Twenty years in design. Building the organizations that ship is the work of the last decade.

I’m a design and product executive based in the Bay Area. I lead in places where the product is intricate, the stakes are real, and the customer can’t afford bad UX.

Roles and outcomes

• 2025 — 26

  Founder

  PathNow

  A full year running an AI-native product end to end, solo: an AI-first career acceleration platform for senior tech professionals. Research, design, positioning, pricing, product. Led and coached two university capstone teams — CS undergraduates at USF, DMBA candidates at CCA — as an extension of the operating model.

• 2024 — 25

  VP, Design & Research

  NinjaTrader

  Built design from a tactical function into a strategic discipline with a seat at the executive table, in a high-stakes futures trading environment. Opened with an assessment of the products, the business, and the team; org design was the first deliverable. Made the first design-systems investment in the company's 20-year history and used it to converge UX across every product and channel, marketing included. Shipped Trader Engagement and the enterprise Visual Design Language Evolution. Grew the team 2.5x, secured budget for the org design, made the case for a permanent VP, ran the hiring, and left a structured handoff. Kraken acquired the company for $1.5B during my tenure.

• 2021 — 23

  VP, Design & Research

  Achieve

  $100M in investment secured within 12 months of appointment. Built the design organization from 3 to 30 across design, research, and content — three business units, 25+ digital products — and made continuous research standard practice. Set enterprise design strategy: UX convergence, the company's first design system, accessibility, digital transformation. Co-led the FFN → Achieve rebrand, converging three brands into one. 4x long-form submission rate on Achieve.com. The org kept shipping to plan twelve months after I left.

• 2016 — 21

  Design Leader

  Google

  Enterprise, platform, and operating-system work across three product areas. Led UX for Google Ads Audiences, contributing to billions in revenue. On Chrome OS, led a ground-up redesign of the media apps and built the developer experience for Linux for Chromebooks (AKA Crostini), used by hundreds of thousands of developers. Led the re-envisioning of a performance management suite for 100k+ Googlers. Spoke at Google I/O 2019.

• 2008 — 14

  Design Leadership

  Tile · Facebook · Yahoo

  A decade of consumer product design at scale — Tile's tracker hardware and app in its early scale years, consumer surfaces at Facebook through hypergrowth. Earlier work at Yahoo, leading the redesign of Search, Homepage, Personalization across platforms. Shipping for millions, across hardware and software, before leading the organizations that ship.

What people say

• “Sudha played a pivotal role in building our design function from the ground up, revolutionizing our approach to design and significantly enhancing the quality and consistency of our user experiences.”

  Aman MalhotraSVP, Product & Technology Operations, Achieve· Cross-functional peer

• “Sudha is a role model for the values-based culture and team she would build, one that is compassionate, poised, strategic, inclusive, and importantly, fun.”

  Chris BarnardProduct Designer, Achieve· Direct report

• “Our group was tasked with redesigning a tool used internally at Google by 100k+ Googlers. Sudha proved to be very effective in leading the UX efforts, proactive in planning, prioritizing, and engaging the stakeholders.”

  Andrea BascettaUX Research Manager, Google (now MongoDB)· Same team

• “Sudha operates at the intersection of design strategy and real-world execution. She provided wise, human executive leadership at NinjaTrader through a complex build with multiple stakeholders and vendors, keeping the team grounded in what mattered most to customers without losing sight of business priorities and technical realities. She's the kind of design leader the world needs.”

  Sven NewmanPartner, Daylight· Agency partner

The rest of the picture

Telangana folk art

I paint in a Telangana folk-art tradition — bold-color portraits of women, inspired by Thota Vaikuntam. It’s the one piece of cultural specificity I keep visible on this site.

Painting is, for me, a counterweight to the kind of work I lead in the day — slow, physical, decided one stroke at a time. I think the discipline of working in a specific tradition has shaped how I think about leading inside a craft.

A passion project — not for sale.