Craft, culture and community: A recap of PhonePe Grid
Reflecting on our first community design event
August 12, 2025
In June this year, we brought together the design community for PhonePe Grid, an event that combined learning, honest feedback, and great conversation—all set in one of Bangalore's most inspiring spaces. We wanted to create something that matched the ambition of what we're building at PhonePe, and the design work we do for 61 crore+ registered users*.
We hosted Grid at the Museum of Art and Photography in central Bengaluru. MAP felt like the perfect backdrop for conversations about creating meaningful experiences. When you're talking about design that moves people, it helps to be surrounded by art that does exactly that.
The Panel: Building at scale
We kicked off the event by bringing together our heads of Business, Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Design for an honest conversation about what it's really like building products that millions use every day.
The panel—Sonika Chandra (VP of Business Development, PhonePe), Sudhanva Rao (Head of Product, Pincode), Maulik Shukla (Head of Engineering, Indus Appstore), Amit Doshi (Group Chief Marketing Officer) and Rahul Gonsalves (Group Head of Design)—opened with a question:
What's the most counter-intuitive thing you've learned about building products at PhonePe?
A few key insights emerged from the conversation:
The Personalisation Paradox: "Every once in a while someone walks up and says, 'we should personalise this,'" shared Sudhanva. "People assume personalisation is always good. But our data showed otherwise. The most intuitive thing for the user (and therefore very counter-intuitive) is building predictable experiences for users".
Assumptions vs. Reality: Sonika explained how the team learned to "let go of personal intuition and biases, especially when building for a diverse audience of a billion people." For example, when designing PIN-less transactions, they thought they were removing friction. However, many users actually preferred having a PIN, as it made them feel more secure. It goes to show, she said, that “Scale itself is a product, and a very, very different experience”.
Soul + Business: "The best way for a business to scale and sell is when there is 'soul' in the product," Sonika noted. "Otherwise you're constantly trying to convince people to choose your product—if the product itself conveys that, then you've won."
The conversation made it clear: designing for massive scale requires different thinking than designing for smaller audiences. Personal preferences don't always translate to user needs, and the best business outcomes often come from prioritising user experience over short-term revenue opportunities.
The Portfolio Review Sessions
The highlight of the event was the Portfolio Review Session with five industry leaders.
Sunit Singh (SVP Design at Krutrim), Aashish Solanki (Founder and CEO of NetBramha), Shreeya Malpani (Head of Design at Cure.fit), Rasagy Sharma (Head of Design for DataLabs at Capital One) and Hardik Pandya (ex-SVP of Design at Unacademy) sat down with attendees for one-on-one feedback sessions.
The format was simple: bring a link to your portfolio, and get 10 minutes of focused critique and guidance from someone who's been in the industry for years.
Senior designers from the PhonePe team also joined them in reviewing and critiquing portfolios from the lens of designing at scale. As so many of us have benefited from real conversations and honest critiques from people who've put in the work, we wanted to give back to the community and make that happen for our attendees too.
Events like this remind us that design was always about solving real problems for real people, at a scale that can impact millions of lives.
The conversations we started at The Grid are continuing in our work, our teams, and our community. The energy in that space proved something important: when designers come together to share honestly about their craft, everybody gets better.
See it for yourself in this video:
Special thanks to the PhonePe Internal Communications and HR teams for helping us pull this together, to MAP for hosting us in such an inspiring space, and to everyone else who made this event one to remember.
Want to be a part of future events? Sign up to our newsletter and keep an eye out for announcements on PhonePe’s social media.
*All data as of March 31, 2025
In June this year, we brought together the design community for PhonePe Grid, an event that combined learning, honest feedback, and great conversation—all set in one of Bangalore's most inspiring spaces. We wanted to create something that matched the ambition of what we're building at PhonePe, and the design work we do for 61 crore+ registered users*.
We hosted Grid at the Museum of Art and Photography in central Bengaluru. MAP felt like the perfect backdrop for conversations about creating meaningful experiences. When you're talking about design that moves people, it helps to be surrounded by art that does exactly that.
The Panel: Building at scale
We kicked off the event by bringing together our heads of Business, Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Design for an honest conversation about what it's really like building products that millions use every day.
The panel—Sonika Chandra (VP of Business Development, PhonePe), Sudhanva Rao (Head of Product, Pincode), Maulik Shukla (Head of Engineering, Indus Appstore), Amit Doshi (Group Chief Marketing Officer) and Rahul Gonsalves (Group Head of Design)—opened with a question:
What's the most counter-intuitive thing you've learned about building products at PhonePe?
A few key insights emerged from the conversation:
The Personalisation Paradox: "Every once in a while someone walks up and says, 'we should personalise this,'" shared Sudhanva. "People assume personalisation is always good. But our data showed otherwise. The most intuitive thing for the user (and therefore very counter-intuitive) is building predictable experiences for users".
Assumptions vs. Reality: Sonika explained how the team learned to "let go of personal intuition and biases, especially when building for a diverse audience of a billion people." For example, when designing PIN-less transactions, they thought they were removing friction. However, many users actually preferred having a PIN, as it made them feel more secure. It goes to show, she said, that “Scale itself is a product, and a very, very different experience”.
Soul + Business: "The best way for a business to scale and sell is when there is 'soul' in the product," Sonika noted. "Otherwise you're constantly trying to convince people to choose your product—if the product itself conveys that, then you've won."
The conversation made it clear: designing for massive scale requires different thinking than designing for smaller audiences. Personal preferences don't always translate to user needs, and the best business outcomes often come from prioritising user experience over short-term revenue opportunities.
The Portfolio Review Sessions
The highlight of the event was the Portfolio Review Session with five industry leaders.
Sunit Singh (SVP Design at Krutrim), Aashish Solanki (Founder and CEO of NetBramha), Shreeya Malpani (Head of Design at Cure.fit), Rasagy Sharma (Head of Design for DataLabs at Capital One) and Hardik Pandya (ex-SVP of Design at Unacademy) sat down with attendees for one-on-one feedback sessions.
The format was simple: bring a link to your portfolio, and get 10 minutes of focused critique and guidance from someone who's been in the industry for years.
Senior designers from the PhonePe team also joined them in reviewing and critiquing portfolios from the lens of designing at scale. As so many of us have benefited from real conversations and honest critiques from people who've put in the work, we wanted to give back to the community and make that happen for our attendees too.
Events like this remind us that design was always about solving real problems for real people, at a scale that can impact millions of lives.
The conversations we started at The Grid are continuing in our work, our teams, and our community. The energy in that space proved something important: when designers come together to share honestly about their craft, everybody gets better.
See it for yourself in this video:
Special thanks to the PhonePe Internal Communications and HR teams for helping us pull this together, to MAP for hosting us in such an inspiring space, and to everyone else who made this event one to remember.
Want to be a part of future events? Sign up to our newsletter and keep an eye out for announcements on PhonePe’s social media.
*All data as of March 31, 2025
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If this excites you,
let's build together
Sign up to get updates about new essays and design events
If this excites you,
let's build together
Sign up to get updates about new essays and design events