Varun Mehra
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
New Delhi, Delhi, India
Toptal member since October 3, 2022
Varun is a founding product designer (Swif, YC S20) who ships 0→1 and growth experiences that turn complex workflows into simple, trusted UI. Ex-Smartsheet (Admin & Commerce), he’s designed high-stakes subscription and admin flows at scale, built design systems that keep teams fast and consistent, and mentored designers through strong critique and craft. He partners tightly with remote engineers to deliver polished, measurable outcomes, and helped drive Swif’s path to ~$1M ARR and AI workflows.
Portfolio
Unified Plan and Billing | Payment and Subscription Management for Smartsheet
Unified Case Management System for CMS | Center for Medicare and Medicaid
System UX Design for Digital Banking SaaS Platform
Real-time Vehicle Telematics and Employee Fleet Management Platform
Work Experience
Design Director & Mentor
Roadcast
- Led growth design across the funnel (acquisition → activation → retention), shipping iterative improvements to onboarding and key workflows to increase conversion and product adoption.
- Established a centralized product intake + prioritization loop (request template, weekly triage, shared tracker), reducing ad-hoc requests and improving decision speed across design/PM/eng.
- Directed the Bolt V2 redesign from discovery to launch, aligning stakeholders on scope, validating concepts through usability tests, and delivering end-to-end specs for engineering.
- Mentored designers through weekly critiques and 1:1 coaching, improving craft quality and consistency while enabling faster execution across multiple parallel projects.
- Implemented a feedback + insights cadence by synthesizing customer notes into weekly themes and recommendations, driving at least three prioritized UX improvements per quarter.
Founding Product Designer
Swif
- Led 0→1 product design at Swif—discovery, IA, flows, UI, and interaction design—shipping the core “golden path” experiences that supported the company’s growth to around $1M ARR.
- Built and maintained early design-system foundations (tokens + components + usage guidelines), improving consistency across new surfaces and enabling faster, cleaner handoff with engineering.
- Partnered with remote PM/engineering teams to deliver high-fidelity specs and prototypes, ensuring strong Figma-to-production parity and reducing rework across implementation cycles.
- Implemented a tight iteration loop using customer calls, support/sales feedback, and product signals to prioritize and ship improvements that reduced onboarding confusion and increased completion through key workflows.
- Designed conversion-focused onboarding and setup flows, using drop-off points and usability feedback to simplify key steps and improve time-to-value for new customers.
- Standardized UX writing, empty/loading/error states, and interaction patterns across workflows to make the product feel more predictable, trustworthy, and easier to learn.
- Collaborated with the founder and cross-functional stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into shippable scopes, aligning on tradeoffs and delivering polished releases on tight timelines.
Product Designer
Smartsheet
- Led design for admin and commerce initiatives across unified plan and billing and admin center experiences, supporting around 40,000 unassisted subscriptions ($200m+ ARR) through self-serve flows.
- Redesigned key trial/signup and purchase steps to reduce friction and clarify “what happens next,” improving flow comprehension and lowering drop-offs in high-stakes billing moments.
- Designed plan, seat, and billing management UX (upgrades/downgrades, seat changes, renewals) with clear confirmations and safeguards to reduce costly admin mistakes.
- Partnered closely with PM/engineering to ship production-ready specs and interaction details, improving delivery quality across complex edge cases and multi-surface workflows.
- Validated improvements through usability checks and post-launch signals (support feedback + funnel behavior), iterating on messaging, error states, and decision points to increase trust.
UX Designer
Tista
- Designed a unified case-management experience (IA, end-to-end flows, UI, interaction specs) covering intake → case updates → status tracking → handoffs across multiple user roles.
- Conducted UX research across 80+ user interviews and deep stakeholder immersion (case workers, program leads, ops) to capture workflows, pain points, and constraints for CMS case-management programs.
- Synthesized research into actionable themes, journey maps, and prioritized requirements—translating user insights into feasible, build-ready design decisions aligned with policy and operational realities.
- Ensured platform-wide consistency through documentation of UI elements. Designed and delivered a new design language consisting of UI components and carried out the E2E design process from research to wireframes for the UCM ecosystem.
- Improved clarity and efficiency in high-complexity tasks by simplifying navigation, reducing cognitive load, and standardizing key patterns (forms, validation, empty/error states, confirmations).
UX Designer
Infosys
- Designed end-to-end customer-facing digital products for clients as a part of the digital experiences team. Worked on Finacle, a banking software built by Infosys.
- Defined features, refined the system architecture, and designed wireframes for Finacle while working in a cross-collaborative environment.
- Created UI assets, standardized the legacy system, and implemented multilingual software for our global clients.
UI and Graphic Designer
Cintrafor
- Designed and developed a new website serving more than 2,000 active monthly users.
- Created interactive data visualizations for an open source trade database to be integrated into the website as a new feature.
- Developed illustrations and digital graphics for the website, social media, and print publications, increasing the outreach by 18%.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Human Computer Interaction
University of Washington - Seattle, WA, USA
Certifications
Human Centered Systems Thinking
IDEO U
Strategic Design
Rhode Island School of Design
Skills
Tools
Sketch, InVision, Zeplin, Adobe Illustrator, Wix, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Final Cut Pro X, Miro, Adobe InDesign, Adobe CC, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Jira, Claude, Slack
Platforms
Figma, iOS
Languages
JavaScript, CSS
Other
UX Design, UI Design, Product Design, Complex Application User Interfaces (UI), Human-centered Design (HCD), Low-fidelity Prototypes, UX Wireframes, Wireframe to Product, Web App UX, User Journeys, User Personas, User Flows, User Interviews, User Interface (UI), Web Design, Mobile Design, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Web App Design, Web App UI, Wireframing, High-fidelity Mockups, Mobile UX, Mobile App Design, Product Discovery, Design Systems, Fintech, User Experience (UX), SaaS, SaaS Design, Mobile UI, Mobile Prototypes, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), User Research, UX Documentation, Dashboard Design, Material Design, Trading, Mobile UX Design, Mobile UI Design, B2B, Early-stage Startups, Digital Product Design, Workflow, Document Management Systems (DMS), Automation, Interactive Dashboards, Information Design, Web Applications, Style Guides, User Stories, Prototyping, Workshop Facilitation, Journey Mapping, Dashboards, Microsoft Teams, App Design, UI Components, UX Audits, Collaboration, Communication, Competitive Analysis, Mockups, Mobile Apps, Color Palettes, Typography, Logo Design, MVP Design, Software as a Service (SaaS), UX Strategy, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Interactive Prototypes, Conceptual Design, Customer Journey, Design Workshops, Enterprise SaaS, Fintech Design, Information Architecture (IA), A/B Testing, Graphic Design, Sustainability, Data Visualization, iOS UX Design, Visual Design, Branding, Cross-platform, Social Networks, Strategic Design, Project Management, Holistic UX Design, UX Pattern Design, Mobile App UI, Systems Thinking, Human-centered Systems Thinking, Complex Web Systems, Complex Problem Solving, System Design, React, Cross-functional Collaboration, UX Research, System UI, UX Review, Web UX, User Journey Maps, User Workflows, Stakeholder Interviews, Stakeholder Mapping, System Process Mapping, Rapid Prototyping, Business Cases, Desktop Web Design, Finance, Enterprise Application Design, Design Testing, ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Agents, Notion, Framer, Wix Studio, Design Thinking, Jira Administrator, Zeplin to HTML, Enterprise
Experience
- Figma - 9 years
- UI Design - 8 years
- UX Design - 8 years
- Product Design - 8 years
- Complex Application User Interfaces (UI) - 6 years
- UX Wireframes - 6 years
- Human-centered Design (HCD) - 5 years
- SaaS Design - 4 years
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