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Akash Kumar · akashshivanand

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Product designer · 2020 – 2025 · Consumer scale

Tata Neu

I designed across nearly every surface of one of India's largest super apps, then built the design system that held it all together.

A diagram of how one token layer feeds every surface. Not a product screen.

The problem

A super app is dozens of separate products wearing one coat: payments, food, fashion, grocery, travel, offers. When each team ships its own buttons and spacing, the app stops feeling like one thing, and people stop trusting it. Tata Neu had started on a design system built by an outside agency. It could not keep up with where the product was going.

What I did

I designed the core happy path, onboarding, offers, discovery, stories, UPI and more, and then built Tata Neu's own in-house, token-based design system: a single shared kit of colour, type, spacing and components that every team draws from. It powered a major relaunch, a refined version drove a later UI refresh, and I scaled it across food delivery on ONDC, the omnichannel fashion module, the BigBasket grocery integration and seasonal gamification.

Why a token system

Tokens are the difference between a style guide people ignore and a system people build on. One value, defined once, flows into every screen. Change it in one place and the whole app updates without a single team having to repaint by hand. That is how one designer keeps a hundred surfaces coherent.