Paytm
Lead Product Designer
2018–2021
I spent three years inside the Paytm super app — not on one product, but across three PODs. Each one was a different kind of problem: credit in checkout, travel with real-world chaos, and the homepage everyone opens first. The through-line was judgment — what to simplify, what to standardize, and when to let a vertical move fast on its own.
Paytm Lending
Postpaid and pay-later. The job wasn’t “add BNPL.” It was to make paying on credit feel as normal as UPI — limits, trust, and state visible without turning checkout into a lecture.
The tension I kept coming back to: marketing wanted Postpaid everywhere; risk and ops needed clarity at the moment money left the user’s account. My bias was to design for the worst state first — limit hit, pending capture, retry — because that’s when people decide if a product is “real” or a gimmick.
Paytm Travel
Flights, hotels, and IRCTC trains in one vertical. Search, booking, and post-purchase had to stay legible when itineraries, rail rules, and partner APIs disagreed.
Travel taught me to separate “what the user is trying to do” from “what the system knows.” Status and next steps mattered more than visual polish — especially after booking, when anxiety is highest and support tickets are cheapest to prevent in the UI.
Paytm Central
The pod behind the main homepage and shared platform. What millions see first, and the patterns every other vertical plugs into.
Central is where local vs global fights actually happen. I pushed for a system that squads could adopt without feeling boxed in — enough governance to stop drift, enough flexibility that Lending and Travel didn’t fork every component.