A UX veteran of 19 years, Malini has designed product experiences for diverse organizations – giants like Siemens Medical Systems and Oracle; Technology leaders with a cult following like Red Hat and also smaller and nimble organizations like Acquia and Ipswitch.

The chief tenet that Malini advocates is ‘creative adaptation’. Malini has adapted her rigorous design training (Masters degrees from the Indian institute of technology, Mumbai and Michigan State University) to suit the needs of the domain, users and organization she served across her career. It is her proposal that out-of-the-box creativity should not be limited to the design of efficient and delightful product interfaces alone but also to the methods of doing design itself. She has presented talks on extending the use of the technique of ‘Reality Mapping’ from being a research tool to serve as a non-visual story board in the early design process or even become a tool for product road-mapping.

Malini’s current focus is to guide organizations in becoming more design centered. Her dual approach in this regard is to grow talented UX teams in these environments but also expand the scope and impact of design and strategic thinking beyond product experience into customer experience and organizational process.