India

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Product Design

UX writing

Interaction Design

UX Testing

UX Research

Tanya Rao

Founder and Product Design Lead

Usability Testing

Quantitative research

Public Speaking

Product strategy

Prototyping

Qualitative research

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Critical-thinking

Presentation skills

Leadership

Design systems

Human computer interaction

Information architecture

User research

Product roadmap

Canva

Figma

Framer

Maze

With over a decade of experience designing and shipping app experiences for 100M+ users, I have worked across garage startups and hyper-growth unicorns in India and Southeast Asia. In 2023, I founded my digital product design studio, Tanya Rao, with a focus on Delightful Efficiency—creating products that balance business impact with exceptional user experience. Too often, companies launch MVPs that become roadblocks rather than strong foundations for growth. My approach ensures that design is not just functional but a catalyst for scalability and success.

As the principal designer at my namesake studio, I work personally and collaboratively with founders and teams to develop products that look better, ship faster, and cost lesser.

I moved into a management role from Dec 2021, having been an IC for the last couple years. I managed 5 designers across two teams building user experiences for GrabExpress (first and last mile delivery services within Grab) and Food/Mart Merchants (managing their restaurants from order to fulfilment).

With the pandemic, came new business opportunities and we expanded GrabMart across SEA helping deliver essentials to millions of people under lockdown. I designed for GrabMart all of 2020 before moving onto a new delivery initiative, called Group Buying. After learning from the success of Community Buying across China and other Asian countries, Grab launched their services in Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. As the senior and only designer on this initiative, I participated in writing specs, creating fundamental user journeys, and designing every pixel of the product to launch in 4 months, of mid-2021.

Shortly after joining Grab, I led the restaurant menu page redesign for GrabFood, laying the foundations for what would eventually snowball into the Grab Design System. As a design initiative, I looked into everything from leading user research to working with product and business teams on prioritising features. We rolled out the new GrabFood menu experience early 2020, also adapting the same user experience to GrabMart and spearheading design for the Mart ordering flow, early pandemic.

Having worked in marketing teams for 4 years, I consciously switched careers and joined Ola as a product designer for the Web team. In my first 9 months, I designed and helped launch entire microsites like Ola Share, Partners (driver) as well as international launches like Australia and New Zealand. I also built new features and improved user experience for the booking PWA (progressive web app). Since I was coming from a marketing background, the first 6 months helped lay the foundations of working within a design system and collaborating with product managers to get things off the ground.

Post which I had a short stint with the supply design team, where I built the self-onboarding flow for new drivers in Australia and New Zealand. 

I was part of the design team working on FoodPanda (Ola acquired Foodpanda India in Dec 2017). In a few months, we integrated the entire Foodpanda app with Ola (via PWA) and were working on building out the new Foodpanda app (v3.0) - single-handedly conceptualizing and wireframing the new app from ground zero, lead by Sunit Singh.

Udacity was in it’s 5th month of the India office, it’s largest market for MOOCs outside of the US. We were building a lean team, working remotely with a much larger parent team sitting out of silicon valley.

Over the next 10 months, we grew the India user base by 5x to 20,000 registered students. My marketing responsibilities included setting up email drip campaigns,  360° online marketing for campaigns like #BuildfromScratch, in association with YourStory, and conducting regular webinars with the course managers. Data analysis was also an important part of the day-to-day, syncing fortnightly with the international team on numbers and campaigns. Globally we reached 15,000 paid nanodegree subscriptions by March 2017.

As a part-time communication designer (to be product designer), I also created landing pages for India-specific campaigns like Women in Tech and #BuildfromScratch. As part of our marketing outreach, I regularly designed standees, posters, brochures and online advertisements.

I was the first hire of the Marketing team, 3 months before the close of the 2016-17 financial year, when over 13 million Indians would file their returns online. In the lead up to 31st March 2016, my responsibilities included driving up traffic via SEO, SEM and content partnerships. I also drove email marketing for new customers and set-up drip campaigns to hike up our returning users. That year, 2.5 million returns were filed online on Cleartax.

I joined Zepo, blushingly, right after college. Not realising what I was getting into, I ended up sticking around for 3 years while growing the company from 5 to 70 employees, raising over $2 million in funding. 

Over the next three years, I setup our complete marketing discipline from adwords to social media and email campaigns while also hiring, training and managing a full-stack marketing team of 5. We grew our active paying customers from 150 to over 2000, 70% of them inbound via the blog (unpaid, 50,000 visitors m-o-m) and adwords. The personal highlight would be writing over a 100 articles to rank Zepo and the Zepo blog in the top 5 search engine results, for all keywords leading to an enterprise ecommerce solution, ex. ‘create an online store in india’.

As one does as a core team member of an early-age startup, we helped establish a company culture, writing down and implementing employee policies like unlimited vacation and remote working along with the hiring. Day-to-day also included cross-team collaborations with tech-ops to strengthen customer retention and with business development to increase our monthly revenues by 25x (2L to 50L).

Tanya Rao🇮🇳

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