Manoj Shakar
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OPEN TO THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITY

I turn complex
problems into
products people
actually use

Lead Product Designer at Keka, with 10+ years designing products for enterprise SaaS. I build from 0 to 1, transform existing platforms, and lead design teams, consistently moving the metrics that matter.

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Had the privilege to work with
Keka Spendflo Freshworks Vajro Trimble

Recent Work

My recent and past accomplishments

01  /  Spendflo  ·  Lead Product Designer

Building Flo AI from 0 to 1, transforming a SaaS tool into an AI-native procurement platform

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.

Timeline5 Months
RoleLead Product Designer
Impact↓40% effort · ↑35% adoption
↗

02  /  Spendflo  ·  Lead Product Designer

Redesigning procurement workflows: from manual requests to intelligent automation

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.

Timeline3 Months
RoleLead Product Designer
Impact↑22% workflow self-serve
↗

03  /  Freshworks  ·  Senior Product Designer

From clutter to clarity: redesigning the social media campaign creation experience

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.

Timeline1 Month
RoleSenior Product Designer
Impact↓83% task time
↗

Design Philosophy

Six things I've
learned the hard way

Not borrowed frameworks. These came from shipping real products for users who had real jobs on the line.

01

Design that doesn't move a number is just art

Every design decision connects back to a business outcome: adoption, retention, efficiency, or churn. Aesthetics serve strategy, not the other way around.

02

AI must earn user trust. It can't demand it

Intelligence 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.

03

Systems beat heroics every single time

Scalable design systems and repeatable processes outlast individual brilliance. The foundation is what makes a team faster, long after any one project ends.

04

The right problem is more valuable than a clever solution

A major onboarding win didn't come from a visual redesign. It came from identifying steps nobody had questioned in years. Diagnosis before prescription.

05

Designers who understand revenue make better decisions

If 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.

06

Scale changes everything about how you should design

At 50,000+ users, one wrong pattern costs thousands of support tickets. At hundreds of enterprise customers, one confused workflow costs a renewal. Scale demands a different kind of precision.

Design Process

From ambiguous
problem to shipped product

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.

01

Discover

Understand the business problem, not just the design brief. Stakeholder interviews, usage analytics, support tickets, and user research. I look for the gap between what the business thinks users want and what users actually do. More than once, that gap turned out to be the real project: users didn't want a better dashboard, they wanted an answer.

02

Frame

Define the right problem before designing anything. I turn research into a crisp problem statement and success criteria. "How might we help someone trust a recommendation enough to change their daily workflow?" is more useful than "redesign the dashboard." This framing guides every decision that follows.

03

Design

Make decisions, not deliverables. Wireframes and prototypes are decision-making tools, not deliverables. Every screen answers a question: what does the user need to see here, and what should they feel confident doing? For any automated or predictive feature, I design for the moment it's wrong, not just when it's right.

04

Validate

Test with real users before engineering builds. Usability testing, stakeholder reviews, and data review before a single line of code is written. I look for hesitation, confusion, and unexpected workarounds, since those are the real signals. One round of testing surfaced six redundant steps that nobody had questioned in years.

05

Ship & measure

Design isn't done at handoff. 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.

↻

Step 05 feeds back into step 01. The loop starts again with what shipping revealed.

Professional Traits

What you get when you hire me

Strategic and hands-on

Both at once. I set direction and I'm still the one pushing pixels.

0→1 builder

Shipped a product from scratch, not just iterated on an existing one.

Metric-first

Every design ties back to a number that moved because of it.

Design system builder

Token-based, scalable, and actually adopted by engineers.

Cross-functional

Comfortable running a stakeholder workshop or a design critique.

Clear communicator

I explain the reasoning behind a decision, not just the opinion.

Team multiplier

Raises the floor for the whole team, not just my own ceiling.

Comfortable with ambiguity

That's usually where the best problems are still unclaimed.