About

I'm a product designer working primarily in complex, data-heavy enterprise contexts.

Currently Lead UX/UI Designer at athenahealth, on the reporting product line. Prior work has spanned healthcare, enterprise software, analytics, travel, and marketing — domains that don't obviously belong together, but the through-line is that they've all been complex, high-stakes contexts where users know what they're doing and the design challenge is often about making expert work easier rather than making basic work possible.

I'm a product designer with 15 years of experience across healthcare, fintech, enterprise platforms, and digital products. My career has evolved from visual and interaction design into leading complex product initiatives—combining research, systems thinking, product strategy, and hands-on design to turn ambiguous problems into experiences that work for both users and the business.

How I approach problems

I try to reshape the problem before I design the solution.

Most of the strongest work I've done started from a framing I wasn't convinced by. The reporting redesign started as a search problem and ended as a lifecycle problem because the research told me the framing I'd been handed was too narrow. That kind of reframing is usually the highest-leverage move a designer can make.

I use research to change what I design, not to confirm what I already had.

Concept-led generative discovery, RITE testing, working with SMEs — these aren't rituals. They're the mechanism for finding out that the tidy assumption in your model doesn't survive contact with actual use cases.

I think in systems.

Mature products have accumulated behaviors — feedback loops, informal workarounds, drift over time. Some of the strongest design decisions I've made came from noticing a reinforcing loop that made a feature request the wrong thing to build. Feature-by-feature thinking usually misses this.

I'm willing to change my own solution.

Cross-team collaboration, done well, isn't about persuading other teams to adopt what you already have. It's about bringing your solution into a room where other requirements will pressure it. The first sign that a cross-team collaboration is working, for me, is when someone else's requirements have changed my design — not when someone else's team has adopted my design.

I try to advocate for parties who aren't in the room.

Users and future teams bear a lot of costs that don't show up in the decision meeting. Someone in the room usually needs to speak for them, and that's often a design job.

How I work

Cross-functional by default. Product, engineering, research, other design teams. Some of my strongest work at athenahealth has been co-led with peer designers across product-line boundaries, and I've come to think of that as most of the interesting work in mature products, not a side activity.

Evidence-driven about my own claims. I try to be careful about what I know versus what I've inferred versus what I'd like to be true. This matters for internal design conversations and it matters in portfolio work.

Comfortable with ambiguity long enough to reshape it. I don't rush to converge. The value of sitting with a problem is usually higher than the value of moving quickly to a design.

Willing to question scope. Sometimes the right design move is asking whether the problem is being solved at the right layer. Some of my hardest work has been proposing that a validated direction wasn't the right destination and that we should reconsider the level at which we were designing.

Domains

Healthcare · Enterprise software · Data and analytics · Travel · Marketing

The domain variety is deliberate. Product design work translates across domain boundaries more than most people expect. What doesn't translate — regulatory context, user vocabulary, data models — is worth learning fresh each time. What does translate — how to reframe, how to run research that changes your thinking, how to work across teams — is where the seniority actually lives.

What I'm interested in

I'm interested in complex product problems where design can influence more than the interface—shaping product direction, simplifying systems, and creating experiences that can evolve over time. I'm particularly interested in Principal and Lead Product Designer roles where I can stay close to the work while partnering deeply with product and engineering, and continue exploring how AI can change both product experiences and the way we design them.

Areas I've been thinking about lately based on the reporting work:

Get in touch

I'm based in India and open to remote opportunities and globally distributed teams. If you'd like to discuss a role, a product problem, or my work, get in touch at marykunnathur@gmail.com.