The person behind the system.
I'm Prabhu Raja, a Senior UX/Product Designer and design strategist with 15+ years of experience leading UX strategy, design systems and product delivery for B2B SaaS across financial services, legal technology, public sector and IoT.
How I got here
I started out with a chemical engineering degree, not a design one — which sounds like a detour, but it's where the systems-thinking came from. A few years into that career I pivoted hard, did a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction at City University London, and never looked back.
Since then I've spent 15+ years designing core B2B products across some genuinely different worlds — legal collaboration platforms at Thomson Reuters HighQ, an IoT support platform at Sweepr, enterprise financial tools at BNY, and public sector services at Marston Holdings. Each domain taught me something the last one couldn't: legal tech taught me how to make dense, high-stakes workflows feel calm; IoT taught me how to turn raw technical data into something a human can act on; finance and public sector both taught me that trust is a design material, not a nice-to-have.
Today I'm VP User Experience at BNY, building and governing the design system behind the bank's marketing and demand-gen websites and apps — and making sure it actually gets adopted, not just admired in Figma. I lead with research and stakeholder alignment, but I stay close to the work itself, because a design system is only as good as the judgement of the person maintaining it.
Alongside that, I've spent the past year designing and shipping five independent products solo — a UX debt tracker, an automated UX audit tool, a localization QA tool, an exam platform and a sitemap builder — using AI-assisted development (Claude Code) as a full delivery partner. It's given me a current, hands-on view of how AI is changing the distance between a design decision and a shipped product, and sharpened my sense of exactly where process discipline and design QA still matter most once AI can produce a first draft in minutes.
Academic background
MSc, Human-Centred Systems
City University, London, UK
Interaction design theory, evaluation of interactive systems, information architecture, cognitive technology, requirements engineering, inclusive design and multimedia design.
BTech, Chemical Engineering
Madras University, Chennai, India
Chemical reaction engineering, plant and engineering design, thermodynamics, and material science and metallurgy.
15+ years across industries
Depth built across regulated, high-stakes domains — each one sharpening a different facet of the craft.
BNY — VP User Experience
Nov 2025–Present. Own the design system behind BNY's marketing and demand-gen web and app products, and drive its adoption across every AEM site.
Marston Holdings — Senior Experience Designer
Nov 2023–Mar 2025. Designed and scaled B2B public sector services, and built the Figma component library behind them.
BNY — Senior UX Designer (Contract)
Sep 2022–Jun 2023. Led UX for enterprise financial platforms and unified the design library across internal tools.
Sweepr — Senior Product Designer
Mar 2021–Sep 2022. Turned raw IoT device data into human-readable dashboards for a B2B support platform.
Thomson Reuters HighQ — Senior Product Designer
Nov 2013–Mar 2021. Designed legal collaboration workflows and mobile apps used by law firms and financial institutions.
Principles I design by
The same principles that shape my design system work at BNY and Marston shape how I approach every product.
Content first
Design decisions start with the content and the task, not the chrome around it.
System over one-offs
Every pattern earns its place in a shared library before it earns a place on a screen.
Progressive disclosure
Show what's needed now, and make the rest available without adding noise.
Accessible by default
Accessibility is a starting constraint, not a pass applied at the end.
Data-informed, not data-led
Analytics and usability evidence sharpen judgement — they don't replace it.
Design QA as a discipline
Every pattern gets validated against real usage and edge cases before it ships — QA is a design responsibility, not a downstream check.
How I work
The same four-step process, applied to every project regardless of size or domain.
Understand
Immerse in the problem, the users and the business context before proposing solutions.
Simplify
Strip away complexity to find the smallest, clearest solution that solves the real problem.
Systemise
Turn solutions into reusable patterns and components that scale across the product.
Measure
Validate with real usage and data, run it through design QA, then iterate based on what's actually working.
How I lead design
Design leadership isn't just craft — it's building the conditions for good design decisions to happen.
AI-Augmented Delivery
Bring AI-assisted workflows into how design and delivery actually happen, using them to compress timelines without lowering the bar on craft.
Design Critique
Run critique that separates taste from rationale, so teams debate the right things.
Mentorship
Invest in growing other designers' judgement, not just reviewing their output.
Stakeholder Alignment
Translate design decisions into business language so leadership buys in early, not at the end.
Cross-functional Partnership
Treat engineering and product as co-authors of the solution, not downstream recipients of it.
Design QA & Governance
Build review and audit rigor into the process itself, so quality is caught by the system, not just by a reviewer's memory.
Skills & expertise
A working toolkit built for enterprise-scale design work.