Sandstone Index: a numbered register of one product leader's positions

The home page opens with a two-part masthead closed by a heavy ink rule. A narrow left column, in small type, gives her role, India and the words Practice / Perspective. The wide right column carries the page headline, which for this design is simply her name, set large in a medium weight.

Directly beneath sits a real table, captioned with her name and the words Published perspectives. Three columns give the essay number, the idea itself and its subject with a reading time. The newest essay, on the protection gap, rests on a darker sand panel so that it reads first without a badge or banner. On a phone the subject column is dropped and only the number and title remain. It suits Devika because each title is already a proposition a nomination committee chair could accept or dispute in one line.

After the register comes a three-part band labelled The practitioner. Her portrait stands on the left. The centre gives her name, the first paragraph of her biography, her availability and a contact link. That paragraph must stand alone, and hers does: her father stopped paying an endowment policy in 1994 and learnt what it was worth. On the right, six areas of practice are listed as numbered entries from 01 to 06, from savings design and surrender values to product approval and IRDAI filing. On smaller screens the list moves below the portrait and text.

Three measures follow: ₹4,120 crore of annualised premium for the year to March 2026, thirteenth-month persistency of 85.2 per cent, and 17 mis-selling complaints for every 10,000 new policies, down from 41.

Her thesis, that a life product is judged in its fifth year rather than at the counter, then opens three paragraphs on the insurer and her remit, four proof points, her current focus and the conversations she welcomes. A record band lists her seat at a financial-literacy foundation and her formation, beside a remark from the chair of her insurer's policyholder protection committee.

Sandstone sets deep olive-black text on a warm sand ground, with darker sand for panels and a restrained olive accent for numbers, captions and links. Hairline rules in a muted olive-grey divide rows and entries. Headings use Work Sans; running text and labels use IBM Plex Mono, so persistency ratios and crore amounts read like entries in a regulatory return.

That plainness suits Devika's readers. Nomination committees, search partners and fellow actuaries distrust the gloss of insurance advertising; a page that looks like a working document asks them to read the argument.

Each essay opens with an olive rule down the left edge of its heading and standfirst, sets the body slightly larger in Work Sans and ends with a pull quote and links to its neighbours. The Career page numbers her six roles 01 to 06, dates in their own column, from a Chennai actuarial traineeship in 2000 to the present, each with scale, reporting line, team, outcomes and reason for moving.

Board Readiness places two bordered panels side by side. One holds the committee table and her capacity: twenty-five days and one current directorship. The other holds her exposure, each item labelled by capacity, and her governance learning. Beneath a heavy rule come her contribution, three judgement examples and her plan for a first year.

The Index composition suits any leader whose case rests on positions they have argued in public: product, risk and actuarial leaders in regulated consumer businesses, chief risk officers, operating leaders in healthcare or education who write about customer outcomes, and finance leaders with a few sharp essays. Like every design in the collection, it works for all ten leadership roles.