From preparing layouts to owning the reader experience

Mandate

Give readers useful choices while retaining creator meaning and editorial authority

Outcomes

• Released optional guidance with whole-page context for seventeen pilot titles
• Added chapter-level offline preparation alongside complete-title choice
• Kept small-study observations separate from market-wide performance claims

Decisions in context

Three leads coordinate twenty-one colleagues across reader and publisher workflows. Discovery and design spending of ₹1.9 crore sits within the ₹5.6 crore function expense. Rohan retains enterprise commitments, and publishers and creators retain editorial and rights decisions. The guided-reading work required us to support two useful preferences rather than declare a small study’s larger group representative of every reader. The offline work required a more detailed chapter state instead of treating a title as either wholly prepared or unavailable. Both decisions accepted product complexity to preserve a meaningful choice. My role carries no statutory seat or personal ownership interest. I want the team to explain what changed in the experience and what the evidence supports, without adding unmeasured retention or commercial benefits to make a careful product decision appear more impressive.

Reason for the move

Current CPO mandate; exploring a prepared first non-executive contribution

Concurrent appointment

Product employment without statutory board appointment

Mandate

Make adapted page views preserve the story rather than merely fill the screen

Outcomes

• Corrected the nine speech-balloon crops found in a twenty-four-page review
• Restored a full-page fallback and added creator preview before release
• Retained my own approval error in the product-learning account

Decisions in context

The director role brought nineteen colleagues and ₹4.2 crore annual function expense into my remit. In 2019 I approved an automatic crop because the preview looked cleaner on a phone. Nine pages in a selected twenty-four-page review lost part of a speech balloon. Nazia and creators challenged the result, and we used ₹29 lakh over seven weeks to restore the full-page fallback and add creator preview. All nine affected pages in that set were corrected. The work did not establish that every catalogue page had been reviewed or that the product met every accessibility need. My responsibility was to correct the design decision and the workflow that released it. The later CPO appointment extended the same concern to reading mode and offline preparation, where an apparently simpler experience could again remove a choice someone valued.

Reason for the move

Promoted to CPO across reader experience and publisher workflows

Concurrent appointment

Product employment without statutory board appointment

Mandate

Connect screen-level design with the experience of reading an entire illustrated story

Outcomes

• Examined movement between panel detail and whole-page composition
• Built continuing work with researchers, creators and engineering colleagues
• Preserved publisher approval while developing reusable reader features

Decisions in context

Sixteen colleagues worked with a ₹2.8 crore annual product expense allocation. Moving from studio assignments to a continuing product meant seeing what happened after a presentation became an everyday experience. A view could look effective for one page and become tiring across a story. I worked with research, engineering and publisher colleagues to understand movement between detail and composition. Creators retained responsibility for editorial meaning, and the product needed a way to preserve their judgement as features became reusable. The later crop error showed that this principle could still be lost when a visually persuasive preview reached approval. The product-director role made me accountable for that approval rather than simply for the recommendation. My subsequent work has tried to keep the original page and the reader’s choice available when a new convenience risks making either disappear.

Reason for the move

Promoted to product director with broader experience-approval responsibility

Concurrent appointment

Product employment without statutory board appointment

Mandate

Adapt visual material for screens while preserving the relationships that carry meaning

Outcomes

• Examined how changed layouts altered emphasis and reading order
• Worked within creator and editorial approvals rather than claiming them
• Prepared screen adaptations with context beyond the isolated image

Decisions in context

The digital-design practice combined twelve colleagues and ₹1.5 crore annual function expense. We adapted material for different screens while clients retained publication decisions. I learned that changing the space around an image could change emphasis even when the words remained the same. The task was to make an adaptation useful without assuming that a cleaner arrangement was automatically a more faithful one. Joining Ravneshi gave me a longer relationship with those choices after release, and a chance to develop features used across many stories. It also made the consequences of a mistaken default more persistent than a single studio assignment. My later crop approval failed a principle already visible in this period. The correction therefore required responsibility for applying design judgement carefully, not a claim that the team had discovered meaning for the first time.

Reason for the move

Joined a reader-product enterprise to own the continuing experience after release

Concurrent appointment

Product employment without statutory board appointment

Mandate

Prepare layouts while preserving the context of the creator’s material

Outcomes

• Learned how surroundings and scale affect the meaning of an image
• Supported senior designers without approving client publication
• Developed attention to material lost during adaptation

Decisions in context

I joined the studio after completing design studies in May 1999. Our seven-person assistant group prepared layouts and assets for senior designers. I held no line-management, budget or publication-approval authority. The practical discipline was to preserve the surrounding material that helped an image make sense. Small changes in scale or placement could alter what a reader noticed first, and an apparently neat crop could remove something important. That lesson remained relevant as my work moved into digital products. The later speech-balloon mistake was a failure to preserve it at a point where I held greater authority. The career has therefore involved learning to question my own visual preference, not only the quality of other people’s execution. The reader’s experience and the creator’s meaning must remain visible when an approval presentation makes one screen look compelling.

Reason for the move

Promoted into digital design and later practice leadership

Concurrent appointment

Product employment without statutory board appointment