Personally, I never liked the concept of thank you emails that folks send everyone bidding goodbye on their last working day. Sure, it's a good gesture but I also think that folks should share their appreciation whenever they genuinely feel for someone at work.

I love a lot of my folks in my team and in other teams at UC. I'm pretty vocal about how I feel with almost all of them. The last time I wrote around this topic of appreciation was here.

I felt like doing that today. The few folks I'm lucky to be working with in Design & Native product. There are more, of course, but the following folks are the ones I spend most of my day-to-day with.

Amit Jaglan

Jaglan is the Director of Design at Urban Company. Essentially, he's the person responsible for everything related to design in the UC Customer & Partner apps.

I had first worked with Jaglan in 2015. Briefly. He had joined Housing.com directly from college. In 2016 when he interviewed with UC, the entire discussion went by and it ended up becoming a long intellectually satisfying discussion. We talked flows, issues, possibilities, ideas in both his and our work. It was clear he was a great fit, and to this day, I’m glad he joined us. He's exceptionally with who gets both Product & Design.

In fact, he's the reason why I can confidently spend 95% of my time in building Native. Because he can take care of everything else.

Quick facts: He introduced me to Grand Designs. We have spent 100s of hours watching car reviews videos and even more debating. He too loves plants!

Mayank Dhawan

Dhawan's the Head of Content Design & Associate Director of Design at Urban Company. In 2016, Dhawan moved from the then marketing team at UC to Product Design. He left UC shortly after. We stayed in touch tripping over Procreate, iPads and a lot of common interests. Many years later, we collaborated to build the first brand identity of Cuddle (now Crux Intelligence) by Fractal Analytics. Few months later.. he joined us as a Product Designer. In 2021, he joined UC again.

He's the person behind the super-neat UC Customer app we have today. He along with Suhail built the Align Design System. Mayank is also the person behind the killer Native logo and has been behind a lot of super-cool stuff. Product Design. Brand identity. Visual Design. Copywriting. Packaging design. Team management. He's done it all and still doing it all.

In fact, he's why I pick up a lot of last moment, guilty-pleasure projects. I know Dhawan will always be a partner-in-crime.

Quick facts: He's a cleanliness freak. His desk looks like an Unsplash work desk and has an impeccable taste in things.

Ankur Nischal

Ankur is an Associate Director of Design at Urban Company. He’s a lot like me—he loves board games, has a similar passion for cars, good drinks, and fun. Also, doesn't think much before doing an impulsive purchase if he spots something cool!

Over the years, he has managed to pull-off a ton of things single-handedly and falls in the rare buckets of hands-on creators. He is extremely good at new ideas generation and has similar child-like curiosity which I absolutely love! Doesn't have any fear of judgement or failure.

Over the last one year, Ankur's been the person to take care of all things Native in apps. He's an amazing human being and super fun to be around with like everyone else here.

Quick fact: He's a creator who's not limited to digital. He paints, does craft projects, will look up interesting places to go to and loves food.

Shalini Mookerjee

Shalini is a Lead User Researcher & Product Designer at Urban Company. I first worked with Shalini in 2019. She joined us at Cuddle as an intern and later became a full-time researcher. A bit later, she joined us as a Senior researcher at Urban Company.

She's always been the hyper-active learner and a ball of energy on the floor. To an extent that despite being a researcher, she never said no to any other body of work — she was the sole content writer when we didn't have any in the team, she's done UI design when it was needed, and most recently she's forayed into Product Design! All this on top of the great research work she continues to do.

Being part of the central design team, my confidence comes from the fact that I can share a problem I'm facing and what would help… and she'd be on it and come back with multiple approaches! This gives me peace of mind.

Fun fact: She has funny pronunciations for a lot of common Hindi words!

Brajesh Sen

Brajesh is an Associate Director of Content Operations at Urban Company. Brajesh was my first hire when I formed the content design team. He had deep experience working in content deployment and wanted to do more and meaningful with this new team.

He's very diligent and one of the very few in the team who will get the job done — come what may. In the last six months, most of our calls were about last-minute deployment change requests across multiple UC categories. He will learn, he'll figure it out with teams he hadn't worked with before… but, he'll get it done. He's also someone who loves reading books!

Fun fact: He's amazing at his work but sings like Steve on India's Best Dancer Season 4.

Love you all! Thanks for being there!