Hi, I'm Nikhil.

I found product at a college recruiting seminar. Someone described the job and I realized I had been doing an unpaid version of it my whole life. Pulling apps apart, complaining about the ones that got it wrong, sketching the ones that should have existed. I had never thought of it as work. It was the first time a career felt obvious to me.

The instinct is more disciplined now. I want to know what people are struggling with before anyone writes a spec. The decision I'm proudest of was arguing against a feature leadership wanted, one that would have demoed beautifully and wasn't attached to a problem anyone had. I made the case for fixing the mobile app's UX instead, and keeping the users we had before building for the ones who weren't staying.

AI runs through most of how I work now, though the useful version of it is unglamorous. Most of my discovery starts with a rough prototype I build in Claude, real enough to put in front of a user and watch them react to. Finding out I'm wrong costs a day instead of a design sprint. Elsewhere it's quieter: pressure-testing a spec for the gaps I'd otherwise hit in sprint planning, getting a first read on a dataset in minutes. What I'm deliberate about is where it gets a vote. It makes me much faster at producing, and it still can't tell me what a user is quietly working around.

Away from work I'm happiest around anything with an engine. Cars, planes, racing especially. There's a sim rig at home I use to switch my brain off, though I'm also chasing lap times.