← Manas Vaze

I've spent fifteen years designing products people rely on every day: ordering food online, enabling merchant payments, upskilling for the underserved, making sense of product analytics. These days I am partnering with realfast, building AI products for finance and healthcare, where most of my design ships straight to production code.

Manas with the design team at Sundial
the design team at Sundial
Previous work experience
Principal Design Engineer
Dec 2025 to Present
Applied-AI strategy and engineering firm delivering for regulated enterprises in fintech, capital markets and healthcare.

Design infrastructure: Built the agentic design toolchain the engineering organisation ships through. An eight-skill pipeline from discovery to production code, with brand and accessibility enforcement running as automated gates in CI.

Agentic product design: Own the front-end and interaction design of the firm's AI delivery workbench, an Electron and React app on the Claude Code SDK.

Client delivery: Led a multi-quarter AI transformation for a Singapore university's venture and finance offices: automated investment-committee reporting and a finance-dashboard migration.

Open source and internal tooling: Extended realfast's own design system to be LLM legible. For client engagements, built a brand-extraction and theming plugin and a schema-driven media pipeline that lets non-designers produce on-brand video, social and decks. Shipping design as infrastructure for AI-native executive and GTM teams.

Sabbatical
A deliberate pause
A deliberate break after twelve years of continuous shipping, taken to put my health first. I slept properly, moved every day, travelled slowly and read a lot, and came back with more zeal and capacity than I left with.
sitting still
beaches
cocktails
reading
Head of Product Design
Aug 2022 to Sep 2023

Led product design across the company's entire product suite. Set the design principles and the cross-team process behind them, and drove design-system adoption, documenting and evangelising components until consistency held across every product line.

Staff Product Designer
Apr 2021 to Apr 2022
Founded by Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan to make product analytics usable by everyone in a company.

Shaped early product direction through discovery, competitive analysis and scoping. Designed and prototyped the analytics reporting experience.

Product Design Manager
Feb 2019 to Apr 2021

Led design and illustration at a vernacular learning platform serving students across income levels and geographies. Owned the platform redesign.

Design Lead
Nov 2017 to Dec 2018

Led a team of 4 on the consumer experience for Ola's connected-car platform: in-cab entertainment, personalised content and advanced car controls.

Sr. Product Designer
Dec 2016 to Dec 2017

Led design of the Instamojo Android app, letting merchants run daily business operations from a phone. Shipped core web-app improvements including faster merchant e-KYC, and designed an SME app store.

Product Designer
Jun 2015 to Jul 2016

Led the consumer redesign across iOS, Android and web, introducing several of Swiggy's core consumer features: live delivery tracking, predictive address management, improved restaurant listings, and a recommendations-led menu.

Product Designer
Nov 2012 to Jan 2014

First design hire. Led the firm's client-facing design work and its in-house iOS and Android product experiments.

Assistant Systems Engineer
Sep 2011 to Nov 2012

Where it started, and the only engineering job on the list. ASP.NET developer on the consumer web-app team for AC Nielsen, USA, building feature enhancements for a three-tier web application reporting Fortune 100 advertising spend. About a year of it before I moved into design and stayed there.

Engagements

where this usually begins

Four common starting points. If none of them match what's on your mind, say hello anyway.

Starting from nothing You have an idea and a deadline and nothing on screen. I design the first version and build enough of it that you can put it in front of a real person and find out. Start something →
Fixing what's live Something shipped and it isn't landing. I find where people are getting stuck and fix it, usually in the codebase rather than in a deck about the codebase. Send me the problem →
Two weeks of pushing No brief, just a question you can't answer. Two weeks to explore it properly, and you keep everything I make whether you use it or not. Book two weeks →
Sticking around Months rather than weeks, alongside your team. This is the one I like most, and the one where the work usually gets good. Talk about a longer run →
get in touch
Say hello