Ankur Kushwaha
Book intro

Design advisory

Everyone can ship screens now. Do yours still add up to one product?

I’m Ankur, a lead product designer. AI made building cheap. Judgment still costs something. I help teams where everyone ships keep their product coherent.

Book a 30-minute callSee how I work
One product, three settings pages, three Save buttons

What changed

We used to wait on design. Now nobody waits.

Full stack builders now take a feature from idea to launch, with AI doing much of the build. It works. Teams ship in a month what used to take a quarter. But each builder now makes dozens of small design calls a day, and nobody sees them side by side.

What it looks like

It works. It just doesn’t feel like one product anymore.

A pattern I see constantly. Three teams needed a way to delete a project. Each built its own.

Team A · Projects list
Team B · Project settings
Team C · Dashboard cardActually deletes it

Each one passed review. The user still has to guess.

  1. 01One concept, three names. Users start to wonder if they’re the same thing.
  2. 02The happy path is polished. Empty and error states are left to chance.
  3. 03AI reaches for the most common pattern, which is rarely the right one for your user.
  4. 04Every feature is locally right. The product is globally wrong.

Why it happens

AI predicts the average. Your product isn’t average.

Ask for a settings page and you get the internet’s average settings page. It doesn’t know your users say Workspace, or that Delete makes them nervous. That context lives in people’s heads, and in most builder teams nobody is accountable for all of it.

How I work

Frame, align, ship.

The process I run in-house, adapted for teams where everyone builds. Builders keep their speed. The product keeps its shape.

Frame

01

Most rework starts as a vague prompt. Before anyone builds, we agree on the user, the problem and what done means.

Align

02

Patterns, names and states written down once, in a form people and AI can both follow. Three delete dialogs become one decision.

Ship

03

I review what shipped and rank fixes by user impact, with my reasoning. The reasoning matters most. It’s how your team learns to make the call without me.

Why me

Keeping many teams on one system is my day job.

  • 32%fewer design review cycles, after I led the Block design system at Builder.ai.
  • 178screens from three build teams on one product area, designed as one journey.
  • 2→9designers on the team I grew, and nobody left in two years.
Before: the Buildcards list with heavy cards, bright green buttons and mixed typeBefore
After: the Buildcards list rebuilt with the Block design systemAfter
The same screen, before and after Block. Read the case study

“Ankur is the kind of designer who makes the team around him better.”

Parker GindelePrincipal Design Manager, Sprinklr

Working together

Start small.

1 week

A one-week review

I go through your product and send a ranked list of fixes, with the reason for each. Then we walk through it on a call.

A low-risk way to see how I think.

Monthly

A few hours a month

I join your critiques, make the pattern calls and help your team decide faster as you ship.

For teams shipping every week.

Your team already ships fast. Let’s make it add up.

Book a 30-minute call

Bring two screens that should feel related. We’ll see if they do.