����Vlog

Picture this: You’ve designed the perfect user onboarding flow. It’s elegant. It’s intuitive. Users love it in testing. Then your PM says, “We need to add three more steps to capture email, phone number, and their firstborn’s name for the marketing team.”

Your soul dies a little. Welcome to product development.

This talk is about the decisions that don’t make it into design case studies:

• The addictive features we build knowingly
• The “harmless” dark patterns that became industry standard
• The beautiful UX we killed because of constraints
• The metrics that make PMs do questionable things

Speaker’s profile

Thenmugilan is a seasoned product manager with nearly a decade of experience building and scaling digital products across startups and tech giants like Grab.

His career spans diverse domains including marketplace platforms, e-commerce, SaaS, advertising technology, demand generation, and growth hacking. Currently focused on edtech (KodeKloud), he
brings multidisciplinary expertise in product development and user experience design.

Thenmugilan is excited to share practical insights from his product journey with the SUTD community, bridging the gap between academic learning and real-world product development.