At Tcules, we believe we’re standing at the crossroads of a UX revolution.
With AI becoming the core of virtually every product, design thinking is rapidly evolving. The old rulebooks are being rewritten, and the barriers between ‘UX professionals’ and ‘everyone else’ are dissolving before our eyes. Today, anyone with intention and ideas can shape meaningful user experiences.
But amidst this democratisation, we find ourselves asking, what makes for truly exceptional UX in this new landscape? How do we balance AI capabilities with human needs? And how do we avoid the trap of technology for technology’s sake?
That’s why we’re launching ‘My Experiments with UX’, a series featuring the voices of product managers, marketers, UX designers, and ‘amateur’ AI builders who are navigating these waters in real time. Mind you, these aren’t just theoretical discussions; they’re practical insights from people solving real UX challenges every day.
In the second part of this series, we speak with Aishwarya Ashok, who manages product and growth at Stitchflow.
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Aishwarya Ashok lives on Reddit.
“I spend at least an hour and a half every day on Reddit,” Aishwarya Ashok tells us matter-of-factly. “Some days it’s close to two hours.”
In an era where product managers and designers flock to Dribbble and Figma communities, Aishwarya immerses herself in the raw, unfiltered frustrations of IT professionals.
“Understanding their rants is actually my go-to thing to do. That’s where I get to deeply understand our audience.”
This unconventional approach to user research is just one example of how Aishwarya has consistently carved her own path in product and AI design, from reimagining visual collaboration at Zoho to now building AI-powered tools that IT professionals actually want to use.
From Zero to Product: The VaniHQ Story
“We built a product that actually has a lot of opinions,” Aishwarya explains when describing her journey creating VaniHQ at Zoho.
What started as a whiteboarding tool eventually evolved into a comprehensive visual collaboration platform, one that deliberately broke from Zoho’s traditional design language to establish its own identity.
However, before diving into VaniHQ’s design choices, it’s worth understanding Aishwarya’s journey.
Starting in product marketing at Zoho, she found herself increasingly drawn to hands-on implementation work with customers. This customer-facing experience gave her invaluable insights into user challenges and expectations, which she eventually leveraged to identify a gap in the market: the need for an integrated visual collaboration tool for creative teams.
As a founding Product Manager, Aishwarya managed the core product from ideation to beta in what she evaluated as a $17.5 billion emerging market. She collaborated with over 20 cross-functional stakeholders across roadmap planning, messaging, identity and access management, legal operations, and UX design, taking VaniHQ from concept to a fully-functioning platform where “teams create, meet, and work together.”
When COVID-19 hit and remote work became standard, her team recognised an opportunity to evolve from a simple whiteboarding tool into a comprehensive visual collaboration platform. Unlike competitors who were focusing primarily on content functionality, Aishwarya’s approach balanced content with collaboration features.
“Our 50-60% energy went into the content bucket, which obviously everybody was missing, but the remaining 40-50% went into the collaboration bucket,” she explains. This led to innovative features like ‘Catchup’ (their take on video calls) with floating tiles instead of the standard grid view, and personality cursors that let users express themselves in the canvas space.
This strategy of building “uniquely-positioned features among competitors in the creative collaboration space” successfully reduced customers’ need to use separate productivity tools, a key differentiation in an increasingly crowded market.
What made this product distinctive wasn’t just its features, but the deliberate design philosophy behind it. “The first ever decision I made was that this shouldn’t look like Zoho,” Aishwarya says. This decisive break from corporate design identity, focusing instead on the creative audience they aimed to serve, helped the product establish its own presence in the market.
The Power of Guiding Principles
When asked about her approach to defining user experience for new products, Aishwarya emphasises the importance of establishing clear guiding principles before diving into feature development.
“The first ever thing that I did as a PM was actually drafting a whole principles pillar for what this product would look like, and then that became our guiding light for the next at least two years,” she explains.
These principles weren’t just about the visual aspects of the product but about fundamental decisions: who the product was for, what problems it would solve, and importantly, what it would not do. For VaniHQ, these principles included targeting small creative teams who needed to visualise their work and creating a single source of truth for both content and collaboration.
This principled approach proved invaluable when facing the inevitable feature requests that come once users begin adopting a product. “Having that whole principled way of saying ‘no, this is where we solve and this is where we draw the line’, I think that really helped in taking our next set of road map for the tool,” she reflects.
The success of this approach is evident in how she prioritised and built uniquely-positioned features that reduced the customer’s need to use separate productivity tools. By staying true to core principles while evaluating a $17.5 billion emerging market, Aishwarya was able to carve out a distinctive niche for VaniHQ in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Interestingly, these principles extended beyond the product itself to how she built the community around it. Through strategic partnerships with startup hubs and personally overseeing product support for over 180 teams, she ensured that the product’s principles were reinforced through every customer interaction.
Understanding the Power User
Aishwarya’s approach to user research displays a strategic focus on identifying and designing for “power users”, those who would not only adopt the product but champion it within their organisations.
“In our case, I think really understanding that major player was important for us initially,” she notes. Through extensive testing and observation, her team discovered that their power users were primarily marketers and product managers, professionals who constantly needed to visualise concepts but were constrained by disconnected tools.
Rather than targeting companies by size, they focused on teams with significant creative output and co-creation needs. This led them to early-stage teams and creative departments where hierarchical tool mandates were less rigid and the need for visual collaboration was highest.
Her research methodology combines both internal testing and external validation, “I stopped using all of let’s say a Google Docs or those disintegrated systems and I was really going to think if you have to do product management for a tool like this and then let’s say you do it on the tool, then let's see how this whole PM journey comes through.”
Reimagining Delight in UX
When discussing the concept of “delight” in user experience, Aishwarya offers a perspective that goes beyond superficial elements like seasonal animations or colour changes:
“One non-negotiable thing of a delight thing, is that it has to work. It is not form over function,” she emphasises. “Delight comes in terms of getting that functionality matching with the behaviour of someone who’s actually looking to get that action back.”
For Aishwarya, true delight emerges when users can intuitively accomplish tasks without instruction, when the product just “gets them.”
This approach is exemplified in features like the personality cursors, which allowed users to express themselves in the collaborative space, a feature that competitors later attempted to replicate after seeing its popularity.
Inside the AI-First Development Process
Aishwarya’s journey from traditional product development to her current role at Stitchflow reveals a fascinating evolution in how products are conceptualised, designed, and built. At Stitchflow, she’s pioneered an AI-driven development process that collapses what used to be distinct roles—PM, designer, and engineer—into a fluid, iterative workflow.
“A lot of SaaS apps, the interface is going to be very, very minimal in about a year or two,” she observes. “For any agent to actually go log in, get some data, do some data processing, it has to be in a structured way that an AI understands.”
This insight drives her approach to building AI-native interfaces that are both human-friendly and machine-comprehensible.
Her development process doesn’t start with lengthy documentation but with deep immersion in user contexts. After identifying a potential tool based on Reddit research, Aishwarya begins with a lightweight goal statement, “I purposely keep it very light because my approach is to build it with AI and update it back. It’s like try 10 versions and then one of those versions gets to be the extended format of the PR.”
Here’s how her typical development cycle unfolds:
- Data-first design: “Always start with defining how you want that sample data to look like,” she advises. “If you start with your back end, it’s troublesome. If you define everything and then say, ‘for these things go create tables,’ that is a better match for AI code.”
- Rapid prototyping: Using v0 (an AI design tool), she creates the initial interface by describing what she wants in natural language, refining it through conversation with the AI. “I start off by defining the sample data and then get the interface to at least spend about four or five hours with it to get to a state that I want.”
- Code implementation: “I then export the code, go to Cursor [an AI coding tool], and I actually make it functional beyond whatever basic functions are there.” This involves fine-tuning through precise instructions, “I want the toggle button to look this way.”
- Collaborative refinement: The code then moves to a repository where both Aishwarya and a developer take branches, each working on different aspects. “Sometimes I have the backend set up. Sometimes I play around just with the sample data, and then I use it to work for the backend.”
What’s remarkable is the level of control and specificity she achieves through natural language conversations with AI tools. “Yesterday, I was just telling Cursor to say, ‘Hey, it looks like this table that you're showing me doesn't have the same consistent width across. Can you just go fix it?’ And it fixed it,” she explains. Or “Hey, looks like this toggle button is not what I want. Make it a dropdown and just ensure that this is a default value.”
The entire cycle, from concept to working product, often takes just a day or two, compared to weeks or months in traditional development. As she puts it, “This process typically gets done within a day or day and a half or two maximum.”
Take the example of OpsReportCard, a project that Aishwarya recently worked on. The team discovered that a valuable resource for IT professionals, a 32-question assessment tool for evaluating IT operations teams, had disappeared from the web when the original site was taken down.
Recognising the value of this resource for their target audience, the team at Stitchflow decided to recreate it as an interactive checklist rather than just a readable version. What would have traditionally required a week’s work across design, development and content teams, Aishwarya completed in just one hour using AI coding.
The recreated tool now serves as a valuable lead magnet, bringing IT professionals to the Stitchflow platform and qualifying potential customers who resonate with their solutions.
This example perfectly illustrates how Aishwarya’s methodical approach to AI-powered development, combined with her deep understanding of user needs from Reddit research, allows her to collapse traditional development timelines while creating truly useful tools for her target audience.
Aishwarya has developed specific patterns of communication that yield better results from AI tools. “There are certain phrases, certain ways, certain quirks that you play around with,” she notes. For example, “I always tell it to ‘tell it to me in words’ because otherwise it starts coding. So if I don’t want you to code, I’ll say ‘don’t code anything’ or ‘let me know in words before you actually proceed.’”
Perhaps most fascinating is how this workflow changes the nature of product management itself. “What started out as a problem statement for us when we were building out this tool was... my approach is to build it with AI and update it back... My PR gets even more enriched as I keep building.” Documentation evolves alongside the product rather than preceding it, creating a more responsive, iterative development cycle.
Aishwarya's UX Golden Rules
Based on her experience spanning traditional and AI-powered product development, here are Aishwarya’s key principles for exceptional UX:
Start with clear principles: “The fact that you know what you want to build and you’re building something that is of value, that part never changes whether AI is in the picture or not.”
Know your audience intimately: “It’s important to first figure out where your audience most likely comes to rant. That’s the place that you actually can go and understand, or at least see where they hang out.”
Systematise your thinking: “When your thinking is systematised, the same thing can be reflected in your tool building, which starts with design.”
Focus on functionality that feels natural: “Delight comes in terms of getting that functionality matching with the behaviour of someone who’s actually looking to get that action back.”
Use AI as a thought partner: “AI is a great thought partner if you are clear about what you want to do or if you at least know your starting point.”
Don’t overcomplicate AI interactions: “Working with AI is not rocket science as long as you actually are good with your basic product principles.”
Build with multiple perspectives: “I talk to [AI] like I talk to my designer. I say, this is something that I would want. I would want the page to look like this.”
The Future of UX in the AI Era
For Aishwarya, the AI revolution has democratised end-to-end product creation, allowing individuals to handle everything from ideation to implementation. “It helps you with almost anything, from the app name to actually the tweet copy and everything in between, which includes the product; this whole narrative is now stitched with AI.”
Yet she maintains that the fundamental principles of good UX remain constant: understanding user needs, creating intuitive experiences, and delivering functionality that feels natural. The difference is that AI now enables faster iteration, more personalised experiences, and the ability to quickly test multiple approaches.
As we navigate this new landscape, Aishwarya’s journey offers valuable lessons for both traditional UX professionals and those embracing AI-powered design. By maintaining strong product fundamentals while leveraging AI capabilities, designers can create experiences that truly resonate with users, whether built with traditional methods or through conversations with AI.
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