Leadership work
Leading design at Instamart has been one of my most challenging and rewarding experiences. With the product growing rapidly and new charters and features constantly added, the work has been fast-paced and often unpredictable. On top of that, the competitive market has pushed us to take on ad hoc projects to stay ahead and create strong value for our customers.
In this dynamic environment, my focus as a leader has been to manage the team effectively—ensuring we stay customer-focused, make decisions backed by data, and deliver impact without burning out.
Elevating Instamart app experience with DLS and native tech stack
Time frame
Apr 2023 - Feb 2024 (DLS), Apr 2024 - Jan 2025 (Native)
Org need
In order to achieve the vision of Super app, all offerings needed to reuse the Design Language System (DLS) components to provide a coherent and unified app experience. Moreover, the web experience would be migrated to a native experience on iOS and Andoid, to offer a slicker and faster app ordering experience
Goal
Identify the design POCs for both DLS-compliance and Native migration, establish ways of working with engineering to keep the project on track, and coordinate with the food team and the DLS designer to build new components for Instamart
Key constraints
Both projects were XXL-sized projects and had to be taken up over and above ongoing business-impact projects. The design team was very small and already stretched in bandwidth
Making Instamart DLS-compliant
1️⃣ Scope of effort & assigning design POC
Due to the complexity of Instamart and the effort needed to define components properly, we broke down the DLS work into milestones to better utilize the design and engineering bandwidth.
Since this wasn’t part of our original roadmap—and with only 4 designers on the team—I assigned a junior designer to work with me and the DLS designer, while judiciously allocating other projects among the remaining team members.
2️⃣ DLS specifications, review and implementation
We started by reusing DLS components and tokens from the food delivery product. After our team reviewed them, we shared them with DLS engineers to update the storybook and codebase. It was tough and took time since engineering teams were stretched, but it was key to ensuring a consistent experience across all Swiggy products.
DLS tokenization of Instamart components
3️⃣ Ensuring DLS adoption at project level
Post the completion of both milestones on DLS compliance, I worked with my manager to set up a process of DLS audit at every project level before handing over to the developers. We focused on training our designers to reuse components from other offerings like food and dineout whenever possible, and only request to build new components for Instamart with the right justification.
Projects with new components include DLS specs by default
On the Instamart B2B side, we also started using DLS tokens to make the experience scalable for desktop web usage in Brand and vendor portal. This also enabled our partners to see the Swiggy experience in enterprise tools.
Storybook with Desktop DLS components
Impact of DLS
109 man hours
saved by developers
100% compliance
of Instamart components to date
Native migration
This was a big engineering project, as both backend and frontend had to be built from scratch, including new DLS components that were only on the web before. On the design side, the main focus to do pixel perfection with developers to ensure the native experience on iOS and Android matched the web experience perfectly.
The DLS designer also led the pixel-perfect work for native migration, supported by my Senior Manager. I was pulled in whenever there was some clarification needed on the prioritization or bandwidth issues arose in design.
Moving to Native has enabled a snappier app experience
Impact of native migration
Faster load times
0.145s vs 0.383s in web
Same API latency
as in web
Improved usability
due to seamless microinteractions
Increase in search
due to snappy autosuggestions
Add to carts increase
due to smoother browsing
70% reuse
of Food and Dineout components
Drive design-led inspiration for the org through visioning & hackathons
Time frame
2023 - present
Org need
With quick commerce getting more competitive every year, our product needs to keep evolving to stay ahead in the market. It’s up to the design leadership—my VP, my senior manager, and me—to set the vision and motivate the team to come up with new ideas that improve the Instamart experience.
Goal
Brainstorm on new ideas for Instamart, make prototypes of the same and present to leadership. Approved ideas will be taken up as full-fledged projects with dedicated engineering bandwidth
Instamart visioning
Every six months, the leadership team sets aside a week for visioning and inspiration, while the roadmap work is handled by our reporting designers. This is essential because our competitors are always racing to improve their app experiences, which results in the market share loss unless we keep up the pace.
The visioning exercise usually entails the following steps:
1️⃣ Creating a moodboard for inspiration
This is when we look online for creative ideas and interactions to elevate the grocery shopping experience from various inspiration websites and apps
Sources of inspiration
2️⃣ Idea playground to spark creative direction
Using the mood boards, we create high-level design concepts that go beyond current patterns and push the boundaries of how Instamart can look and feel. The goal is to excite the team and show Swiggy leadership what the future of Instamart could be.
Getting ideas for components to be built in future
3️⃣ Leadership alignment and adding to roadmap
We put together a full deck to show the Instamart leadership a new homepage and other key touchpoints. The idea was to get their feedback and see how we could push the boundaries of grocery shopping. These discussions often led to new features being added to the roadmap.
Some components built from the vision alignment with leadership
Impact of visioning
Visioning exercises are a must for Swiggy Design leaders to be able to drive influence to the organization's product building, and helps to showcase the future potential of the product and unlock newer ways of capturing market
Generating ideas through hackathons
Apart from visioning for Instamart, I initiated and led a design hackathon with the larger design team, to spark fresh ideas and reduce recency bias. I also made it more fun and engaging by organizing a quiz competition on Instamart and Design, with a prize for the winner. It was a great way to simulate our creative juices and inspire the Instamart design team!
Scenes from the Instamart designathon
All the ideas from the designathon were collated in a single Figma file, and a single prototype with all interactions and simulations were shared with the org leadership. The top ideas were picked as full-fledged engineering builds.
Artefacts from the designathon
Appreciation from the founder
Impact of hackathons
We have now made hackathons a half-yearly activity, and the organizartion has acknowledge the benefit of setting aside a day to just brainstorm and come up with new and fresh ideas. The most recent one was in April 2025, where the focus was on building new capabilities and ideas leveraging the benefits of native stack.
