AI-Native Lead Product Designer · B2B SaaS · 10+ Years
Hello, I'm Manoj Shakar. A Lead product designer with 10+ years shaping AI-powered and enterprise SaaS products. I've built Flo AI from 0 to 1, transformed entire platforms, led design teams, and driven measurable business outcomes. From reducing churn to improving adoption by 35%. I work best at the intersection of strategic direction and hands-on execution.
10+
Years of experience
15+
Products launched
35%
Adoption increase
0→1
AI product built
HAD THE PRIVILEGE TO WORK WITH
RECENT WORK
Transformed Spendflo from a SaaS management tool into a fully AI-native procurement platform covering intake-to-procure and procure-to-pay. Built Flo AI, the conversational AI procurement assistant, entirely from scratch. Defined AI interaction patterns, trust signals, explainability frameworks, and human-override flows.
Procurement teams were drowning in manual request handling and approval bottlenecks. Redesigned the end-to-end request and approval workflow, streamlining intake, automating routing, and surfacing the right information at the right moment to reduce friction across the entire procurement cycle.
Freshworks marketers were spending too many clicks creating multi-platform campaigns. Redesigned the campaign creation workflow from scratch, simplified the flow, added live preview, and enabled multi-platform posting in a single interaction.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
Every design decision I make connects back to a business outcome - adoption, retention, efficiency, or churn. Aesthetics serve strategy, not the other way around.
35% adoption at Spendflo post-AI redesignIntelligence without transparency creates friction. Every AI feature needs explainability, confidence signals, and a clear way out. I've shipped this, not just theorised about it.
Built Flo AI from 0→1 at SpendfloScalable design systems and repeatable processes outlast individual brilliance. I've built design systems at 2 companies, because the foundation is what makes the team faster.
Lotus at Spendflo · Needle at VajroAt Vajro, the 64% onboarding improvement didn't come from a redesign. It came from identifying 6 steps nobody had questioned in years. Diagnosis before prescription.
64% onboarding completionIf you don't know what moves the business needle, you can't prioritise the right problems. I engage with roadmap, growth metrics, and churn data, not just design briefs.
Influenced product roadmap at SpendfloAt 50,000+ users, one wrong pattern costs you thousands of support tickets. At 500 enterprise customers, one confused workflow costs a renewal. Scale demands a different kind of precision.
50K users impacted · 60% support reductionDESIGN PROCESS
My process is not a waterfall. It's a loop. I move between research, decision-making, and execution iteratively, always keeping the business outcome visible at every step.
Stakeholder interviews, usage analytics, CS support tickets, and user research. I look for the gap between what the business thinks users want and what users actually do. The insight that changed Spendflo's direction: users didn't want a better dashboard, they wanted answers.
I turn research into a crisp problem statement and success criteria. "How might we help procurement teams trust AI recommendations enough to change their daily workflows?" is more useful than "redesign the dashboard." This framing guides every decision that follows.
Wireframes and prototypes are decision-making tools, not deliverables. Every screen answers a question: what does the user need to see here? What should they feel confident doing? For AI features, I always design for the moment the AI is wrong, not just when it's right.
Usability testing, stakeholder reviews, and data review before a single line of code is written. I look for hesitation, confusion, and unexpected workarounds. Those are the signals. At Vajro, testing revealed the 6 redundant steps that nobody had questioned before.
I stay close to engineering during implementation, catch edge cases that weren't in the spec, and track the metric we set out to move. If adoption doesn't improve post-launch, I go back. The number is the signal, not the Figma file.
PROFESSIONAL TRAITS
Strategic and hands-on. I don't choose between them.
0→1 builder. I've shipped AI products from scratch, not just iterated.
Metric-first. I design for the outcome, not the deliverable.
Design system builder. Token-based, scalable, adopted by engineers.
Cross-functional. I can run a stakeholder workshop and a design critique.
Clear communicator. Design rationale, not design opinions.
Team multiplier. I raise the floor, not just my own ceiling.
Ambiguity doesn't slow me down. It's where the best problems live.