00 · PROFILE
Janam Shah
A designer who ships. Product, brand, growth, and the code in between. Head of Design at Leucine. 9+ years in.
J. SHAHIf you don't take risks, you can't create a future.
— Monkey D. Luffy, One Piece
I started in 2015 by co-founding a small company — strategy, brand, and digital work for early-stage clients. In 2017 I was hired into Yes Bank's ISME ACE accelerator as the designer for its funded startups, owning everything from UI/UX to brand. From there to solo product engagements, then Leucine in 2020 as a product designer. I am now Head of Design there, six years in.
The work has cut across industries that look unrelated — pharma manufacturing, fintech debt-recovery, astrology marketplaces, banquet halls, theatre, an elder-care NGO — but the through-line is the same one: whoever uses the thing should be able to use it, and whoever pays for it should see what they paid for. The domain changes. The discipline does not.
I write production-quality front-end (React, TypeScript, Next.js) and ship it. I wire up backends with tools like Supabase and ship full features end-to-end — but I do not architect distributed systems or tune query performance at scale. I am still learning it, and I am direct about the line.
Most of the projects on this site started smaller than they ended up.
Moneytor — a debt-recovery platform — came to me as a visual refresh. It became a 10-module rebuild because I spent the first month sitting through six different operational roles to understand how the product was actually used. The Leucine design system was meant to be a quick spike; it consolidated a five-person design team into one in five days. The Aannapurnaa NGO site was a five-day build. The brief is rarely the real job, and I tend to find the real job by getting closer to the work than I was asked to.
I work across product, brand, and code in the same head. At Leucine I lead product design across two products — MES, our manufacturing-execution system, and CLEEN, our compliance platform — while the brand work ran in parallel. This portfolio, the invoice tool, and the theatre archive were all designed and built by the same person.
I show, not document. The reasoning behind each decision lives inside the case study's deep dive, not in a separate strategy memo.
A design is good when something measurable changed after it shipped.
The data-entry burden for factory-floor staff at a pharma client dropped 92% after a redesign. A banquet hall sold out its New Year's Eve event from a standing start. A five-person design team consolidated to one because the system I built replaced the handoffs between them. The work is not the artefact; it is the change in the metric.
The case studies are the philosophy, written one project at a time.
In 2025 I started building production apps in code. Six shipped since.
A Head of Design or product-management role.
Open to full-time roles, fractional leadership for one or two early-stage teams in parallel, and select consulting with a clear outcome and a sharp deadline.