# Uday Gajendar > Humanistic design leadership + strategy + operations. Visual sensemaker. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/udaygajendar I enable humans & products to have better conversations. For 20+ years, I've been a translator between what businesses want to build, and what people actually need & desire in their lives. My craft is simple: simplify the problem, shape the flow, and reduce friction so that busy people can move through complex products with ease…and maybe joy! At Aurora Solar, I led a cross-team redesign of our solar sales suite to help homeowners buy solar with confidence. At PayPal, I made mobile payments feel swift, secure, and powerful. At Automation Anywhere, I turned a puzzling platform maze into a navigable journey to build bots. Each time, the goal was the same: make the complex feel effortless. I believe the best design solves problems so well that users forget there was a problem! I also believe in the power of a well-timed workshop, a crafted user journey, and validated prototypes to influence skeptical stakeholders. I'm currently plotting my next chapter as a Principal or Manager/Director where design breathes life to business strategy, beyond stylish UI. Bring me your stickiest problems — ambiguity is where I do my best work! ——————————————— ** My work: http://www.udanium.com/ ** Primary skills: UX Strategy • Interaction Design • Visual Design • User Research • Enterprise SaaS • Workshop Facilitation • Cross-functional Collaboration • Design Thinking • Agile • Design Systems • Jobs-to-be-Done • User Flows • Customer Journeys ** Primary tools: Figma • Mural • FigJam • Sketch • Notion • JIRA • Claude • ChatGPT (Experimenting: Lovable, Cursor, Replit, V0 – like everyone else!) ## Work Experience ### Alchemist @ Self Employed Jan 2025 – Present Self-defined, independent role focused on three pillars of guiding change: 1) Coaching junior designers & design leaders for resilience 2) Consulting with startups & teams for navigating AI-driven ambiguity/complexity 3) Community engagement via Rosenfeld Media, thought leadership (writing & speaking), and relationship-building for what's next. How can I help you navigate change with clarity and humanity -- and a strategic outlook? ### Community & Conference Curator @ Rosenfeld Media Jan 2015 – Present Co-founder of groundbreaking Enterprise UX Conference in 2015 at Rackspace HQ, which evolved over years into Enterprise Experience and then ended with Enterprise UX in 2023. I reviewed speaker submissions, shaped speaker programs, and gave speaker cohort guidance/preparation. Curated & emcee’d inaugural 2024 "Designing with AI" virtual conference, driving speaker program creation + preparation. Hosted monthly community speaker calls for 5+ years, with wide range of topics like Agile, design management, strategic planning, dashboards, and aerospace UX. Still curating the twice monthly community newsletter (The Rosenfeld Report). ### Director, Product Design @ Aurora Solar Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 - Advocated & operationalized design maturity processes for HelioScope (commercial / industrial / utility scale division of Aurora) via cross-functional workshops on design rituals, unpacking assumptions, pre-mortems, and MVP definition. - Partnered with Product and Eng leaders in strategy definition workshops on Sales Mode strategy. - Collaborated in cross-functional summit to improve our TPO (third party operator) financing strategy. Led workshops on improving Product + Eng + Design efficiencies, methods, comms. Defined a novel visual framework to holistically connect multiple overlapping TPO efforts across the company. - Supported critical design team rituals: design crits, squad reflections, and team all-hands…as well as our annual virtual Design Summit events. Plus a mix of tactical, operational, strategic, and relational activities to further elevate design’s partnership with other facets of the business. ### Senior Manager, Product Design @ Aurora Solar Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 As the first hired design manager, I served as a "player-coach" delivering designs, and also led a team of 5 designers focused on a suite of software solutions for selling residential solar systems, from lead capture to proposals to contracts. Culminated in a full redesign of Sales Mode (codenamed "Prism") that improved usability, navigation, ease of use, and speed of use per customer discovery research findings. Concept to code within 9 months, while increasing adoption from under 25% to over 55% and enabling the V2 platform migration OKR strategic goals/drivers. ### UX Architect @ Automation Anywhere Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Jose • Led redesign of Automation360 Platform IA/nav, with new onboarding “bot creation accelerator” tools, boosting task efficiency by 37% and feature adoption by 42%. • Designed new Developer Portal with unified site nav, to support “citizen developers,” the key growth segment, driving 50% growth in A360 Community feature usage. • Streamlined A360 Bot Migration with simplified tech docs IA/nav, reducing support tickets by 50% while growing customer migration commitments over 60%. ### Advisor / Instructor @ Women's Startup Lab Jan 2014 – Jan 2019 (Unpaid / voluntary role) Provided UX advisory support to founders via WSL's accelerator sessions, offering office hours & workshops or lectures on UX as a key element to business success. ### Director Of User Experience @ Instart Logic Inc Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Palo Alto, California • Solo UX leader driving app redesign for e-commerce analytics startup (Series C), with new design system — showcased at Sales Kickoff to galvanize Go-To-Market teams for improving pipeline. Achieved 45% customer renewals OKR. • New design system improved Engineering velocity by 62%, boosted user data comprehension by 33%, and raised user task efficiency by 45%. • Delivered critical net new customer-validated features (Tag Self-Assessment, Rule Builder, Security Services) to round-out product suite, ahead of Q4 2019 sale to Akamai. ### Principal UX Consultant @ Consulting / Advising / Teaching Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | SF/Silicon Valley Clients: Facebook (Ads API Tools with 82% adoption), Medallia (self-service admin UI with 78% adoption), AVI Networks (UX designs & task flows with 87% task completion), Cumulus Networks (admin configuration flows with +24 NPS boost). ### Design Lead @ PayPal Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area • Led UX strategy for mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) integrating newly released payment hardware for SMB merchants: credit card swiper & chip reader, with “PIN on glass”. • Redesigned mobile POS app Bluetooth pairing & purchase flow, to reduce support needs (42% drop in tickets), while driving 52% YoY device sales growth and +27 NPS. • Established “learning velocity” (ongoing lab studies & user interviews), shifting team mindset to leverage user feedback during product cycles. ### Principal Designer @ Peel Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Silicon Valley Supported various UX iterations of existing Remote Control mobile app for Android, while defining "next gen" concepts with Biz Dev & Sales teams, for exploring alternative revenue models. ### Director of User Experience (UX) @ CloudPhysics Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Silicon Valley • Joined as “UX Team of One” at 20-person datacenter analytics startup (Series C). Revamped design system with inventive data visualization patterns, for IT admins and CIOs. Increased feature usage by 68% and brand sentiment by +32 points. • Delivered new Partner Portal to scale channel sales workflows and accelerate customer acquisition, with 35% growth equaled to approx $1M ARR. Medium essay: https://medium.com/@udanium/lessons-from-leading-ux-at-a-startup-bf4855d9533a BayCHI presentation of first 100 days success here: (video link) https://archive.org/details/BayCHI20140812_201410 ### KP Design Council member @ Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | Silicon Valley (Unpaid / voluntary role) Invited member of Kleiner Perkins Design Council. Mentor to KP Design Fellow (Summer 2013). ### Principal Product Designer @ Citrix Systems Jan 2009 – Jan 2014 | Santa Clara, CA As Principal Designer on the Citrix Customer Experience team, I drove UI concept innovation & design thinking initiatives as described below: • Designed & shipped "Crystal Palace", a joint project with Citrix Labs for enabling seamless cross-device transport of apps and files using cloud services, Fall 2013. (and presented at UX Australia 2013) • Designed & shipped "Chameleon", a unique feature that runs Windows 7 on iPad, styled like an iOS app, Fall 2011 and presented at SxSW March 2012. • Designed & shipped Citrix Receiver for Google Chrome, featured at Google Apps event, Fall 2010. Also designed & shipped Citrix XenClient 1.0, featured at Synergy 2010 Keynote demo by the CEO as part of "Mobile Workstyle" message. • Served as a “design coach” for the Citrix Startup Accelerator, drafted a UX curriculum, offered part-time advisory support, and conducted scorecard analyses of resident companies’ products. • Participated in annual Think Tank forums, co-creating futuristic concepts with other executives and designers, around “The Future of Work” and “Mobile Workstyles”, both presented to the CEO. • Evangelized "design thinking" internally as part of corporate 'Design Matters' initiative, via articles, book club, and running a popular speakers' series called 'Design Salon'. Also, led university collaborations with schools including Carnegie Mellon and CCA's dMBA Innovation Studio and Experience Design courses. ### UX Consultant @ Self-Employed Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 | SF Bay Area Professional consultant hired to design attractive, well-thought out, functional software interfaces for Microsoft (Expressions Suite), Pomegran (iPhone task/calendaring app/start-up), JackBe (enterprise mashup builder), Netflix (web and device-based streaming video setup flows and UI), and LinkedIn (social networking settings/prefs), plus other clients in the SF/Bay Area. End-to-end design, from product architecture analysis, to flow diagrams, wireframes, and pixel-accurate mockups and style directions. ### Sr Interaction Designer @ Cisco Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 Sr IxD within the Voice Technology Group UX team led by Cordell Ratzlaff. Designed the UI for upcoming VOIP phone models for both "budget-minded" enterprise users and "high-luxury" executive users. Delivered executive-approved specs and future concept sketches, while working with a globally distributed team, including offshore vendors. Also created and updated keystone documents for shaping a broad user-centered design program for Cisco VOIP team. ### Senior Designer @ Involution Studios Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 Senior designer for the re-design of enterprise PLM (product lifecycle management) software for Agile Corp. (now a subsidiary of Oracle) encompassing visual design and interaction design. Delivered final comps, assets, and behavior specs while collaborating with a prototyping team. Also supported internal Involution projects and other client engagements as needed. Last major project involved re-doing the consumer installation and activation flows and screens for McAfee's security client. I delivered comprehensive wireframes and flow diagrams. ### Design Analyst @ Frog design Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 Design analyst for two projects with Hewlett Packard, providing overall information architecture expertise and new product discovery and visualization for future design planning. Delivered final IA taxonomies for a Sharepoint system, and visual concept sketches. ### Experience Designer @ Adobe Systems, Inc. Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 Lead UI designer for the "Out of the Box" experience for Creative Suite 3 (install, activate, uninstall), also the enterprise e-licensing ecosystem (both back-end and client-facing). Collaborated with PMs, engineering leads, and doc writers as needed to deliver compelling solutions. And designed features for Acrobat 8, Photoshop CS3, and Photoshop Elements 5. ### Lead UI Designer @ BEA Systems, Inc Jan 2004 – Jan 2005 Lead designer for flagship WebLogic Integration Business Process Manager (BPM)--based upon emerging BPEL standard--owning and driving the UI design for the next version. Collaborated with a dev manager, dev team, PM, and doc/QA leads. Delivered iterative specs, concept sketches, annotated wireframes, and detailed designs. ### UI Designer @ Oracle Corp. Jan 2001 – Jan 2004 UI designer for Oracle Financials, a central component to Oracle e-Business Suite. This included Accounting, Loans, Leasing/Contracts, Treasury, and enterprise Taxation systems. Delivered wireframes, flow diagrams, and XML-based prototypes. Worked under a design mentor and with usability engineers, with guidance from product PMs. ## Education ### MDes. in Interaction Design Carnegie Mellon University ### BFA in Industrial Design University of Michigan ### none in Engineering, Art The University of Texas at Austin ### none in Industrial Design Rhode Island School of Design ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/udanium - Portfolio: http://www.udanium.com/ - Portfolio: https://udanium.substack.com/ - Portfolio: https://uday-design-hub.super.site/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/udaygajendar JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/udaygajendar/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13