Over ten years of
making the complex
feel simple.

I’m Takshak, a staff-level product designer who takes on the systems everyone else avoids: talent machinery for a million employees, financial ledgers that never left Excel, mortgage forms with government rulebooks attached, and lately an AI that had to be told where it was allowed to act.

Seattle, WA · open to staff and principal product design roles

Takshak Parmar, standing, in a dark three-piece suit
A LITTLE MORE HUMAN

Japanese minimalism, and a lot of coffee.

As is evident through this website, I am inspired by Japanese minimalism, especially the use of negative space and restraint. I also grew up watching a lot of samurai films. I'm pretty sure that has seeped its way here as well.

I am based out of Seattle, the heart of the Pacific North West and love the mountains, the clouds, and the rain. Most weekends, I am out and about in the city or the mountains with my camera. You can find some of my photos at Fosistoria. Otherwise, I am still looking for the best coffee in the city. I do have a running list which I am happy to share.

Photography is deciding what to leave out, waiting longer than is comfortable, and accepting that the fourth frame is the one you keep. So is design. After years of feeling constrained by template website providers, I built this portfolio from scratch instead of on a template, for the same reason: the details matter, and good structure should disappear once it is doing its job.

That is also how I work. I prototype in code, with AI agents, not to replace engineering, but because a static frame hides the decisions that matter most: timing, density, what happens at the edges. I specify the behaviour, Claude and Codex write the code, and I review every state in the browser. This site was made that way, with no framework and no build step, including its motion system and the forty live product screens inside the case studies. Building the thing is how I find out whether the thing is right.

THE KIND OF WORK I CHOOSE

I work where ambiguity is expensive.

When teams disagree on the problem, the data lives in forty places, and the operating model is hiding inside people’s heads. That is usually where I’m most useful. I lead cross-functional teams, think in years, and ship in quarters.

Enter the system

Observe the real work until the hidden rules become visible.

Create shared language

Turn conflicting vocabularies into one product decision.

Build for adoption

Make the better behavior easier than the familiar workaround.

THE THROUGHLINE

Four chapters. One discipline.

The domains changed. The work stayed consistent: understand the operating reality, give it structure, and align the people who have to make it real.

01 · CURRENT
KELLTON · JAN 2024 – PRESENT · SEATTLE

Senior Manager, Cloud Computing & AI

Leading AI-first product development end to end: setting product vision and long-term strategy with C-level and board stakeholders, owning the product P&L, and running a scaled engineering team from discovery through delivery. Most of the current work sits behind an NDA. Anchor is the piece I can show.

On the title. It says engineering management because that is where the org chart put the AI product, not because I stopped designing. On Anchor I ran the research, drew every surface, set where the model was allowed to act, and owned the number the product was judged on. The title is an accident of structure. The work is product design, and it is the work I want to keep doing.

AI-first productsP&L ownershipHands-on design
02 · SCALE
AMAZON · WORLD WIDE OPERATIONS

The Talent Ecosystem

Lead designer for four greenfield products governing how more than one million employees are found, grown, and moved. Transfers fell from 48 days to under 24 hours.

1M+ employees$10M+ run rateWCAG 2.1 AA
03 · PLATFORM
AMAZON · FINANCE TECHNOLOGY

Digitizing the Financial Ledger

Led design and strategy for Fulcrum, ICSE, and Abacus, turning manual financial integration into a shared platform with 90%+ first-quarter adoption.

$20M saved YOY9 personas3 products
04 · SYSTEM
PNC BANK · SENIOR UX CONSULTANT

Reinventing Lending

Led the responsive redesign of PNC’s lending applications through more than sixteen sprints, translating legal, compliance, customer, and engineering constraints into one production system.

Live in production15+ personasDesign system
THE THREAD

Chaos in. Clarity out.

Every project follows the same arc. The tools change; the discipline doesn’t.

ObserveFind the real work
Make visibleGive complexity structure
AlignCreate one decision
Earn adoptionMake change stick
THE LEADERSHIP THAT ISN’T A HEADCOUNT

I lead the problem, not the org chart.

The work I want to be judged on is still design work. But at this scale, design that never leaves the file does not ship — so four kinds of leadership come with it, and I have had to be good at all four.

01 Hold the five-year picture while shipping this quarter.

Greenfield products are bets on year five that still have to justify themselves every quarter. Four Amazon talent products were designed as one system and built in pieces, so each could launch on its own schedule without the whole drifting apart. Anchor went further: nobody asked for it, so I spent a week reading two years of proposals against their outcomes and turned a chronic complaint into four numbers that could be funded.

02 Run programmes where five disciplines have to agree.

Talent meant product, engineering, applied science and HR working to one plan across four delivery schedules. PNC meant legal, compliance, marketing and engineering inside the same two-week loop for sixteen sprints, with constraints arriving as design inputs rather than late approvals. The joins between groups are where these programmes actually fail, and the joins were my job.

03 Take the argument to the people who can say no.

Succession planning had to be sold to VPs who had named their own replacements in a spreadsheet for a decade before it could be designed at all. At Kellton the same skill runs upward: product vision and multi-quarter strategy agreed with C-level and board stakeholders, against a P&L I own. Work that cannot survive that room does not get built.

04 Design for the client’s side of the table.

In a services business the hardest user is the one evaluating you. For Anchor I interviewed four client procurement contacts to learn how proposals are actually scored — compliance first, coherence second, content third, the exact reverse of how firms write them. That ordering became the product’s priorities. Client-facing work at PNC and Kellton has meant designing to somebody else’s rulebook and defending it in their review.

AND, ALONGSIDE THAT

Taste doesn’t transfer. Method does.

I have managed people and I mentor designers, though it is not the job I am asking for. Three practices I keep wherever I am the senior person in the room.

01 Grow people by progressive overload.

Hand over slightly more than is comfortable, early enough that there is room to recover, then stay close on the first two and step back on the third. Designers I have mentored this way have gone on to promotion — which is the only measure of mentoring that means anything.

02 Critique against a stated bar, on a schedule.

“I don’t like it” teaches nothing. My teams have run regular critique with the test written down first — on Talent, three laws every screen had to beat. Seventeen directions lost on that test rather than on my preference, which meant anyone in the room could run it without me.

03 Raise the bar on the way in.

I have sat on design hiring loops and interviewed designers, including work on what the bar should be rather than just applying it. Who gets hired shapes a team’s standard far longer than any critique does.

Have a complex system that needs to feel human?

Let’s work together.

I reply within a day