About
Sushrut is a Product Designer at ServiceNow in Hyderabad, working on Legal and Contract Operations and Core Business Suite, enterprise products used by over 240 customers globally. He has around four and a half years of experience across enterprise SaaS and agency work at Wongdoody (Infosys), where he worked with clients including United Airlines and John Deere. He is a recent visiting faculty at VIT Vellore teaching Visual Hierarchy and Semantics and has run design workshops at Kaarwaan. He holds an MDes degree and has a publication, Synesthetes Type, from IDC Typoday 2021. He designs, vibe-codes, and illustrates, and has spent the last year thinking seriously about what AI makes possible for designers who are willing to turn their own process on themselves.
Talk details
I Am My Own Most Neglected User
About this talk
This talk follows one story. A product designer who maps friction for users every day had never once mapped it for himself. When he did, he applied the same process he uses at work: write a brief, define the smallest fix, ship it to yourself. He built a floating window that connected his AI context directly to his design tools. 16 days, 1700 plus prompts, 3945 lines of code. The honest part comes next. He overbuilt it, ignored his own brief, and had to catch himself. Every integration that followed, Figma push, sprint story visibility, automated defect logging, started from the same question: what is the thing that makes me sigh every time? The talk ends with a live demo. The argument is simple: three years ago a designer could not have built this. Today it takes one afternoon and one question.
Key takeaway
- You are your most neglected user. Your workflow has friction worth mapping.
- The design process you already use every day works on yourself. Brief, smallest fix, ship.
- AI has given designers real build power for the first time. No engineer, no sprint, no ticket required.
- Designing for yourself is the most honest user research you will ever do. You cannot fake your own daily adoption.
- The metric that matters is not how fast you built it. It is whether you still use it every single day.