About
Astha Khurana is the Head of Design at Adalat AI, a nonprofit building AI tools for India's judiciary. She joined as the fifth employee and first designer, built the design function from scratch, and now leads a team of four. Her work spans tools used across 10 states and 5,000+ courtrooms (20% of Indian Courts), designing for high-stakes, low-tech environments where standard design playbooks don't apply. Under her leadership, Adalat has made unusual organizational bets: design leading product, no product managers, domain experts as decision-makers. It turned design into the function the organization scales on. Part of that scale has come from deliberately integrating AI into the design workflow, using it to move faster without losing the intention and user empathy that high-stakes design demands. With a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Roorkee and an MS in HCI from the University of Maryland, she approaches design from first principles, not templates.
Workshop details
You're the PM Now: Owning Product Features End-to-End as a Designer
About this workshop
Designers in tech today aren't handed briefs to make pretty. They're asked to decide what to build, scope it with engineers, and ship it. The design half they know. The product half, nobody taught them. This hands-on workshop teaches a five-stage loop from Adalat AI, where designers own features with no PM, used across 5,000+ courtrooms. In small groups you'll take one messy brief from signal to shipped. They leave with a repeatable, reliable loop for the next time someone says, 'You own this.'
Workshop key takeaways
- The Designer's Product Loop.
- Read signal before you open the tool: the loudest request is rarely the most frequent problem.
- Framing is choosing: state the bet in one line and decide explicitly what you will not build.
- Scope is a conversation with engineers, not a guess you hand them: lock what's in, what's out, and the riskiest unknown.
- Sequence by risk (design-first vs. build-in-parallel) and name who owns which piece, by when.
- 'Done' is a decision you make as the owner: ship the V0, watch it, and loop back.
- The fork for designers in an AI world: the strategic route or the design engineer route. We're betting on the first because the person closest to the user is best positioned to make the product call.