I’m Akhil.Hello, I’m Akhil. I’m currently at Personio, where I split my time between leading product work and making it easier for the design team to do great work.
Before this, I spent nearly eight years at Google, working on 0-to-1 products, including one that I helped take from an idea to nearly half a billion users.
I enjoy working in early-stage environments where there’s clearly an opportunity, but it’s not yet obvious what to build. I take the work seriously, but I don’t take myself too seriously. Good things are built when you’re having fun.
Work
Here’s a brief overview of what I’ve done over the last few years. If you’d like to learn about any of these projects in more detail, you can reach me by email.
Loading…
Turning around a struggling core product
Role: Design lead; started solo, later guided a few designers as we scaled
Personio is Europe’s leading HR and payroll platform, used by over 16,000 companies to run their people processes. Its Performance & Development product had become hard to understand and use, and was missing key features that were costing us new deals. Over 12 months, I led the redesign across three major releases, keeping our plans tightly scoped around real customer needs, uncovering critical gaps for our roadmap, and introducing practical uses of AI in the product. Core patterns from the redesign also became part of our new design system for other teams to reuse. Together, this work roughly doubled the share of satisfied customers and reduced lost deals.
Loading…
Rebuilding the foundations of time tracking at Personio
Role: Design lead and interim product lead through multiple PM transitions
Personio’s time policies define how employees’ time is tracked and compensated. As more complex customers joined, the legacy system created heavy manual work for their HR teams and caused errors that rippled into areas like payroll. It also made it hard for our own teams to expand the product. Working with four product teams, I led a six-month redesign of the core policy model so companies could manage changes confidently over time, while giving our teams a scalable foundation to build on. Although the rollout is still recent, five major features have already shipped on top of it, including critical capabilities for selling Personio’s payroll product.
Loading…
Improving how the design team builds
Role: Instigator and fixer
Alongside product work, I’ve helped change how teams work at Personio. Sometimes that has meant setting a clear launch quality bar that teams use in pre-launch reviews. Other times it has meant shifting teams out of a ship-and-forget mindset to keep iterating until work has truly “landed” with customers, a practice that spread across Personio. More recently, I’ve been helping our design team become more AI-native, from building tooling to training designers to explore product data with AI so they can spot new opportunities.
Loading…
Finding Google’s next billion users
Role: Founding designer across multiple products; led small teams at times
Google’s Next Billion Users team was an internal incubator building products for people coming online for the first time. I got the chance to launch new products across entertainment, utilities, employment, and commerce, and the most successful of these was Files by Google. Our small team spanning product, engineering, and user research spent months in the field in India, where we uncovered the core insight behind the app and defined its initial direction. From there, I helped grow it to over 400 million monthly active users, and it became Google’s highest-rated app during my time.
Loading…
Unlocking growth in Brazil with two new ways to pay in Google Wallet
Role: Design lead for Brazil
Brazil was a priority market for Google, but Wallet didn’t support key local payment methods, and many people’s phones couldn’t use its tap-to-pay feature. We introduced two new ways to pay: Pix bank transfers and card payments via QR codes. I worked across Google’s regional and global payment teams to keep the Pix experience consistent across Wallet, Chrome, and Google Pay, and partnered with major Brazilian banks to simplify setup and verification. Together, these launches opened Wallet to millions more users in Brazil.
Not work
These days, I oscillate between giddy excitement and low-grade anxiety about what’s now possible to build. The result of both these feelings is plenty of side projects. Here are a couple that made it out alive.
If you’re a film photographer and have never developed and scanned your film at home, congratulations, you are a sane person. I develop and scan my own film, and one of the annoying parts of the process is that once my images are on the computer, I still have to crop their borders, invert them and straighten them before I can see the final results. See the example below of a raw, unfinished scan.
Loading…
Common photo editors can’t do this automatically across a batch of scans, but fortunately we live in an era of personalised software. So I built it myself (instead of just shooting digital. Yes, I know).
The solution
I wanted to keep editing in Lightroom, but start with my images already cropped, rotated and inverted. CutNegs analyses each image and saves those adjustments in its metadata, so they’re applied when I open it in a photo editor. I can tweak anything it hasn’t quite got right because it’s not permanently changing the original image.
Processing your scansAll scans are processed locally on your device.DSC03518.ARW0 of 21Loading…
Process
One of the enjoyable parts of building CutNegs was creating a small Design Lab using the app’s actual components. It let me fine-tune motion and interactions directly, much faster than describing every adjustment to an LLM or editing them in code.
I did wonder whether I could just use the latest AI model to prepare my scans each time. That worked, but it had drawbacks for something I wanted to release as a free tool: the images couldn’t be processed locally, and the cost added up quickly with big batches. Eventually, conventional image processing proved sufficient for this constrained problem.
What’s next
Next, I want to see whether a small on-device model can find frame edges more reliably than my current implementation. So if you’re shooting and developing film in this economy, please give it a go and send me some of your scans ;)
Loading… 
