Essays and field notes by Grishma Joshi on design leadership, team building, design systems, women in tech, and craft.
There is a specific kind of silence that happens when you realise someone has just done your job for you, and nobody in the room thinks that's a problem.
My father spent nearly thirty years with the same company. Growing up, I saw that as stability and loyalty. Today, staying somewhere for five years makes people ask: are you still growing?
Every two months, a new dashboard. Every two months, the same conversation.
I used to think design was about the product. It took me a while to realise it was about what the product makes possible between people.
Good design for whom? The question sounds simple. It becomes genuinely difficult the moment you try to answer it honestly.
The brief rarely says: design something that strengthens society. It says: improve adoption, reduce friction, ship by Friday. So where does social good actually fit in?
It didn't happen dramatically. There was no single moment where I put down my stylus and walked away. It happened the way most quiet losses happen — gradually, then all at once.
The panic wasn't about the presentation. It took me a while to realise that.
I didn't tell them the bricks would need to merge. That was the point.
After four years of managing designers, I realised the question I kept asking was the wrong one.
When you are the first designer in a startup, your way of working quietly becomes the definition of good design. That is a problem. And it takes a while to notice it.
At some point while building the design team at SatSure, I realised I was not trying to help people become better designers. I was trying to make them become me. Those are very different things.
The interview had gone well. They were talkative, curious, and open. Then they joined. And became very quiet. It took me nine months to understand what had actually happened.
For a while, being a small design team felt like a strength. Everyone knew what everyone was working on. We were fast. We were flexible. And then we started growing, and I realised we had been confusing proximity for structure.
I played them seven minutes of a film. The room went silent. What happened next told me more about their gaps than a year of design reviews.
The problem in most design reviews isn't the quality of the thinking. It's that the thinking never reaches the room.
The idea started in a room full of women talking honestly about what bothered them at work. What came out of it surprised me.
There is a difference between being a mentor and being a sponsor. I spent a long time confusing the two.
The women I have worked with over the last five years were not held back by a lack of skill. They were held back by a lack of structures that made their skills visible and their confidence possible.