My year 1 at

Before Razorpay, I spent my years moving through startups. Small teams, big swings, and a hundred hats on one head. I loved it, and I learned fast. But somewhere along the way a quieter question started following me around: what would it feel like to be part of a larger design team? To work inside a bigger organisation and see how it actually breathes?

I had always loved the idea of a group of designers who show up for each other. People who help out without being asked, who tell you the honest thing about your screen, who celebrate a small win like it's a launch. Razorpay felt like the place where I could find that. A year later, I can say it was.

When I joined, Figma was the only design tool that I used. And honestly, that was the trend then. AI wasn't booming the way it is now, and "design" mostly meant frames, components and prototypes you clicked through.

What I didn't know was how a big organisation moves. What is the one thing that pushes everyone forward? What is the energy that keeps a team going when the roadmap is long and the deadlines are real? I spent my first months watching, asking, and slowly figuring out what was pulling me along too.

Then the ground shifted. We began moving from Figma-only prototyping to prototyping with Claude. And somewhere in that shift, we discovered a rule that now feels obvious: if you're going to do something more than once, it should be a skill. So we built a set of skills that took care of our repeated, iterative tasks, and suddenly the boring parts of the work started to disappear.

The best part? Nobody learned this alone. We figured out AI together. We worked out Claude prototyping together, sorted team access together, and slowly more and more people joined in. I don't come from an engineering background, so when the group began untangling the basics of GitHub, I was learning right alongside everyone else. Not as the expert in the room, but as one of many curious people, which is honestly my favourite way to learn.

I've always been the go-to person for events, and yes, I'm an extrovert, technically. So I ended up organising things and creating social media for the team. That's where I made my very first video invite in Claude.

I remember sitting there thinking: wow. This thing can make a lot, and it does some genuinely crazy work. I was so happy that I could figure things out with it, and that tiny invite opened a door. If I could make this, what else could I make?

Somewhere in all of this, I began to understand people and problems in a way I hadn't before. You have to take responsibility for pushing a feature. You strive for it. And you have hard conversations with stakeholders, product managers, engineers, and timelines. Those conversations are not always comfortable, but they're where the real work happens.

And slowly, I merged into the code. Well, first I raised a PR. And raising is very different from merging.

Once I raised my first PR, we were all thrilled. Then the OKRs arrived: merge 10 PRs a month. In the beginning that felt completely unrealistic. We had to chase down every engineer assigned to review, with back-and-forth conversations and gentle follow-ups, to get anything over the line.

But I want to be clear about something. None of this would have been possible without my engineers. Whenever I had a doubt, I went to my team or to my engineer and asked a lot of questions. When I was working on a specific project, I'd sit down with my product manager too. I was trying to understand how writing code through Claude really works, and I had patient people around me who let me ask the same questions twice.

So I wrote code using Claude. I got it reviewed. I understood a little more of it each time. And over time, I merged multiple PRs.

I can't fully explain how good that felt. Shipping a whole feature gave me a new kind of ownership, over the code, along with the product and the design. It stopped being "my screens" and started being "our feature, live in the world."

Somewhere along the way, I took part in my very first hackathon. Not just my first at Razorpay, but my first in my entire life. I had never participated in one before, so I walked in curious and a little unsure of what to expect.

It turned out to be a really interesting experience. I was trying to build things at speed, syncing up with my product manager, and working out what we could actually pull off in the time we had. We never made it to the top 100 teams, but the experience was a good one, and I came out of it having learned a lot. I also made a video for it, a rather crazy one.

I came looking for a bigger team, and I found a team that learns out loud. I arrived knowing only Figma, and a year later I've raised and merged PRs, built skills, made videos, and shipped features I feel ownership over.

More than any tool, it taught me this: the best growth happens in company. Ask the questions. Learn together. Share the skill once you've built it.

Here's to year two.