Akshan Ish

Shaping products people love & leading design teams that do great work together





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I've spent 12+ years at IDEO, Babbel, Spotify, and PowerUs learning that good design leadership is context-dependent. What works at Spotify doesn't work at a Series B startup. 

Work Experience

My approach: understand the terrain, figure out how & where design adds the most value, then build the teams and systems to deliver it, or roll up my own sleeves to push things forward. I write about the messy reality of making good design work happen on my newsletter.

The Politics of Product Design

I'm a dad to two kids, play pickup hoops every Thursday, and every year I pick one thing to learn deeply. Last year was personal finance, this year is learning to build & distribute apps with AI agents as an indie maker. I recently shipped 3 products in 6 months.

Building with AI
Work Experience

Aug 2023—Present · Remote
Head of Design



Transforming design from bottleneck to strategic asset at PowerUs


PowerUs is a Series B recruiting marketplace connecting skilled tradespeople with companies across Germany. When I joined as Head of Design in 2023, the design team was in turmoil—varying skill levels, no clear leadership, and tense relationships with engineering.

Over the next 16 months, I rebuilt the team both structurally and culturally. Team engagement scores went from below 60 to over 80. We established Schaltschrank, our design system that transformed how designers and engineers collaborate (engineers actually love working with it now). I led the product vision work that shaped our company roadmap, refreshed our visual identity, and built internal tools that help our GTM and sales teams make better decisions.

As a member of the leadership team reporting directly to the CEO, I've helped shape not just the product, but our business strategy, culture, and operations. Design went from being a bottleneck to being a strategic facilitator that helps the entire company move forward.


We evolved the B2C product thoughtfully based on vision work, user insights, a focus on improving the information architecutre & visual design (systematized through the design system). This examples shows the reworked job details page, which resulted in a 10% increase in applications after the redesign.
We completely overhauled the B2B product which was previously neglected. We transformed it into a professional grade piece of software that respects the customer’s time, and creates trust in the PowerUs brand.
We brought clarity to the job creation flow, and used LLMs to guide customers in creating the best possible jobs. As a result, over 80% new jobs had salary information and benefits added.
I worked alongside Data, Account Management & Sales teams to unify internal dashboards that showed Customer Health, and enabled our GTM leadership to make data-driven decisions.
I initiated a visual language uplift to improve how we show up in the world, communicate with our customers, and make PowerUs employees proud of the brand they work for´
I worked with our Sales Team to create company segment specific pitch deck templates to help them make their pitches more effective
Introduced Loom as a way for async communication in the company
Made our weekly design rituals useful, informative, and engaging
Commissioned an illustration system that was used across product & marketing assets

Oct 2021—Aug 2023 · Remote
Design Manager



Leading the evolution of the music industry’s most iconic UI at Spotify


Spotify is where hundreds of millions of people around the world listen to music, podcasts, and audiobooks every day. I joined in 2021 to lead the Play Squad Group—the team responsible for one of the most iconic UIs in the music industry: the Now Playing View. 

My role was to manage the team & define the vision for how the play surfaces should evolve to meet growing consumer expectations and business ambitions around new content formats, better discovery and distribution, and deeper artist-fan connections. The work my team shipped increased listener engagement and creator-fan connection by over 20%, and drove a 4x increase in revenue through merchandise and concert ticket sales.

Leading design at this scale meant balancing craft excellence with systems thinking (have you tried moving a button’s position when 500 million people use it everday?), collaborating across dozens of product teams, and ensuring that every change honored what made the experience special in the first place.

Official Release







Sep 2020—Sep 2021 · Remote
Principal Product Designer



Creating & integrating new multi-format learning experiences at Babbel


My journey with Babbel actually started at IDEO, where I led a 10-week research project across three markets to uncover new opportunities and articulate a product vision for their future. A couple of years later, that vision brought me back—this time as Principal Product Designer to help make it real.

I started with a small speedboat team to run experiments, validate the vision and answer critical questions: What new learning experiences should we offer? How do we guide learners through them? Once we gained confidence in the direction, I transitioned to leading a design team of 7 in the Growth & Engagment area and focused on integrating these new experiences into the core product by rethinking the app's information architecture.

The work spanned the full learner journey—from onboarding new users to helping them discover diverse learning content, build sustainable habits, and celebrate their progress. 

On TechCrunch



Sept 2019—Aug 2020 · Munich
Founding Designer



0→1 building a real-time meeting assistant before AI was cool at Ciara


Ciara was a digital meeting assistant for inside sales teams (think Granola specifically for sales), and I was the founding designer. This was my first true 0→1 experience—joining at the very beginning to help shape what the product could become.

As the sole designer working directly with the founders, I wore every hat: user researcher, product manager, product designer, and marketing designer. We were figuring out product-market fit in real-time, which meant rapid prototyping, constant user testing, and being comfortable with extreme ambiguity.

Ciara was slightly ahead of its time technologically. I prototyped many of the interaction patterns we see today in LLM chatbots—inline suggestions, real-time feedback on voice and tone—to help salespeople during real-time conversations, but we didn't have the models to follow through with experiences that would do most of the heavy lifting for the user.



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Mar 2015—June 2019 · Munich
Design Lead



Infusing human-centered design to fuel digital transformation for global brands at IDEO


IDEO is where I cut my teeth as a designer, starting as a design researcher and eventually leading teams through complex strategic challenges. Over four years, I helped organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies uncover new opportunities, launch ventures, and transform how they work.

Some notable clients I had the privillege to work with were Airbnb, Bosch, Lindt, Michelin, Siemens, and Zeiss. Each project required a different approach depending on the organisation’s context, constraints, and ambitions. The work ranged from digital product design to organizational transformation and strategic innovation.

My personal highlight was spending 7 months as a resident at La Victoria Lab in Lima, where I helped design and run a corporate startup accelerator for Intercorp, Peru's largest business conglomerate. Cima, a successful financial product that's still in market today, emerged from that program.

The best part about IDEO was being surrounded by exceptional people who taught me how to approach challenges with optimism, bring a human-centered lens to business problems, take ownership, embrace ambiguity, work across cultures and industries, and understand that great design work requires equal parts craft, strategy, and the ability to bring people along on the journey. 




2013, 2014 · Delhi
Information Designer


Making complex health data actionable through design at Public Health Foundation of India


In my previous life, I was a graphic and information designer. The most impactful work during this time was at the Public Health Foundation of India, where I designed infographics about malnutrition and immunization across the country.

Public health experts and ministry officials used them to raise awareness and make informed investment decisions about critical health programs affecting millions of people.



Building with AI
I learn by doing. In the last 6 months, I've spent my evenings building & shipping three AI-powered products (not just prototypes). It feels like a new superpower has been unlocked. Each project has taught me something different about designing with LLMs, moving fast, and also made me realize how important brand & distribution will be when almost anyone can build & ship products.

June 2025
Replit · Web


Letting kids create unique stories by dropping emojis into a magical pot with Storypot


One Thursday evening at bedtime, my 5-year-old pointed at a ceramic frog-shaped container and said, "Papa, can you tell me a story about that?" Five days later, I had a prototype.

Storypot lets kids drop emojis into a magical pot to create unique stories tailored to their age and interests. Parents can weave in themes like kindness, big feelings, or trying again—helping kids explore emotions through stories they're excited to hear.

Since launching, over 1,000 stories have been created, it's been featured in Lenny's Newsletter, has its own podcast (also using LLMs with ElevenLabs to generate audio from text), and has received love from parents and kids across the world. I'm now working with a small team on an iOS app and evolving the product based on what we've learned.







Aug 2025
Claude Code · iOS


Teaching basketball fans the strategic side of the sport  with Sideline


Sideline is a basketball strategy game for people (like me) who love the tactical side as much as the highlights. You step into the coach's shoes and make the calls that win games.

I wanted to see if I could use LLMs to build a fully functional iOS app, learn how to publish things to the App Store, and brush up on some SwiftUI – so I took a topic I love (basketball!), and used a simple card based mechanism like Reigns to create something that would put a spotlight on all the tactics and the terminology of basketball.

I learned how painful it is to actually get something approved & published on the App Store, in addition to a whole lot about how Claude Code works, how to keep the project on track, what to do when solving one problem creates multiple new ones, etc. 

The launch was very well received within the basketball community. I also learned to use TikTok to distribute the app and drive traffic. I also quickly realized that it is extremely difficult to get people to pay for a niche basketball strategy game app like this one (: 





Akshan Ish
Last Updated: November, 2025
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