Sreeja Balachandran

Who I am

My strength is connecting system design and product frameworks to cohesive end-to-end experiences: understanding how products, workflows and teams relate, clarifying the decisions people need to make, and carrying that structure into clear interactions and implementation.

I enjoy problems that require learning a new domain, bringing clarity to evolving requirements, and collaborating closely with product managers, engineers and architects — bringing together diverse perspectives, inputs and constraints to create coherent, adaptive experiences for the emerging agentic design era.

The question underneath most of it

Looking back at the four case studies, they are all about the same thing: how much structure one role is allowed to impose on another. A marketing operations team building templates for campaign authors. An administrator deciding what a data orchestration may send where. A supervisor deciding when to step into someone else’s conversation. An agent proposing work a marketer has to be able to take apart.

That question is not answered on a screen. It is answered in the objects underneath — what is one thing and what is many, what can be overridden and what cannot, and whether every operation has an inverse. It is also why the agentic work was not a change of subject: an agent needs a specification to satisfy, and years of arguing about structure turned out to be the groundwork for it.

How I work

• Start from the system model, not just the screen. Enterprise products break when every new use case becomes a one-off template or custom screen. I look for the underlying structure — whether that’s a shared permission model or a reusable component grammar — so the product stays coherent as it grows.
• Use concrete scenarios and real data to test assumptions early. Working through a realistic end-to-end scenario against actual data constraints exposes edge cases before anyone writes code — especially in AI and data-platform workflows where what an agent can reason about depends on the data underneath.
• Design for how people notice problems, not just how they act on them. Giving users a button to intervene is easy; helping them spot when and where their attention is needed is the real design problem.
• Lead through written clarity and cross-team partnership. In large organizations, designers rarely have direct authority over platform teams or sibling products. Laying out clear options, trade-offs, and system constraints in writing is how I align PMs, architects, and design-system teams around a shared direction.

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Before software

I trained as an architect in Kerala, then took a master’s in design at IIT Bombay and spent two years as a senior industrial designer at Tata Elxsi in Bangalore. I moved to the Bay Area and did an MFA in web design and new media at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

What I’m looking for

A Principal or Lead Principal UX / Product Design role where I can shape product direction and stay closely involved in the design.

I’m especially drawn to work that helps people make better decisions, manage complexity with confidence, and collaborate effectively with intelligent systems. My next step is an opportunity with broader influence — leading agentic design across connected experiences, shaping how autonomous and assistive capabilities support user goals, strengthening collaboration across disciplines, and helping other designers grow.

If any of the four case studies is close to something you are working on, I would like to hear about it: sreebala@gmail.com.