I joined Infosys straight out of college in 2016. Campus training was in Mysore — 350 acres, Domino's inside campus, a dome-shaped theater, recreation center and a lot more. It was genuinely a great time.
The work was fine. ABB project, German clients, enterprise code. But about a year in, I started getting restless. I was maintaining a legacy tool that existed entirely inside the organization — no users outside, no growth, no version of the future where any of it mattered beyond the next sprint. I wasn't wondering how to write better code. I was wondering what any of this was actually for.
That's a different kind of question.
Growing up I'd watched Discovery, NatGeo, How It's Made obsessively. I took art as an elective in class 12. My elder sister had cleared NIFT. And a friend of hers — Shatabdi didi — had done her masters from NID and was working as a product designer at Paytm. That was the first time I understood product design could be a career in tech.
I prepped for NID while still at Infosys. Didn't clear it. Was genuinely crushed — not just because of the rejection, but because I'd finally admitted out loud what I wanted, and the answer was no. I didn't know what to do with that. So I kept going to office. Kept writing code. And started looking for other ways to make things.
Then Jio happened. Free internet, YouTube explosion. I taught myself video editing, bought a camera, a GoPro, a drone. Regulations didn't exist in India then. I flew over an archaeological survey site once without knowing. Got in trouble. Flew in my village. Got in trouble again. Shot a Christmas event on Infosys campus, put it on Instagram. Over a lakh views. Life felt like it was going somewhere.
Freelanced on Fiverr, Upwork. Got unstable money. A college friend connected me to Leap Finance — a startup. Joined as Sr. Video Editor and Content Strategist. Scaled their YouTube from 0 to 30k subscribers in a year. It felt like proof that I could build something. Then I got my first PIP. The feedback was vague, the goalposts had moved, and I hadn't seen it coming. Got laid off shortly after. It was the first time I understood that being good at something wasn't the same as being in the right place.
That's when I found Abhinav Chikkara from 10k Designers. Enrolled in Cohort 4. It wasn't just a course — it was the first time I was in a room (virtual or otherwise) where switching from engineering to design wasn't considered a detour. It was just a story people had. I started freelancing as a product design consultant. Worked for free first. Trained junior designers on ADPList. Nights were long. But it was the first time work felt like something I'd actually chosen.
Eventually landed at MontyCloud as Senior Product Designer. First full-time role in design.
I never went to design school. No bootcamp changed my life. Just enough curiosity to keep pulling threads until I landed somewhere that made sense.
The engineering background still shows. I read constraints before I open Figma. I think in systems. And I've stopped believing the myth that design is mostly about taste. Taste gets you to good-looking. What actually separates designers is whether they understand what they're designing toward — the outcome, not just the output — and whether they can walk a stakeholder through their reasoning clearly enough that the decision holds up in a room they're not in.
The "why are we building this" question never went away. It just found a better home.
Credits & further reading
- 10k Designers — Abhinav Chikkara. Cohort 4 was the structured turning point. If you're in a similar position — technical background, strong intuitions, no formal design training — this is the program I'd point to first. 10kdesigners.com
- ADPList — where I started mentoring junior designers before having a "senior designer" title. The act of teaching clarifies your own thinking faster than almost anything else. If you know something, teach it. adplist.org
- Articulating Design Decisions — Tom Greever. The book that helped me translate engineering-style reasoning ("this approach is better because of X constraint") into design-presentation language that stakeholders could actually engage with. The mental models carried over cleanly.