Dinesh Senapati
Design leader who builds teams, moves design upstream, and turns user insight into product direction.
Design leader with 10 years of experience building teams, shaping product strategy, and making design a business-critical function. Twice a founding or near-founding designer — most recently at Cashfree Payments, where I led two business-critical pods, drove cross-functional research that surfaced organisation-wide product gaps, and delivered measurable outcomes across onboarding, checkout, and payments. I develop designers as people — not just manage output — and bring craft, systems thinking, and strategic influence in equal measure. Fintech domain depth. Pending patent. Fluent in AI-augmented design workflows.
India's leading payments infrastructure provider — processing millions in transactions across 500,000+ merchants.
Led two of Cashfree's most business-critical pods (Onboarding & Dashboard, then Checkout & Collections), where I moved design from execution to strategy and drove measurable outcomes across merchant activation, payments, and adoption.
- Elevated design as a strategic voice. Brought design and user evidence upstream into roadmap decisions before requirements were locked, directly shaping prioritisation across onboarding and checkout.
- Built and led design pods across two critical surfaces. Led a pod of 4 on Onboarding & Dashboard, then a pod of 3 on Checkout & Collections. Hired across both pods, mentored a visual designer through a full transition into product design.
- Surfaced organisation-defining insights through research. Led the SMB Discovery and Merchant Onboarding workshops — cross-functional sessions spanning Design, Product, Engineering, and Business — that uncovered a critical communication gap between Cashfree and its merchants. The finding is now a dedicated workstream in another pod.
- Transformed Checkout and OCC into strategic growth surfaces. Defined design strategy for Cashfree's Checkout and OCC products. Spearheaded the design of two innovative features: a peer-payment mechanism and a discount discovery flow — both addressing merchant requests to increase completion and engagement.
- Led cross-functional initiative that transformed merchant activation. Drove the design effort across a Design, Operations, and Engineering initiative that reduced merchant activation time from 5 days to 4.75 hours — a ~95% reduction.
- Contributed to DesignOps as the org scaled. Introduced data visualization initiatives, defined competency frameworks for designers, and established research infrastructure and pod collaboration norms.
HR-tech building professional verification, recruitment, and identity products across multiple SaaS platforms.
- Founding designer on Trivia — Springworks' first revenue-generating product. Set end-to-end design direction across the full suite including SpringRole, SpringVerify, and SpringRecruit.
- Trivia achieved 14 Product Hunt launches and 8 awards (#2 product of the day), 56K global users, $56K USD revenue, and features in Yahoo Finance and G2. View awards →
- Contributed to recruiting and structuring the design team as the org expanded into a multi-product portfolio.
- Led end-to-end design and branding for an agri-tech cross-device platform helping Farmer Producer Organisations — spanning research, prototyping, design system definition, and stakeholder pitches.
- Sole designer at a service design studio. Delivered UI design, style guides, user research, prototyping, and usability testing across multiple client projects.
- Campaign manager and digital analyst across Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. Notable: YES BANK IPL 2013–14, Dell Back to School Campaign 2014, Adobe MAX.
- Patent (Pending)Joint patent filed for a product/UX innovation developed at Cashfree Payments.
- Payment Method Badges
Figma Community plugin1,300+ users · 61 saves. Standardises payment method iconography for fintech design teams. - Workshop FacilitationDesigned and led cross-functional workshops spanning Design, Product, Engineering, and Business — including SMB Discovery and Merchant Onboarding — whose findings are actively shaping Cashfree's product roadmap.