Senior Product Designer· Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Saumya Agarwal

Ten years turning enterprise banking and marketplace complexity into interfaces people actually trust.

Currently redesigning Customer Due Diligence with AI-agentic UX at Emirates NBD, Dubai.

10+

10+ Years

of Experience

University of Toronto

University of Toronto

Visual Design, 2022

HFI CUA™

HFI CUA™

#2019-7544

DQ8.1

Design Quotient

DQ Score

Saumya Agarwal

Why UX?

Saumya Agarwal - a personal moment

My biggest strength turned out to be an unglamorous one: I empathise easily. In UX design that's the whole job - understanding a person well enough to design for them before they've explained the problem to you. Paired with a fairly relentless need to get to the bottom of things, it's what pulls me toward the messiest, most cross-functional problems rather than away from them.

Ten years of end-to-end design across enterprise banking and consumer marketplaces - with a proven read on how business goals and product metrics should shape a design roadmap, not just follow it.

Mentoring budding UX designers since 2018, and occasionally invited to universities and workshops worldwide to talk about why UX matters.

Education

  • University of Toronto

    University of Toronto

    Visual Design, Design & Visual Communications

    2022

  • Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun

    B.Tech, Computer Science

    2011 – 2015

Toolbox

  • Figma
  • Sketch
  • Adobe XD
  • Illustrator
  • Photoshop

Experience

  1. Senior Product Designer

    Jan 2025 - Present
    Emirates NBD logoEmirates NBDDubai, UAE
    • Leading UX for API Souq, a self-serve API marketplace for corporate banking clients.
    • Automating cheque encashment and QMS flows to move corporate branches toward paperless banking.
    • Redesigning Customer Due Diligence (CDD) with AI-agentic UX - human oversight built into every automated step.
    API DesignProcess AutomationAgentic UX
  2. Lead UX Designer, Advanced Analytics

    May 2024 - Jan 2025
    Mashreq logoMashreqDubai, UAE
    • Facilitated a series of collaborative journey mapping workshops to assess and refine the existing customer journey, aiming to develop a more user-centric design strategy.
    • Led a series of collaborative sessions with senior stakeholders to elevate the role of design and streamline existing processes, resulting in better alignment between the product, design, and research teams.
    • Introduced new processes to the design system team to effectively manage localization requirements and rigorously test all new components prior to production. This has led to greater efficiency and consistency across the product.
    Problem FramingB2B DesignWorkshop Facilitation
  3. Product Designer II

    Nov 2021 - May 2024
    Meesho logoMeeshoBangalore, India
    • Ran user research and usability testing that directly informed design strategy and the broader user journey.
    • Advocated for user-centered design principles org-wide - empathy, research and iteration as the default, not the exception.
    • Facilitated cross-functional workshops across product, engineering and business stakeholders.
    Customer JourneysWCAGUsability Testing
  4. Senior User Experience Designer

    May 2020 - Dec 2021
    Oracle logoOracleHyderabad, India
    • Set design strategy across thirteen NetSuite verticals for enterprise customers.
    • Partnered closely with the user research team to keep customer insight embedded in the roadmap.
    • Built strong cross-team collaboration between design, product and engineering.
    Customer JourneysWCAGCross-functional Collaboration
  5. Product Designer

    Jan 2020 - May 2020
    Berkadia logoBerkadiaHyderabad, India
    • Owned usability testing and user research for a user-centred redesign.
    • Managed and collaborated closely with business stakeholders across the project.
    Customer JourneysWCAGUsability Testing
  6. UX Designer

    Jan 2016 - Jan 2020
    Cognizant Technology Solutions logoCognizant Technology SolutionsHyderabad, India
    • Represented and advocated for UX, turning feedback into action proactively rather than reactively.
    • Defined a design system and prepared UX estimates for delivery planning.
    • Ran customer-feedback-oriented, iterative design across four years of delivery.
    Customer JourneysWCAGDesign Systems

Where it started

Summer Intern

Jun 2014 - Aug 2014

Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd · Dehradun, India

Built a library management system with a team of four, handling the front end and database work for cataloguing, issuing and tracking books and journals.

Summer Intern

Jun 2014 - Jul 2014

Forest Research Institute, Indian Military Academy · Dehradun, India

Designed the golf course layouts for FRIMA using Adobe Photoshop.

Community & impact

Mentoring, speaking and organizing - the work I do outside the day job.

Design Mentor
Since 2018

Design Mentor

ADPList & ImaginXP

What started as informal mentoring in 2018 with ImaginXP grew into open 1:1 hours on ADPList a few years later - portfolio teardowns, mock interviews, and the harder conversations that don't fit neatly into either: how to negotiate a raise, when to leave a role, how to rebuild confidence after a layoff. That's the part I care about most - helping someone actually get unstuck, not just critiquing the work.

View my ADPList profile
Speaker & Workshops
Guest Speaker

Speaker & Workshops

Dubai & India

I run and speak at design workshops across Dubai and India, something I've been doing for years - from intimate meetups to conference stages. Recently: a guest session at DDX'25, a Design Thinking talk for the 1% Club platform, Pearl Academy and CNBC-TV18's "What's Next" panel, and jury duty at Vivekananda Global University.

See workshop videos
Mentor, Topmate
5/5 Rating

Mentor, Topmate

1:1 Mentoring

Alongside ADPList, I run 1:1 office hours on Topmate for designers navigating portfolio reviews, mock interviews and career pivots - the same empathy-first approach from the day job, pointed at one person's career instead of one product's roadmap.

HustlerPeople's ChoiceBuilders '23
View my Topmate page
Dubai City Ambassador
Since Mar 2025

Dubai City Ambassador

ADPList - Meetups Lead

As Dubai's ADPList City Ambassador, I organize the local meetups that bring the region's design community into one room - the kind of low-key gathering where a hallway conversation solves more than a webinar ever could.

Advisory Board Member
Since Jun 2021

Advisory Board Member

Digital Influx

I sit on the advisory board at Digital Influx, weighing in on curriculum and industry direction for the next generation of designers coming up through their programs.

Featured Projects

From AI-assisted compliance to a self-serve API marketplace - the work behind a decade in enterprise banking and consumer product design.

Emirates NBD logoEmirates NBDJan 2025 – Present

Redesigning CDD with AI-agentic UX

Turning a manual, document-heavy compliance process into an AI-assisted flow that still keeps a human in control of every decision.

PROBLEM

Customer Due Diligence (CDD) for corporate onboarding was slow and document-heavy, with compliance officers repeating the same judgment calls across near-identical cases.

PROCESS

Mapped the end-to-end CDD workflow with compliance stakeholders to separate genuinely judgment-based steps from repetitive pattern-matching ones that AI could safely assist with.

SOLUTION

Designed agentic UX patterns where AI surfaces a recommendation with its reasoning, and the officer approves, edits or overrides - never a silent automatic decision on a compliance case.

OUTCOME

Now piloting with the CDD team ahead of a phased rollout - early feedback points to less time spent re-verifying cases AI already flagged as low-risk, freeing officer judgment for the cases that actually need it.

AI-agentic UXEnterprise bankingCompliance
Emirates NBD logoEmirates NBDJan 2025 – Present

API Souq - a self-serve API marketplace

Giving corporate clients and partner banks a discoverable, self-serve way to explore and integrate Emirates NBD's banking APIs.

PROBLEM

Corporate clients and partner banks had no self-serve way to discover or evaluate available banking APIs - every integration started with a manual sales conversation.

PROCESS

Designed the information architecture for a developer-friendly API catalog: browsable by use case, with documentation-first flows built for a technical audience evaluating integration fit.

SOLUTION

A self-serve marketplace where partners can browse, read docs and request access to APIs without waiting on a relationship manager for the first step.

OUTCOME

Rolling out to early partner banks - replacing a multi-week, relationship-manager-led onboarding with a catalog partners can evaluate on their own timeline.

B2BInformation architectureEnterprise banking
Mashreq logoMashreqMay 2024 – Jan 2025

Unifying Advanced Analytics UX

Bringing a consistent analytics experience to a corporate banking product that had grown inconsistent across teams.

PROBLEM

Advanced Analytics for corporate banking had fragmented UX patterns across features, built by different teams at different times - hurting adoption and consistency.

PROCESS

Ran a series of journey-mapping workshops with senior stakeholders to align product, design and research on one customer journey, then introduced localization and component-QA processes so new patterns stayed consistent before shipping.

SOLUTION

A shared analytics design language plus a lightweight governance process - new components get tested and localized before production, not after.

OUTCOME

The design language and QA gate shipped org-wide, and the workshop series was recognized internally with an "Appreciated for H1'2024" note from leadership for the cross-team alignment it produced.

Design systemsEnterprise bankingWorkshops
Meesho logoMeeshoNov 2021 – May 2024

Meesho Balance & reducing order cancellations

Cutting platform-level order cancellations at consumer scale by making selection feel more deliberate, before it becomes a support problem.

PROBLEM

Order cancellations were hurting NMV/GMV at scale, and most support demand was voice-only - expensive to run and slow for sellers waiting on resolution.

PROCESS

Usability testing and research to find where casual, low-intent ordering was driving cancellations, alongside a competitor scan showing peers offering chat, email and self-serve support where Meesho only had voice.

SOLUTION

Meesho Balance nudged more conscious order selection at the point of intent, while a self-serve chat bot deflected the most common support queries away from voice.

OUTCOME

Shipped alongside the self-serve chat bot, giving sellers a faster resolution path than voice-only support and nudging buyers toward more deliberate ordering at the moment of intent - the kind of small intervention that compounds at marketplace scale.

Consumer e-commerceResearchSelf-serve support
Oracle logoOracleMay 2020 – Dec 2021

Enhancing the Project Management Experience for NetSuite

Redesigning NetSuite's project management and project-accounting workflows so delivery and finance teams could track budgets, time and progress without fighting the tool.

PROBLEM

NetSuite's project management module was doing double duty for two different jobs - day-to-day delivery tracking and project-level accounting - and neither workflow was built with the other in mind, pushing enterprise customers into workarounds.

PROCESS

Partnered closely with Oracle's user research team to study how project managers and finance teams actually used the module day to day, then worked across design, product and engineering to reconcile the two workflows into one coherent structure.

SOLUTION

A redesigned project management experience that treats project accounting as a first-class part of the workflow - budgets, time tracking and delivery status live in the same place instead of two disconnected tools.

OUTCOME

Shipped as part of NetSuite's core project management module - used by enterprise customers across Oracle's thirteen NetSuite verticals to manage project-based accounting alongside day-to-day delivery.

Enterprise SaaSInformation architectureCross-functional

Skills

Ten years of craft, leadership and domain depth - organized the way I actually use them, not just listed.

Core UX

  • User-Centred Design
  • User Research
  • Usability Testing
  • Prototyping
  • Information Architecture
  • Customer Journey Mapping
  • Design Strategy
  • Problem Framing
  • Co-creation

Leadership

  • Mentoring & scaling design teams
  • Cross-functional facilitation
  • Stakeholder alignment
  • Design-system governance
  • Public speaking

Domain

  • B2B / enterprise banking UX
  • AI-agentic UX
  • Consumer e-commerce UX
  • Localization

What people say

"I had the privilege of managing Saumya, one of the most talented and driven UX designers I've had the pleasure to work with. She consistently dives deep into every aspect of design - from user flows and wireframes right through to micro-interactions and final polish. She absorbs new information with impressive speed: whether it's emerging design patterns, user research findings, accessibility guidelines or business requirements, she internalizes them and weaves them seamlessly into her work.

What's truly inspiring is that when she talks about design, you can literally see her eyes light up - she brings genuine enthusiasm and curiosity to her craft. She doesn't just execute; she asks thoughtful questions, challenges assumptions and actively seeks opportunities to elevate the user experience.

Saumya also consistently impressed her colleagues: she collaborated with cross-functional teams, shared her insights generously, and helped elevate the collective design quality. Her peers often remarked on how thoughtful her contributions were, and how she brought clarity and focus to complex design challenges.

She takes proactive steps to expand her knowledge: exploring new tools, seeking feedback, staying current with trends and always striving for better. In collaborative settings she's a strong partner - she communicates her thinking clearly, engages stakeholders meaningfully and brings others along on her vision. At the same time, she holds herself to high standards and cares deeply about the details - from visual consistency to interaction logic to how the user feels at each touchpoint.

In short: Saumya is someone who not only gets things done, but consistently raises the bar. She's a designer who brings creativity and discipline, curiosity and rigor - and anyone fortunate enough to work with her will benefit from her mindset, her skill, and her collaborative spirit."

MB

Mayr Budny

Head of Product Design · Berkadia

LinkedIn

1 of 8 recommendations

Companies I've designed for

Ten years across enterprise banking and consumer marketplaces.

Emirates NBD

Open Finance & AI-agentic banking UX

Mashreq

Advanced Analytics & design-system governance

Meesho

Consumer marketplace UX at scale

Emirates NBD

Open Finance & AI-agentic banking UX

Mashreq

Advanced Analytics & design-system governance

Meesho

Consumer marketplace UX at scale

Emirates NBD

Open Finance & AI-agentic banking UX

Mashreq

Advanced Analytics & design-system governance

Meesho

Consumer marketplace UX at scale

Oracle

Enterprise NetSuite design strategy

Berkadia

Usability research & user-centred redesign

Cognizant Technology Solutions

UX design systems & delivery

Oracle

Enterprise NetSuite design strategy

Berkadia

Usability research & user-centred redesign

Cognizant Technology Solutions

UX design systems & delivery

Oracle

Enterprise NetSuite design strategy

Berkadia

Usability research & user-centred redesign

Cognizant Technology Solutions

UX design systems & delivery

Awards & certifications

Recognition

  • CTO Summit Cup

    Won the CTO Cup representing a team of 42 designers during the quarterly summit.

  • Xtra Mile Award

    Cognizant · Oct 2018

    Got appreciated for the incredible contribution to project delivery.

  • Invited as a Speaker

    IxDA (Interaction Design Association) · May 2018

    Invited to share experience and knowledge about UX and Heuristic Evaluation with about 40 designers.

  • Spot Award

    Cognizant · Feb 2018

    Received the Spot Award for Performer of the Month.

Certifications

  • 500 Mentorship Minutes

    ADPList · Jun 2022

  • Certified Usability Analyst (CUA™) #2019-7544

    Human Factors International (HFI) · Sep 2019

  • Adobe XD Essentials

    Adobe · May 2019

  • UX Designer

    ImaginXP · Sep 2016

  • Design Thinking 101

    Cognizant

Saumya Agarwal receiving the Emirates NBD GEM Award
Design Quotient8.1

Let's connect

Have a project, a role, or a question about UX? I read everything that comes through here myself.

Email

uxwithsaumya@gmail.com

Quick Message

WhatsApp Me

Location

Dubai, United Arab Emirates