I’m the Director of Product design at Pear Therapeutics, leading a team of Product Designers and UX researchers. We design prescription digital apps for the treatment of serious disease.
Designing Fast and Slow
I've worked in diverse environments—ranging from being part of a process-driven bigger design team at a large corporation to the sole designer at a 5-person startup. I've also managed my own design studio with local employees and overseas developers. I understand the balance between user and business needs, and work fast and iteratively with product managers and developers on the most effective solution to solve the problem at hand.
I've taught design classes at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. I also mentored a group of graduate students at the Design and Development of Web-based Products and Services class at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
I’m passionate about user-centered design, and the potential it has to solve real-world problems in efficient and innovative ways.
"Madhavi is a strong, productive product designer and a pleasure to work with. She's perceptive and focused and can quickly transmute a set of early rough requirements into a suite of well-thought-out design directions to consider. She's talented as well as pragmatic, a great partner to engineers, and quick to learn new technical skills in the quest to bring beautiful, fun products to life.”
- Sean Flannagan, Product Maker and Grower
September 21, 2016, Sean managed Madhavi directly at Wanelo
Madhavi was the sole designer at CruiseWise for a year and a half as we conceived, designed, engineered, and launched the most comprehensive site that allowed customers to visualize the journey as well as the amenities on the ship. We faced a number of design challenges that Madhavi was instrumental in solving. Some examples include:
1. Collapsing the enormous density of information about state rooms, including their size, location, proximity to amenities, guests capacity, and many other attributes into an easy-to-read and intuitive-to-filter interface. While there were a number of sites that allowed online booking of cruises, all followed the model of hotels & airlines, which have much less information to display, which yielded a confusing experience with many steps.
2. Integrating important temporal information, like the likelihood of a fare increasing or decreasing based on historical price data with the other information we had to put in front of our customers.
3. Leading a rapid-iteration growth effort that helped increase conversions 10x by re-arranging elements on page, and the flow of cruise discovery for new users
Madhavi was a strong thought partner as we developed the concept of an online cruise marketplace from ideas to reality, consistently pulling us back from the extravagant and keeping us user-focused. I would unhesitatingly work with her again.
- Steve Davis, Lead Product Manager at Pinterest
January 22, 2017, Steve worked with Madhavi at CruiseWise
We brought Madhavi on board as a contract designer to help with content creation for Photoshop Elements 9. However, she was more than an excellent designer. She coordinated tasks and projects with aplomb, and used her considerable smarts to figure out technical requirements of the content, adding unexpected value and saving us a lot of extra coordination and work. She was also dedicated to the completion of the project and was willing to put in the extra effort when needed despite shifting tasks and priorities, and working with a team in India. Finally, her design work has been well received by both internal teams and customers, who are the final judge of the work. Highly recommended.
- Tom Paderna, Online Services & Content Manager at Adobe Systems
September 7, 2010, Tom was a client of Madhavi’s