# Ashish Shendure

> ✨Principal Product Designer @Alkira | Crafting user-centered, business-aligned, AI-accelerated experiences

Location: San Jose, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/ashishshendure

Hola, I’m Ashish! I’m a hands-on design leader who transforms complex B2B SaaS challenges into engaging, user-friendly experiences. At Alkira (and previously at VMware and Cisco), I absorb intricate enterprise problems and translate them into holistic solutions that align with strategic business goals, meet customer requirements, and deliver usable, clean, and snappy user interfaces.

Over the past decade, I’ve been involved in every stage of the design process—from the initial spark of an idea to a polished, user-centered product. Beyond core product design, my biggest strength lies in uniting stakeholders across Product, Engineering, and Sales to foster healthy, collaborative conversations towards a common goal. In my tenure so far, I have contributed to design leadership for two startups that have collectively reached a valuation of over $1billion+ — a milestone that highlights the impact of aligning design with business strategy, even as it remains a team effort. My three patents (and more in the works!) stand as a testament to my commitment to creative problem-solving and fresh, effective ideas.

In parallel, I am actively shaping AI-native product experiences by integrating intelligent workflows into the design and development lifecycle. My work includes advancing Alkira’s Network Intelligence Agent (NIA) and MCP-enabled design pipeline, where AI assists in synthesizing customer insights, accelerating research, and generating high-fidelity production-ready prototypes. By connecting tools like Figma, GitHub, and product specifications through AI-assisted workflows, I help reduce validation cycles from days to hours while also enabling teams across Product, Design, and Engineering to adopt practical, high-impact AI capabilities.

With a Master’s in Information Science from Indiana University Bloomington, I blend rigorous research with real-world creativity to ensure technology works for people, not the other way around.

If you’re seeking an energetic, innovative design partner dedicated to driving real business value, let’s connect and make great things happen together.

## Work Experience
### Principal Product Designer @ Alkira, Inc.
Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
- Spearheading UX strategy and execution for Alkira’s flagship multi-cloud Network-as-a-Service platform, spanning zero-to-one features to a scalable design system trusted by Fortune 10 and Fortune 500 enterprises
- Leading AI-driven design initiatives including the Network Intelligence Agent (NIA) and MCP integrations, shaping the product’s innovation roadmap
- Building and operationalizing an AI-native UX research pipeline using Claude Code, synthesizing insights from support tickets, customer escalations, and product telemetry into actionable AIOps interaction patterns
- Leveraging a Claude Code MCP stack with Figma, GitHub, and product specifications to generate high-fidelity, production-ready prototypes, reducing validation cycles from days to hours
- Driving end-to-end design vision across engineering, product, and executive leadership, ensuring alignment from concept through delivery
- Facilitating customer and stakeholder workshops to align product direction with market needs and improve overall user experience and satisfaction
- Establishing and scaling design operations, processes, and quality standards to support rapid growth and consistent product excellence
- Championing AI training and enablement across design, product, and engineering teams, driving adoption of AI-powered workflows and elevating cross-functional capabilities

### Lead Product Designer @ Alkira, Inc.
Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | San Jose
Leading Product design for Alkira's multi-cloud solution.

- Managing end-to-end Product Design for Alkira's flagship SaaS web application (CSX) and native application (VPN client for Windows and MacOS) for scale
- Driving the product design process from larger projects to individual features from research to analysis to design to test aligning with design thinking principles and user empathy
- Collaborating with internal stakeholders and customers to drive the product vision covering tactical and strategic facets 
- Facilitating Design workshops with internal and external stakeholders to improve the end-user experience 
- Collecting, analyzing and prioritizing user feedback via quantitative (telemetry) and qualitative (customer interviews) metrics to align with business KPIs

### Apprentice @ Center Centre
Jan 2020 – Present

### Product Experience Designer @ VMware
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Palo Alto
Worked on a high-visibility recommendations-based Network and Security visualization project. 
- Designed a recommendations-based workflow handling different components and their states, statuses, life-cycle and user-flows.
- Conceptualized and designed a rich, modular Search and Filter Framework for the NSX Manager Application with a simpler workflow that allows users to fetch results faster and easier.

### UX/UI Designer @ Viptela
Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Jose, California
- Designed low and high fidelity prototypes to understand interactions. Create interactive wireframes to understand navigation flows
- Designed Dashboards that provide insights from data, right from information presentation and design flows to drilling down the data hierarchy
- Proposed and currently implementing complete solution redesign strategy to improve the overall productivity and usability of the company's flagship solution interface
- Conducted stakeholder research interviews, focus groups, affinity diagramming and data synthesis as a part of Research and Analysis phases of UX redesign
- Graphic design of interfaces and icons with pixel-perfect layout representation

### User Experience Designer @ Cisco
Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area
-Post the Viptela acquisition by Cisco, proactively worked for the integration of the management solutions of both organizations including configuration, monitoring, rebranding, UI architecture redesign and workflow remodeling - thus contributing to the business unit with half a billion in revenue in less than a year
- Led, orchestrated and designed end-to-end Security and Analytics workflows as a part of Cisco SD-WAN integration strategy
- Designed low and high fidelity prototypes to understand interactions. Create interactive wireframes to understand navigation flows
- Designed Dashboards that provide insights from data, right from information presentation and design flows to drilling down the data hierarchy
- Conducted stakeholder research interviews, focus groups, affinity diagramming and data synthesis as a part of Research and Analysis phases of UX redesign
- Graphic design of interfaces and icons with pixel-perfect layout representation

### Graduate Teaching Assistant | Usability Tester - Information Visualization @ Indiana University Bloomington
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Bloomington, Indiana Area
- Assisted primary instructor with teaching, organization & delivering hands-on sessions
- Improved User Experience within course workflow, grading and troubleshoot student issues

### Research Assistant | UI/UX Designer - Data to Insights Center @ Indiana University Bloomington
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Bloomington, Indiana Area
Course link: http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu/
- Redesigned the Information visualization layouts for D2I’s products
- Revamped the design, develop the redesigned websites for various D2I applications

### UI/UX Web Design Intern @ Archway Technology Partners, LLC
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015
-Conducted user studies: Interviews and Contextual inquiry to obtain user data as a part of User Experience Research
-Synthesized user data to find pain points in ATWeb: Archway's flagship financial management software
-Proposed redesign solutions for the pain points in the form of paper-prototypes, information architecture redesign, wireframe mock-ups and workflow redesign.
-Graphic design: icon stack redesign, high-fidelity interface design, logo, etc.

### User Experience Analyst - Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center @ Indiana University Bloomington
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015
- Analyze and solve issues to improve usability of CNS applications and visualization tools 
- Analyze friction points, create wireframes for redesign, Usability Testing, Prototyping
- User studies: Interviews, Surveys, Card-sorting, Personas

### Informatics Assistant | UI developer- Centre for Biological Research Collections(CBRC) @ Indiana University Bloomington
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014
- Data processing and programming
- Digitizing IU's research collections of fossils, plants, and zoo-archaeological material
- Building GUIs to assist data entry
- Building web interfaces to databased images and 3D scans

### Systems Engineer | Data Visualization Designer/Developer @ Tata Consultancy Services
Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Hiranandani, Powai, Mumbai
Data Visualization Developer | Web Content Management | Web development | Usability | User Interface | User Experience | Front-end programming | Linux administration | Mainframes


## Education
### Master of Science - MS in Information Science/Studies
Indiana University Bloomington

### Bachelor of Engineering - BE in Information Technology
University of Mumbai

### HSC in General Science
Ramnarain Ruia College, Matunga

### SSC
V.N. Sule Guruji, King George, Dadar


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ashishshendure
- Portfolio: http://www.ashishshendure.com
- Portfolio: https://ashishshendure.medium.com/

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Source: https://flows.cv/ashishshendure
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/ashishshendure/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-13