Experience — Vijay Gaikwad, Principal Product Designer & Design Engineer

Professional experience

Work history

Nov 2014 – 2026

Pune, India · formerly Community Brands · SaaS platform serving 500K+ users (GiveSmart Events, Fundraise & CRM)

Collaborated with product managers, developers, and stakeholders to define user requirements and design solutions meeting business goals.
Conducted user research and usability testing (Maze, UserTesting, Hotjar, FullStory) to gather insights and validate design concepts before build.
Created wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity mockups communicating user flows — shipping clickable prototypes fast to iterate on data-driven feedback.
Developed and maintained design systems and style guides (components, tokens, Storybook) adopted across 6 product teams, cutting design-to-dev handoff by 40%.
Championed responsive design and WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility across the suite (a company-first initiative); embedded automated a11y testing in CI/CD with engineering.
Mentored junior designers and grew the team from 1 to 4 — defining career ladders, hiring rubrics, and a critique culture; authored a 16-week AI-UX curriculum and an executive-level rollout.
Bridged design and engineering by building responsive, cross-browser UI (React, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript) — production code, not just static mockups.
Pioneered AI-augmented design (Claude Code, Lovable, v0) with validation guardrails anchoring output to real research.

Jan 2014 – Nov 2014

Pune

Built responsive, cross-browser web interfaces (HTML5/CSS3/JS) and pixel-perfect UI components alongside UX designers.

Jan 2013 – Jan 2014

Pune

High-performance web apps for global fintech / banking clients; PHP backend integrations and WordPress customisations aligned to UX specs.

Mar 2011 – Jan 2013

Pune

Responsive websites and digital marketing assets; delivered Android and web platform UX.

Selected achievements

40%

Reduction in design-to-development handoff time through enterprise design-system ownership.

35%

Faster UX research cycles by embedding AI into synthesis workflows, validated against primary research.

28%

Improvement in user task-completion rates via research-led product redesigns.

1→4

Grew and mentored the UX team; built the career ladder and critique culture.

Also: led the company's first WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility programme across the full product suite.