Insights
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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.
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 competitorswho 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.
