# Anu Thanedar > AI forward, deeply caring design leader who pursues design excellence through growth mindset, coaching, & forming deeper XFN partnerships. | AI workflows specialist | Vibe Coding | High agency | Scrappy | Team builder | Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/anuthanedar 💡 AI-forward Leader | Team Builder & Mentor 💡 I help teams design smarter, faster, and authentic AI first, 0 to 1 & iterative experiences. I currently lead & manage the Content-Contributions design team at Yelp where I focus on building next-gen consumer experiences driven by AI, that solicit, use & power UGC content (Reviews, Photos, Videos, Community QAs, Elites community etc.). I’ve launched pilots that use AI to transform how users discover & interact with local businesses, and explore & step change users' changing contribution habits. I also lead an internal 'AI Upskilling Program' to prepare & evolve designers for the AI revolution ahead. Think AI Workflows | AI Prototyping | LLM Prompt Engineering | AI Ethics etc. etc. I am deeply invested in my team, building a culture of care, support, attention to details and continuous betterment. Whether it's designing 0→1 & iterative features, or building with AI, I bring clarity in ambiguity, momentum during inertia, accountability within chaos and get things done. Drop a line, always looking to connect with interesting folks! ## Work Experience ### Senior Product Design Manager @ Yelp Jan 2025 – Present - Defining how AI shows up across consumer Contribution experiences—to improve discovery, trust, engagement and retention. - Leading new, 0 to 1 GenAI pilots that transform user-generated content (UGC) into dynamic, narrated experiences using LLMs, driving new value for consumers and businesses. - Evangelizing internal design standards and playbooks for integrating AI into product workflows. - Launched & leading an internal 'AI Upskilling Program' for designers— preparing & coaching designers to evolve for the AI revolution ahead. Topics covered - AI Workflows, AI Prototyping, LLM Prompt Engineering, NLX (Natural Language Experience) & Best practices, AI Ethics etc. - Partnering cross-functionally with product, data science, and engineering to embed AI into the product definition phase, influencing roadmap priorities and strategic bets. - Coaching the team in emerging areas like AI workflows, AI best practices, to build future-ready talent. ### Product Design Manager @ Yelp Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area - Responsible for the user experience & design for all of Yelp's user generated content flows (heavy & lightweight contributions, reviews, media contributions i.e. photos & videos, user check-ins, content freshness i.e. business info, Q&A, survey questions etc. - Managing the design experience & flows for content freshness as well as different contributor segments (casual, frequent & power users like Elites) engagement, impact & retention etc. - Working on multiple 0 to 1 features & generating new content types within the Yelp consumer app. - Visioning the next gen Yelp Contributions experience via a separate '6 Star Track'. - Managing career growth trajectories for a total of five designers (+ hiring one in 2024). ### Lead Product Designer @ Yelp Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area - Leading the Content & Contribution team of 5 talented designers in the Consumer design org alongside cross functional teams. - Setting the vision, strategy and roadmap for the Upgrade Package (Yelp's always-on subscription product). Learn more about the Upgrade Package: https://business.yelp.com/products/business-page/upgrades/ - Cross functional stakeholder management - Talking to customers and understanding the gaps in our experience and new ways to bring value - Delivering optimal designs that are usable, efficient and solve real customer problem. ### Senior Product Designer @ Yelp Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area - Hybrid product designer, user researcher, stakeholder manager and value driven thinker. - Building Yelp's Upgrade Package subscription service from the ground-up. - What is the Upgrade Package? Learn more - https://business.yelp.com/products/business-page/upgrades/ - Before: Improved the Yelp Connect product experience & finding market fit so as to create value for local businesses as well as for consumers, at scale. - What is Yelp Connect? Learn more - https://blog.yelp.com/2019/09/yelp-connect-a-new-voice-for-restaurants-to-reach-locals. - Building design & product influence through collaboration, trust, and continuous experimentation. ### Experience Design Lead and Manager @ Publicis Sapient Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area - Led & managed a team of 3 UX designers & worked with multiple cross functional teams on multiple work tracks within the Samsung US account. - Led the design for a ‘Comparison Experience’ & ‘5G Hub’ for the US & international launches of Note9 & S10 5G phones to generate increased product interest; generated second-highest page visits & improved SEO ranking. - Headed the implementation of a ubiquitous module to establish Samsung.com as a top e-commerce choice by bringing together siloed product teams under the unified Samsung brand; projected to increase revenue by 2.2MM. - Designed a ‘Customer Acquisition Switcher’ – a landing page experience to incentivize Android and Apple mobile phone owners through distinguished & personalized content; increased engagement rates by 150%. - Came up with a UX wireframe design system to increase speed to market & to replicate live pixel perfect designs based on AEM component library. - Pioneered usability testing program, advocated for design strategy, tied in data analytics and SEO to produce data-driven designs and adopted interactive prototyping tools like UXPin & InVision on the Samsung account. - Directly managed growth of a senior & associate UX and a team of two junior UX & visual designers by mentoring, goal setting & tracking and providing expertise & feedback; realized two promotions in 2018 & 2019. - Implemented digital product innovation processes to create lean, sticky products through co-creation workshop facilitation between Mastercard & Sapient leadership by performing user-research and customer pain-point evaluation. - Conceptualized, prototyped & tested five pixel-perfect innovative digital products for emerging millennials for Mastercard to realize a ten-year product roadmap for the US & five international markets; product market fit is being evaluated. ### Senior User Experience Designer @ Publicis Sapient Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Greater Boston Area - Implemented a connected Tax experience for Fidelity to reduce 9MM call center costs, by identifying the root cause of customer friction through user research, customer feedback, customer journey mapping and usability testing. - Conceptualized and designed a high-touch ‘Point of Sales’ iPad app for State Street Global Advisor’s financial advisors to better consult its diverse groups of individual & institutional investor clients; post launch metrics reported deeper customer relations, increased customer engagement and ease of performing business. - Led a team of three designers to build & design a responsive web cart & checkout experience for BJs.com by collecting business requirements & use-cases, designing wireframes, visual mockups, animated click-through prototypes using iterative & incremental design. - Performed ethnographic research, mapped customer journey, ideated out-of-box concepts & performed usability testing to better understand Humana’s small business consumer behavior and increase digital lead generation and sales through its digital funnel. ### Co-Founder and Product, Marketing Designer @ ekCoffee Inc. Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area - Conceptualized, designed & launched the end-to-end ekCoffee iOS & Android dating mobile applications to build meaningful interactions between urban Indian singles; fostered 12,000 messages, 400 online introductions & 35 in-person dates. - Implemented online & offline marketing strategies through growth hacking to find the product/market fit by driving test & learn experiments; reduced marketing costs improved the quality of application, thereby achieving consistent rating of 4.8 on Google Play and 5 on App Store. - Founded ‘Singles That Brunch’, an online & offline community of urban, professional singles to organically connect like-minded singles; organized a total of 12 brunch meetups with a 2000-member community group. - Used expansive ideation approaches to think of an innovative dating app concept; prioritized the product launch through pragmatic iterative & incremental design approaches through continues user testing. - Designed a seamless dating experience by using user-centered design methods like performing market segment research, customer research, requirements, needs pain-points, and use-cases by interviewing singles from US & India over a period of 1 year. - Employed usability testing to fix the web landing page experience, app’s on-boarding process and usability issues to increase user sign-ups by 25% in 3 months. - Designed & managed the marketing & social media strategy of ekCoffee by executing against new, bold, innovative & out-of-box ideas to increase the organic reach and help the ekCoffee app stand out from its competition. - Performed the end-to-end visual design & branding for the ekCoffee iOS & Android app to give it a warm, contemporary, premium, and young look & feel. - Collaborated, developed and maintained detailed user-interface specifications, visual design system and patterns to facilitate ‘fast to market’ and help the offshore development team stick to launch timelines within an agile environment. ### User Experience Designer @ Arnold Worldwide Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Greater Boston Area - Strategized, designed, & shipped fully responsive web designs & mobile apps using user centered design principles for eight agile scrum B2B, B2C, non-profits, & startup client projects. - Designed and launched responsive web-experiences for various Fortune 500 companies. Worked in a cross-functional team of strategists, developers, marketing team, copywriters, visual designers, product managers and client services. - Identified client requirements into UX requirements by facilitating project kick-offs, requirements gathering, brainstorming, and client workshops. - Utilized Search Engine optimization (SEO) & data driven analytics to fix usability & experience issues to lead website conversion rates by 68%. - Designed user journeys, design workflows, personas, storyboards, functional specifications, style-guides, information architecture/wireframes/annotations, sitemaps & hi-fidelity prototypes for over 12+ client projects. ### Graduate User Experience Designer @ Rochester Institute of Technology Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Rochester, New York Area - Worked as a Graduate User Experience Designer to build an augmented mobile tourism app for Genesse Country Village and Museum, New York. - Collected and analyzed user data through interviews, usability testing, participatory design workshops, and surveys to inform data driven designs. - Brainstormed solutions for designing interactive mobile tourism experiences in a team of four experience designers & researchers. - Synthesized qualitative and quantitative data to derive personas, use cases, concepts, user journeys and information architecture of the app audience. - Collected and analyzed data to capture a series of iterative usability tests. - Collaborated closely with students & professors across multiple majors like software engineering, visual designing (graphic, web, visual), and human factors. ### User Experience Design Intern @ Bose Corporation Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Framingham, Massachusetts - Envisioned new products, systems and designs for Bose by conceptualizing end-to-end digital product experiences of three Bose sound products by adopting user centered design methodologies like facilitating ideation sessions, designing using qualitative & quantitative customer interview data, creating user research personas, wireframing, rapid hi-low fidelity prototypes, storyboarding & usability testing.  - Worked on conceptualizing & prototyping the next app experience for Bose's SoundTouch app by using IDEO's expansive approaches to ideation. - Participated in internal usability testing of the Bose's SoundTouch systems by evaluating against material & ergonomic design principles. ### User Experience Designer @ Pharos Systems International Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Rochester, New York Area - Owned the dashboard re-design of Konica Minolta’s print application software by designing wireframes, application flows, visuals, style-guide and performing usability improvements; helped reduce the cost of printing device infrastructure by 45% and overall print output by 35%. - Worked in an agile environment within a cross functional team of business analysts, product managers, developers & stakeholders to understand and validate business requirements through feature prioritization and examining application usage metrics. - Pioneered new processes & transformed mindsets within Pharos’s traditional business operations to advocate for design thinking and innovation. ### User Experience Design Intern @ Roundarch Isobar Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | New York City, New York - Designed annotated wireframes & user flows for HBO Go’s ‘Program Browsing’ screen for Desktop, iPad & mobile platforms to design for diverse customer needs & pain-points in a cross-functional team of product managers, user experience designers, visual designers and developers. - Reviewed and critiqued the visual style-guide for HBO Go’s iPad and mobile app. ### Software Developer @ Tata Consultancy Services Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 | Mumbai Area, India - Served as a module lead, business analyst, front-end & back-end developer and QA tester for TATA AIG’s General Insurance application by managing a team of three junior developers; built and shipped a car & auto renewal responsive web application within a dynamic and ambiguous environment. - Developed project release plans, estimated software launch timelines and mitigated risks by managing business requirements & POC analysis with client stakeholders. - Managed software release management through Eclipse 4.9 by building a customized workspace, merging multiple code streams, and standardizing QA processes; release 10+ software versions for the clients in a span of 6 months. - Developed TATA AIG’s web auto & car renewal and new policy generation software to make the application faster by coding using technologies like HTML 5, CSS 3.0, JSF, Axis Web Service, JAVA MVC architecture, J2EE Servlets, JAVA beans and Sybase databse management. - Mentored junior developers through project on-boarding, coaching, reviewing code & providing feedback. ## Education ### Master's Degree in Human Computer Interaction Rochester Institute of Technology ### Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Computer Science Savitribai Phule Pune University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/anuthanedar - Portfolio: http://www.anuthanedar.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/anuthanedar JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/anuthanedar/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13