About Tejasvi Soi
Hi, I'm Tejasvi. I go by TJ mostly, it's just easier to call out at Starbucks. I'm a product designer based in Bangalore, India. I've been designing digital products for about five years, across consumer apps, enterprise tools, and the awkward space in between where most of the interesting problems live.
Right now I lead a team of designers at PhonePe, where we're building software products for merchants at every scale, from a kirana store to a national chain. The design challenge is the same at both ends but the context is completely different, and figuring out how to hold that range inside a single coherent system is most of what I think about day to day.
I'm also running a small internal experiment: redesigning how the team works by folding AI into our process early and deliberately, not as a shortcut but as a way to compress the distance between a rough idea and something testable. It's changing how I think about the role of a designer in a product team.
Photo by Shivatmika S R
I design and I code. Not at the level of an engineer, but enough to sit comfortably inside the constraints that define what's actually buildable. That intimacy with how things are made is, I think, what separates good design from great execution. You can't push quality if you don't know where the edges are.
I have a high bar for quality and I obsess over the details, visual design, interaction design, the feel of something in motion. I'll spend a long time on a transition that most people won't consciously notice, and I think that's time well spent. But I've done this long enough to know that sweating the details only matters if the bigger picture is sound first.
I'm drawn to complexity that has a system underneath it. Most design problems, if you look long enough, reduce to a handful of tensions that keep coming back. My job is to find those tensions early, name them clearly, and design around them rather than pretend they don't exist.
Successful design is a collaborative thing. Research, product, engineering, design, all of it has to be in conversation or the output reflects that disconnection. And there's always compromise in the process. I've stopped fighting that and started getting better at knowing which compromises are worth making and which ones quietly erode the work.
Outside of work I spend a lot of time on a motorcycle, usually heading somewhere with a good view or a trail. I shoot on a Fujifilm X-S20, occasionally a Polaroid and a film camera when I want the constraint of limited frames. I write about things I'm learning at rabbit holes and build small projects when something doesn't exist and I want it to.
I'm also a bit obsessive about coffee. I have an espresso machine at home that took me three months to dial in properly and I consider that time well spent. If we ever meet in person there's a reasonable chance I'll offer to pull you a shot.