Darshan's Diary

In this episode, I sit down with Hardik Pandya (linkedin.com/in/hvpandya/?skipRedirect=true), Design Lead at Pocket FM, to unpack what a design team looks like when it's truly AI-native — not just using AI tools, but shipping pull requests to the production repo. At Pocket FM, that's not a thought experiment. It's the current pilot.

Before Pocket FM — a company built on AI from the ground up — Hardik was at Atlassian, where he watched a large company respond full-stack to an existential AI threat. Between those two vantage points, he has one of the clearest views in the industry of how AI is actually reshaping design work, beyond the hype on social media.

In this conversation, he breaks down how Pocket FM's design team works today: every product exposed as code to the entire design team, designers building Swift prototypes by connecting Claude to Xcode, and a pilot where design picks up engineering's PR and does the final 10% of polish directly in code — effectively replacing the painful design QA process. He goes deep into how the team iterates on the production repo itself (forking ideas into plus and plus-plus versions in days, not weeks), why subjective guardrails and shared values matter more than component guidelines, and the question every designer is asking: if AI removes execution as the moat, what's actually left? His answer covers imagination, executive judgment, and why Figma's arrival created more designers — not fewer.

If you're a designer, design leader, or anyone rethinking how product teams should work in the AI era, this episode is for you.

In this episode, I sit down with Mayur Chaudhary (linkedin.com/in/mayurchaudhary/?skipRedirect=true), VP of Experience Design at Publicis Sapient, to unpack what really changes for designers when AI absorbs the craft — and why the answer isn't better tools, it's a rewired mindset.With over two decades of experience, Mayur has watched the industry evolve from Photoshop to Sketch to Figma, built and scaled design teams across nine geographies, and now operates in high-stakes consulting where clients run 770 million transactions a day. His conviction: tools are just the medium — mindset is what compounds.In this conversation, he lays out the advisor → strategist → executioner model for designers, explains why every designer should know their CFO, shares how his team shipped quarterly features written by designers as PRDs (not Figma files), and demonstrates how he built an hourly-updating industry intelligence dashboard with zero code. He also makes a provocative closing argument: we are the last generation of designers with a consistent job title.If you're a mid-level designer, design leader, or product professional trying to quantify your impact and stay relevant through the AI shift, this episode offers grounded, practical playbooks you can apply Monday morning.

What happens when you're trying to market a product in a category that doesn't fully exist yet — and the audience doesn't trust the industry you're in? That's the daily reality of Web3 product marketing, and Varun has lived it firsthand.Varun is the co-founder of Kosh Money, a Web3 payments company, and GoPMM — India's growing community for product marketers. Before that, he scaled IconScout to 2M+ users from Surat before it became a household name in the design world, and worked at Cashfree Payments where he understood what PMM looks like at enterprise scale.In this episode, we go deep into what it actually means to do product marketing in Web3 — why the traditional playbook breaks when you're selling to developers, crypto-natives, and skeptical enterprises at the same time, how you build trust when your industry carries the baggage of scams and fraud, and what it looks like to define positioning when the category itself is still being written. Varun also shares the real lessons from building IconScout — including why talking to your users with no framework and no agenda was the single biggest growth lever — and the frustration that pushed him to start GoPMM, a community built to give Indian product marketers the India-specific context they couldn't find anywhere else.If you're in PMM, growth, or building a product in a trust-deficient market, this one is for you.

In this episode, I sits down with Sugam Anand (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sugamanand/) , Design Leader at Smallcase, to explore what it really takes to design for high-stakes financial products, where trust is everything and a wrong design decision can cost users real money.Sugam breaks down how Smallcase thinks about the two core jobs of an investment platform: helping users make informed decisions, and giving them the tools to act on those decisions. He shares how his team is structured around domain ownership rather than screen-level handoffs, and why deep financial knowledge is non-negotiable for designers working in fintech.The conversation also gets into Smallcase's newest experience challenge: enabling Indians to invest in US stock markets through Ticker Tape, and the nuanced design problems that come with currency switching, remittance timelines, and building trust before a user even opens the app.They close with a conversation on AI, why Sugam thinks designers should be excited rather than fearful, how Smallcase already uses an AI agent for UX writing, and his vision of a future where designers, engineers, and PMs build from a single shared source of truth.And in the final question, Sugam shares what he's really looking for when he hires: not just skills, but curiosity, care, and the drive to go find a solution rather than wait for one.

In this episode, I sit down with Nitin Awasthi (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitinawasthi/) , VP and Head of Product at MoveInSync, to uncover how technology and deep human empathy shape the future of enterprise mobility. With over 16 years of experience scaling products at Microsoft and high-growth startups, Nitin shares deep insights on navigating the conflicting needs of diverse stakeholders, solving for global safety nuances, and the massive shift toward hybrid work.We discuss how MoveInSync goes beyond basic navigation to use contextual AI, the architectural challenges of scaling to millions of users, and the "unstable demand" patterns that are redefining logistics today. Whether you’re a product leader, an engineer, or a founder, this conversation offers a masterclass in turning complex real-world friction into seamless, high-impact solutions.

What happens when you're trying to market a product in a category that doesn't fully exist yet — and the audience doesn't trust the industry you're in? That's the daily reality of Web3 product marketing, and Varun has lived it firsthand.

Varun is the co-founder of Kosh Money, a Web3 payments company, and GoPMM — India's growing community for product marketers. Before that, he scaled IconScout to 2M+ users from Surat before it became a household name in the design world, and worked at Cashfree Payments where he understood what PMM looks like at enterprise scale.

In this episode, we go deep into what it actually means to do product marketing in Web3 — why the traditional playbook breaks when you're selling to developers, crypto-natives, and skeptical enterprises at the same time, how you build trust when your industry carries the baggage of scams and fraud, and what it looks like to define positioning when the category itself is still being written. Varun also shares the real lessons from building IconScout — including why talking to your users with no framework and no agenda was the single biggest growth lever — and the frustration that pushed him to start GoPMM, a community built to give Indian product marketers the India-specific context they couldn't find anywhere else.

If you're in PMM, growth, or building a product in a trust-deficient market, this one is for you.

Designing for speed is easy.

Designing for speed without breaking systems, operations, and trust is where it gets real.

In this episode, we sit down with Apoorv Gupta (https://www.linkedin.com/in/apoorv-gp/**), Design Lead for Flipkart Grocery & Minutes, who is shaping how 450M+ users shop in one of India’s most complex, operations-heavy environments.

From building 0→1 products to optimizing massive-scale ecosystems across Flipkart, Google, Hike, and Coverfox—Apoorv brings a rare perspective on what it actually takes to design products that move fast and still work in the real world.

We go deep into:

• Designing for Flipkart Minutes and the challenges of speed + operations
• Driving design-led decisions with C-suite stakeholders
• Balancing user needs vs system constraints in high-velocity environments
• What junior designers are missing today
• The role of leadership in bringing clarity and direction to design teams

We also touch on his work at Flipkart Health+, where he helped design a health-tech ecosystem spanning online consultations, AI assistance, and pharma delivery in minutes.

If you’re building products where speed, scale, and complexity collide—this episode will change how you think about design.

In this episode, we’re joined by Swaroop Repaka (https://www.linkedin.com/in/swaroop-repaka-10747b10/) , Head of Product for B2B Compliance at ClearTax. Swaroop leads the product organization behind a compliance platform trusted by 4,000+ enterprises, including one in every four large enterprises in India.At ClearTax, his mission is deceptively simple but incredibly difficult to execute: eliminate tax notices for large enterprises. Under his leadership, the platform has evolved from deep enterprise discovery to category leadership and is now expanding across 30+ countries in Asia and Europe.Before joining ClearTax, Swaroop worked at Boston Consulting Group, across India and the US, developing a strong problem-solving approach to complex business systems. He is also an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, bringing together engineering depth, consulting rigor, and product leadership.India has very few B2B SaaS companies that have successfully cracked the large enterprise segment. In this conversation, Swaroop shares the real playbook behind building enterprise-grade products—from discovery to launch to product–market fit.If you’re a product leader, founder, or product manager trying to build and scale enterprise B2B SaaS, this conversation offers practical insights drawn from real product decisions and enterprise-scale challenges.Subscribe for more conversations with leaders building category-defining products.

In this episode, we sit down with Ishan Kansal, Senior VP of Product at Snabbit, to unpack what truly changes when product leadership moves from digital-native scale to operationally intensive, real-world services.With over 11 years of experience across fintech, banking, insurance, and hyperlocal marketplaces, Ishan has built and scaled businesses where trust is not a feature, it’s the foundation.At Snabbit, he’s building India’s first quick-service marketplace for on-demand home services, leading Product, Design, and Data to solve for reliability, supply quality, and execution discipline in urban households.Before this, he was part of the early scaling team at CRED, where he launched and managed multiple P&Ls including CRED Max, Garage, Shield, unsecured lending risk, collections, P2P lending, and core payments infrastructure like UPI and BBPS.Earlier in his journey, he helped build the Payments Bank and India’s first Digital Gold product at Paytm, led global product strategy at Roadzen, and started his career in FIG investment banking at Deutsche Bank.If you’re a product leader, founder, or PM navigating the transition from clean digital metrics to complex real-world systems, this episode offers grounded, practical insights on trust, speed, and decision-making.Subscribe for more conversations with leaders building category-defining products.

In this episode, we sit down with Vijay Varma, a product veteran with over 20 years of experience in the online gaming industry, including leadership roles at Junglee Games. With a career spanning from the early days of gut-driven development in 2005 to today’s hyper-competitive, data-rich landscape, Vijay brings a rare perspective on how to build digital products that truly resonate with users.

We dive into the mechanics of gamification and user psychology, exploring how B2C products can move beyond basic features to create genuine "smiles" and trust. From the critical balance between A/B testing and intuition to the technical foundation every Product Manager needs, Vijay shares how his teams navigate complex systems while maintaining a relentless focus on the player experience.

Whether you're a product manager looking to level up your technical depth, an entrepreneur interested in high-retention mechanics, or a designer curious about the intersection of data and delight, this episode offers grounded insights, sharp perspectives, and a masterclass in building products that stand the test of time.