Dhvanil Patel

Designer → Generalist. At the moment, I'm freelancing and indie-hacking – while travelling around in SE Asia. I'm working on projects such as Read-Next and Collate – trying to build, launch, grow and monetize them.

In the past, I’ve worked at Playment, Sprinklr, Wikimedia Foundation, Cobalt.io, and Instamojo.

IndieHacking

Nomad, 2019 – today

Since the past few months, I've been building and maintaining indie-projects. Indie-hacking involves conceptualizing, designing, building, launching, growing and monetizing these projects. It is quite challenging, especially having to work across various fronts: Design, Product, Sales, Content, Marketing, Growth. At the same time – it is super rewarding.

Some of the projects I've launched recently are:

Spell.tools

AI powered marketing

Read Next is a website which recommends books to read. It includes over 4000+ books with 50000+ datapoints curated from more than 100+ sources. You can read more about why I built Read-Next?

Read Next

A better way to select books to read!

Playment

Bangalore, 2017 – 2019

Playment is an early stage startup building the infrastructure to provide high quality training data for computer vision systems. We help companies and startups working in autonomous driving space to accelerate their AI development process.

Working as a Designer at a fast growing early stage startup is a lot of fun. The roles are muddy, processes are vague, requirements are unclear and the products are unpolished. Everything is a constant interation mode.

Advancing the AI Age

High quality training data for Computer Vision systems

Suite of Annotation Products

Building the training data infrastructure for the AI age

Building 3D Annotation Tools

Advanced sensor fusion annotations (LiDAR + RADAR + Camera)

Scaling Design at Playment

Lessons learnt building the Design team at Playment

At Playment, I also learn more about the business impact of Design, and how to build products that creates value for the customers. Having seen the various iteration cycles of the Products and all the different touchpoints, it helps me look at things from a variety of perspectives — from product and technology, to sales and marketing.

I also help set up the Design function at Playment. This involves hiring Designers, onboarding, mentoring and managing them. It is a completely new experience for me, with different sets of challenges and an intimidating learning curve.

I'm incredibly proud of the products we are building and designing at Playment. It isn't possible without the amazing team here. I also spoke about some ways we design interfaces at an Design event organized by Myntra.

Sprinklr

Gurgaon, 2016 – 2017

Sprinklr is a unified customer experience management platform for enterprises, It provides social media marketing, social advertising, content management, collaboration, advocacy and social media monitoring for large brands like Nike, Microsoft and McDonald's.

I worked on the Care Cloud, which encompasses a host of products which help companies to engage with customers across digital channels, contextualize the conversation, and gain customer insights.

Work at Sprinklr

High Quality Training data for AI Applications

I realised that designing for enterprises is a different ballgame altogether. The complexities involved, the constrains, the features, the functionalities, the technicalities, the stakeholders, and hundreds of use-cases – it is mind boggling.

Some of the work I've been a part of at Sprinklr is truly revolutionary, at the conceptual level in terms of how enterprise UX works. Message me up if you’d like to know about it (can’t put it up online yet.)

Wikimedia Foundation

San Francisco, 2015

In the summer of 2015, I interned at Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit which owns and operates Wikipedia and other Wikis) at their San Francisco headquarters.

I worked with their small but amazing Communications team, creating tools which enable them to share the size and the scale of the Wikipedia world through social media graphics. I worked with some of the most passionate Designers, Software Engineers and Data Scientists I've known.

Work at Wikimedia

Designing and Developing tools for the Comms team

More than that, working and living in the Bay Area had been an eye-opening experience. There were so many people I met, so many friends I made, so many places and events I went to, and so many things I learnt. It was my first experience of the Silicon Valley, and it has left me with learnings which have helped me a lot since then.

Data Visualization

2015 – till date

Charts and graphs was my favourite section in Microsoft Excel as a child. I spent hours playing with obscure .csv files, morphing them into pretty charts and fancy visualizations.

The tools and techniques have changed a lot since then, but the interest remained steadfast. The idea of transforming big huge incomprehensible datasets into engaging stories and insights still fascinates me to no end.

Here are some of the Data Visualization projects I've worked on:

The Beautiful Game

Data visualization story on Football

Sometimes I also speak about Data Visualization. Here’s one of an introductory talk I gave about Visualizaing Data at a Facebook Developers' Meetup in Delhi.

Intro to Data Visualization

Slides from a talk I gave about Data Visualization

Internships

Mumbai & San Francisco, 2013 – 2015

A great deal of my learnings in design and technology are a direct result of the internship experiences I've had over the years. Instamojo was my first taste of what a technology startup is and how they work. Read more about my experience at Instamojo.

I also worked at Cobalt.io, a penetration-as-a-service platform for a few months – designing and developing a part of their client side dashboard, working on a few product improvements, and lots of really random impromptu design tasks.

Internships have been an incredible opportunity for me to dip my toes in the startup ecosystem, meeting and connecting with amazing people, brainstorming ideas, discussing, debating, learning and growing.