Hi! I am Hariharan
Glad you dug a little deeper! Here is a bit about me beyond the pixels.
I have one too many passions, but one thing that is consistent is I find ways to maintain them even if I can't be actively present.
The Rooftop Gardener: My Sanctum Santorum
It's a project that scaled from five humble pots to a 57 bag urban jungle. It is my way of connecting with nature and understanding grouping, planning and my daily lesson in organic growth - teaching me that sustainable systems requires patience, planning, and consistent care to yield rewards.
The Underwater Architect: My latest passion is aquascaping
It allows me to bring nature and cinematic worlds I love to life. Whether I'm recreating the Floating Mountains of Pandora or the Tree of Souls from Avatar, it is pure exercise in composition, texture, color theory, space constraints and visual balance. I spend hours balancing hardscaping canyons and plant density to engineer a self-sustaining ecosystem.
The Storyteller: I don't just watch movie, I helped make one
I worked as an assistant director for 2 schedules on a Tamil feature film starring an A-list actor. That chaotic, creative environment taught me about scene composition and the complex layering of emotions - lessons I now apply to user narratives. When I'm not designing, I'm deconstructing scenes and story arcs and orchestral scores, looking for that perfect rhythm and flow.
Previous Experience
2024 - 2025
Lead Product Designer
Led UX across Payer and Exports mini-zones, launching tools that cut dev effort by 90% and resolution time to 24 hours
Directed research strategy with payer partners, uncovering actionable insights that shaped roadmap priorities and key metrics
Led cross-functional collaboration efforts across organization to build scalable client-facing experience that enabled new third-party revenue paths
Led design efforts leveraging AI design tools to accelerate design turnaround times and provide early interactive prototypes for teams / clients to gain perspective of final tool, this greatly reduced iteration effort by 50%
2021 - 2024
Senior Product Designer
Led data-to-design validation process, reducing design iterations and engineering costs by 20%
Defined a design roadmap aligned with business goals, accelerating delivery through structured sprints
Managed design system strategy, improving scalability and cutting delivery time by 60%
Collated inferences of user metrics, usage trends, and session analysis to drive faster business decisions in the product suite
2020 - 2021
Senior Designer
Consulted with Caterpillar on behalf of Randstad Technologies
Led product design across key initiatives, aligning business and engineering through huddle sessions and design reviews
Advocated qualitative research to inform UX design that would impact metrics and reduce clicks by 70%
2019 - 2020
Senior Consultant
Consulted on client facing projects on behalf of EY
Collaborated with in-house and client designers and stakeholders
Led redesign efforts for client projects
Provided inputs such as KPIs prioritization and interaction design
Led design efforts for government initiative for managing the logistics of COVID test kits
2016 - 2019
Programmer Analyst; Promoted to Associate in 2018
Worked on diverse projects, aligning with business and user goals
Fostered team-wide knowledge sharing through the UX Magazine initiative
Led efforts for multiple RFPs and POCs and won new logos for the team and company
Awarded shining star award for my work in an internal analytics tool that aids in monitoring and measuring efficiency of virtual systems maintained by the organization