ships.
Where I have worked
From 2020 to 2025 I worked on Tata Neu, designing across nearly every surface of the super app and building its in-house design system. Since October 2025 I have designed large-scale digital products for the Indian government. Earlier, from 2017 to 2019, I was at Incrementum, where I ran my first UX research, on a private passport-services website. I hold a B.Tech in Computer Science Engineering from Maharshi Dayanand University.
The range I work across
Consumer work at super app scale taught me momentum, how to organise dozens of services into one screen and keep people moving. National public sector work taught me inclusion, how to build for everyone, including old phones and low tech literacy, with reliability and trust. One teaches you to make an experience profitable. The other teaches you to make a system fair. I have spent years on each.
What I believe
Keep it simple, in design and in life. Simple is not the same as plain: function leads, and a simple interface can still be beautiful. Most of what gets called a design problem turns out to be a business or inclusion problem underneath, and that is usually where the real fix is. AI helps me work faster, but it works only in the hands of someone who already knows the craft. Why AI is a tool, not a role.
What I obsess over
The error state: what the screen says when something breaks on a slow connection. It is the moment a person decides whether to trust the product or walk away, and on a public service it decides whether a citizen gets help. I wrote a long essay about it.
Where I am headed
I want to move the default understanding of design from making things pretty to deciding how people live with technology. The gap between what design actually does and what people think it does has never been wider, especially at India's scale. That is the work.
Topics I speak on
I talk about design a lot, at work and in mentoring. If you run an event and one of these fits your audience, tell me about it.
The interface decides who a product is for
Why design is decision architecture, and what that means for the people who fund it.
The screen that appears when something breaks is where trust is won or lost.
Simplicity is political, not visual
Unifying a sprawling product is a negotiation between owners before it is a design job.
When one decision includes or excludes millions, careful means something different.
Keep it simple. Find me on LinkedIn (opens in new tab).