Before Jurin AI, Pavana spent two years designing across more than 25 products for a global casino business. Most were backend-heavy: dashboards for operators, CRM systems managing large customer databases across casino properties, performance trackers, accounting tools, and the systems connecting all of that data.

Pavana worked on one of those products as the sole designer for around eight months. Engage AI managed markets, analyzed customer behavior across different player segments, determined what offers to send and when, and connected the data behind those decisions.

The product went on to win Product Innovation of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards in 2024.

Working across so many products taught Pavana something that has stayed with her since: the more complicated the system underneath, the more work it takes to make the experience above it feel simple. You cannot simplify something you do not understand.

"A lot of what I learned in gaming carried over because the products were very visual, but I was also designing backend tools for things like accounting, performance tracking, and customer management. It was almost like designing a CRM for the entire customer database: what people liked, where they stayed, how everything connected."

That experience made her think beyond individual screens. She thinks about what happens several steps later, what data sits underneath an interaction, and what happens when a user takes a path the designer did not expect.

"Being a designer is an all-rounder job. You need to understand all of those things to build a good product or feature. If you don't know how to do the research and understand the problem properly, you won't be able to design something that works well."

Until then, Pavana had spent her career at large, established multinational companies.

Then she saw a post on Twitter.

Pavana had been paying attention to how AI was appearing in products. Much of what she saw still felt like an AI feature added onto an existing product. She wanted to work somewhere where AI fundamentally shaped how the product itself worked.

When Rise posted a product designer opening on Twitter, she messaged him the same day.

At the time, she was already five rounds into the interview process at another established company.

"Usually people just add AI to an existing product. They'll have a small chatbot inside a much bigger app and call it an AI product. I wanted to understand how conversational AI actually works. When I saw that Jurin was building communication AI and agents, that was much more interesting to me."

There was another reason she was willing to change direction. Every company she had worked at before had been large and multinational. She knew what that environment could teach her. She had never worked at a startup.

"Since it was a startup, I thought I'd learn a lot and have a lot of responsibility. That's what I was looking for. Now I'm working across different departments and have a lot of ownership, which I really enjoy. Having been here for a year, I know that if I had to make the decision again, it would be the same."

Pavana was used to working across complex products. What changed at Jurin AI was the pace and the number of different things competing for her attention at once.

The app needed design work. The website was being rebuilt. Marketing needed visual assets. Multiple engineering teams were shipping at the same time, each with their own timelines and requests.

"At the start it was really hard to manage all the work. Someone from marketing would reach out, then engineers would reach out about the app while I was already working on the website."

She had to develop her own way of deciding what moved first.

Everything goes onto a list. From there, she prioritizes by urgency and customer impact rather than simply working in the order requests arrive. App work often moves to the front because engineering deadlines can be only a few days away. When several things are equally urgent, customer requests win.

"I list down all my tasks and prioritize based on what needs to move first. App deadlines can sometimes be within two or three days, so those usually come before something like the website. And if everything feels like a priority, I prioritize the customer request."

The challenge wasn't simply having more work. It was learning how to move between very different kinds of work without losing the depth each one required.

Some of Pavana's previous experience transferred immediately. She already knew how to make dense information understandable and how to design products where a simple interface sits on top of a complicated system.

AI products introduced a different set of problems.

"AI products are a bit different. Before, I was mostly working on database dashboards, accounting, and similar products. Here you have things like chats and agents, and you have to understand how the AI works too. I look at how other products approach something, think about whether that pattern actually works for our product, and then figure out what we should do differently. I'm continuously learning at Jurin and bringing that into the designs."

Jurin AI has several very different product surfaces: knowledge, agents, chats, tickets, and all the systems connecting them. A pattern that makes sense for a traditional SaaS product does not necessarily make sense when a user is configuring an AI agent or deciding how knowledge should be structured.

Sometimes Pavana can find a useful reference elsewhere.

Sometimes she can't.

One of her favorite pieces of work started with a problem she struggled to find a good reference for. Her first approach was not quite what Rise had in mind, so she went back, looked for other ways the interaction could work, and started experimenting.

Eventually she developed a pill-style interaction for the notes and knowledge section of the Jurin AI app, including ways for users to hover and create new fields or tasks directly from the interface.

"I started exploring it on my own, and somehow it turned out really well. The way you can hover on it and create a new field or a new task… I really like all of those interactions. It's probably my favorite design I've done here so far."

There wasn't a template she could simply adapt. She had to understand the interaction, explore different approaches, and work out what made sense for the product.

She went through a similar process while giving the Jurin AI website a facelift. Pavana had never used Webflow before, so she taught herself the platform while designing and building the site at the same time.

That has become normal: learn the system while designing for it.

Today, Pavana works across different teams with separate team syncs for each. She and Cy, Jurin AI's first designer, each run their own design studio and sync every day so patterns and decisions do not drift apart as the product grows.

"If Cy is building something similar to what I need, I can use that instead of starting again. We try to sync as much as possible. I reach out to him for a lot of design decisions, he gives feedback, and we improve the feature together."

Almost every new feature requires Pavana to learn something before she can design it.

"Every new feature we're building is new to me as well. I need to understand it first because I'll be the one conveying the design to the engineers. I've gained a lot more confidence doing that. Even when something is new to me, I know I can understand it, work through the design, and explain what I'm trying to achieve.”

Communicating that thinking clearly to engineering is something she is still working on.

A design can make perfect sense in Figma and still leave unanswered questions when someone else has to build it. Pavana has learned to think further ahead about states, edge cases, and what engineers will need from her before implementation starts.

"Being a designer, you need to communicate your designs really well. You need to think through all the screens before handing them over to engineers. That's something I'm still improving. If the handoff isn't clear enough, there can be a lot of back and forth later.”

Working this closely with engineering has also changed her relationship with unfinished work.

Pavana cares about the details. She also knows that waiting until every detail is perfect can be the wrong decision when a product is moving quickly.

"You can improve after shipping the feature, but first you need to ship and then keep building on it. That's something I learned from Rise while I was designing the website."

So she keeps a running list.

While using the app, she will notice an interaction that could be smoother or a detail she wants to revisit and write it down. Some things get improved quickly. Others wait until there is room to return to them.

Shipping something does not mean she stops seeing how it could be better.

Working with Rise has pushed Pavana to think more broadly about what she wants to learn next.

"Seeing Rise manage both the company and university has made me want to pursue a master's even more. I want to develop a much stronger product mindset. And lately, I've started finding marketing really interesting too.”

That curiosity makes sense given how much her role already crosses into other parts of the company. Designing a feature means understanding the engineering underneath it, the customer problem behind it, and how the product itself should work. Working on the website and with marketing has given her another perspective on how the same product gets understood from the outside.

Rise's feedback has also taught her to look beyond the first answer.

"Whenever I go to Rise with a design, he's usually thinking one or two steps beyond where I was. I'll come away with another perspective I hadn't considered, then go back and develop the design further."

And she has become more comfortable with not having the right answer immediately.

"There is room for learning here. Even if you get something wrong, you learn from it, come back, and do the work better."

Outside work, she resets deliberately. Her Spotify is full of playlists with dramatic names, usually ten or twelve songs each, that run in the background while she designs. When she is done, she plays cozy games. She travels when she can. After working remotely from India, the Bali offsite was the first time she met most of the Jurin AI team in person.

A year from now, Pavana wants to be faster at turning all of that thinking into something people can use.