Soumyadeep Mandal

When I joined a startup as a product intern, I was excited — filled with ideas, screens in mind, and wireframes ready. But one piece of advice from my senior changed everything: “Karthik, never start thinking with UI/UX.” At first, it surprised me. Isn’t product all about the user interface? But over time, I understood what they meant — great product management starts with the problem, not the pixels. It’s about why we’re building, who we’re building for, and what real value it creates. UI/UX is just the final layer — not the foundation. That one line shaped how I think today. #ProductManagement #LessonsLearned #PMInternship

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LokDrishti — Week 1, Day 1 If attendance matters in college, shouldn’t it matter in Parliament too? Today I started building LokDrishti — an AI-powered civic transparency platform that analyzes the performance of elected representatives using real public data. 🚀 Today’s Progress: Reverse-engineered PRS pagination system Built automated MP list scraper Extracted real attendance, debates & question data Parsed JS-based chart data programmatically Created structured CSV data pipeline No manual data entry. No scraping hacks. Pure backend + data engineering. This is just the foundation. Next: Data cleaning & normalization Performance scoring model AI-generated representative insights Public API layer Building this as an open-source civic-tech initiative. 🔗 GitHub: https://lnkd.in/diJDF6JQ Came across this powerful idea from Sachin Kr. Shukla — loved the perspective and decided to take it forward by building my own open-source civic tech version. 🚀 Let’s see democracy clearly. #LokDrishti #BuildInPublic #CivicTech #DataEngineering #Python #OpenSource #AI

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Talking about Developer Advocacy matters In India 🇮🇳 1. Creating resources for students for understanding value 2. Driving knowledge and making companies aware of the value Connecting these two audiences will create an amazing domino effect 🎴 If you're a student or founder/C-level executive, I wrote an article that will help you with understanding the importance and driving the right set of value 🌻 https://lnkd.in/gG7UNE-9 #devrev #devrel #india #education #accessibility

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You open your app 📱 . Your food is on the way 🍲 . And the delivery partner is moving live on the map 🗾 . No refresh. No lag. Just smooth, real-time motion. Ever wondered how apps like Swiggy make this feel so effortless? Because behind that moving dot lies a high-scale, real-time, event-driven system ⚙️ Let’s break it down 👇 📍 Step 1: The delivery partner’s phone Every few seconds, the rider’s phone captures its GPS location and sends a tiny update: • latitude • longitude • timestamp No history. No analytics. Just one message: “This is where I am right now.” 🌊 Step 2: Handling thousands of updates (without crashing) Now imagine thousands of riders sending updates at the same time. This is where naïve systems fail. Instead of pushing updates directly to users, each location update is treated as an event and published into a stream built for massive scale. 👉 Apache Kafka is a common choice here. Why ? • High throughput • Durability • Guaranteed order • Loose coupling between producers & consumers Kafka doesn’t care who reads the data — it just delivers it reliably. 🧠 Step 3: The real-time brain A backend service consumes these events and: • Keeps only the latest location per order • Smooths noisy GPS jumps • Responds in milliseconds, not seconds To stay fast, the latest positions are usually stored in memory. Speed > everything. ✨ Step 4: The magic moment for the customer The customer’s app doesn’t keep asking for updates. It subscribes. As soon as a new location arrives, the backend pushes it instantly to the user. 👉 This is where WebSockets shine. No polling. No refresh button. Just a dot moving… live. 🔁 The full flow (simplified) Rider App ➡️ Kafka (Location Events) ➡️ Real-Time Processor ➡️ WebSocket Gateway ➡️ Customer App (Live Map) Simple to understand. Hard to scale. Beautiful when done right. 📌 Platforms like Swiggy don’t publicly reveal their exact tech stack, but this event-driven, push-based architecture is the industry standard for real-time delivery tracking at scale. 📝 I implemented this entire system end-to-end in a demo project and wrote a detailed blog explaining the architecture, data flow, and challenges. 👉 Read the full breakdown here: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dYBWEzWh If this excites you, you’re already thinking like a backend engineer 🚀 #SystemDesign #BackendEngineering #RealTimeSystems #Kafka #WebSockets #DistributedSystems #SoftwareEngineering #TechArchitecture

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🚀 Hi LinkedIn Fam! I'm excited to share my first Medium article with you all! 🎉 🔔 “Designing a Scalable Notification Service – System Design Deep Dive” Ever wondered how platforms like Amazon, Swiggy, or Instagram manage to deliver millions of notifications (SMS, emails, push, in-app) with near real-time speed? In this blog, I walk through: ✅ Functional & non-functional requirements ✅ Queueing mechanisms (Kafka, RabbitMQ) ✅ Multi-channel delivery architecture ✅ Classifiers, digesters, DLQs, retries, and more ✅ Real-world scale estimation & HLD diagrams ✅ Key takeaways for SDE system design interviews 📚 Whether you're preparing for interviews or love distributed systems — this one's for you. 👉 Check it out and let me know your thoughts: https://lnkd.in/gyW4D-bf #SystemDesign #ScalableSystems #NotificationService #SDEInterviews #TechBlog #Medium

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Ever imagined a student body running its own version of Coursera, Uber, and a fintech platform day in and day out? At BITS Pilani, we actually do. And the best part? It’s entirely built and run by students. Our in-house technical team, SUTT (Students'​ Union Technical Team, BITS Pilani), powers some of the most essential and high impact systems on campus, namely the StudyDeck platform and the SU App. The SU App lets students place orders from any campus food outlet on credit—no wallet, no hassle. Payments are deferred and bundled with semester fees. The result? Faster transactions, frictionless experiences, and over 2× growth in revenue for eateries. Today, nearly every food sale on campus happens through this system. Need a ride? The same app has that sorted. Its integrated ride booking system makes off-campus travel easier, safer, and more accessible, whether it's for a quick city run or a journey home during breaks. Academics? We’ve got that covered too. The Study Deck is a comprehensive academic portal—past year papers, lecture slides, tutorial videos, CG calculators, exam schedules, and more, all in one place, all tailored by students who understand what really matters. But what truly sets these platforms apart is their scale and reliability. They collectively manage ₹10 crore+ in transactions every year, all while maintaining operational costs under 0.5%. That’s enterprise level performance, achieved with student led execution. This is what a hands on, student led tech team looks like. Real problems. Real impact. Real solutions. And as you read this, the team is already working on what’s next, yet another tool that will reshape how campus life works. Proud of what our students build. Because at BITS Pilani, we don’t just dream things up We build them. #BITSian #StudentsForChange

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🚨 When UX optimization goes too far… and becomes a dark pattern Yesterday evening, I was in a rush ordering groceries on Zepto. My cook needed ingredients urgently, so I quickly searched for dahi. I spotted a 500ml Nandini curd pouch priced at ₹28. Seemed perfect. I tapped Add to Cart and moved on. But when my order arrived… I received 3 packets of curd. 🧐 Confused, I opened the app again. And that’s when I noticed it: ➡️ The product listing shows one 500ml pouch ➡️ But clicking "Add" automatically adds a 500ml x 3 bundle to the cart ➡️ The default selection prioritizes maximum discount, not what’s visible I wasn’t given a choice. I wasn’t shown the quantity change. And in the rush, I missed it. 💡 As a UX designer, this hit hard. Yes, it’s a clever optimization for increasing cart value. But it breaks a core UX principle: 👉 Put users in control. What would’ve been better? ✅ Show all size options when "Add to Cart" is tapped ✅ Default to the visible item (1 unit), not the discounted bundle ✅ Let me choose savings over quantity, not the other way around This wasn’t just a usability miss. It felt like a dark pattern. I didn’t feel smart. I felt tricked. Have you faced similar experiences where optimization crossed the line into manipulation? Let’s discuss where we draw the line between growth and user trust. #UXDesign #DarkPatterns #ProductDesign #UserExperience #Zepto #GoodUX #DesignStory

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In this week's NonBioS & Chill session, we're looking at an app built by one of our users, Yaju Arya. He created PromptMax - a tool that helps you craft better AI prompts using proven engineering techniques. Instead of starting from scratch every time, you pick a template, fill in your details, and get much better results from GenAI tools. The impressive part? This went from user research and written specs to a fully deployed production app in just 48 hours. We're talking about rapid prototyping, real-time validation features, a comprehensive template system, modern responsive interface - everything you'd expect from a polished product. There's something pretty meta about using advanced prompt engineering techniques to build a tool that teaches prompt engineering, but that's exactly what happened here. Yaju used NonBioS to rapidly prototype, iterate on the user experience, implement complex features, and deploy everything in a weekend. This is what NonBioS & Chill is all about - empowering people to turn their weekend ideas into real, working solutions. The AI handles the heavy development lifting so you can focus on solving the actual problem and building something that matters. What are you planning to build in your next session? Revathi Raghunath Sumit Kumar Singh Harsha MV [Link to PromptMax and Yaju's full blog post where he breaks down in the comments]

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Machine Learning 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Systems Ever wondered how your Swiggy app somehow knows you’re craving chole bhature on a rainy day? Or how YouTube magically lines up videos that match your late-night thoughts better than your best friend? That’s machine learning doing its job behind the scenes: quietly observing and adapting to what you want, often before you even know it yourself. https://lnkd.in/g9qVFFKN

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The Summer of Product 2025 is LIVE at HelloPM and it kicked off with a bang! Huge shoutout to Ankit Shukla, founder of HelloPM, for leading a insightful bootcamp session deep diving into core product management concepts that actually matter in 2025. A few takeaways that really stuck with me: As PMs, our job isn’t just to build, it’s to understand. Too often we focus on shipping shiny features, but if they don’t solve a real user problem, what’s the point? 1. Key Insight: Output vs Outcome Ankit broke it down perfectly. There are two types of outcomes: User Outcome → What your user gets out of it Business Outcome → How that helps the company grow The two are tightly connected. Solve for the user, and the business wins. 2. AI is no longer a "nice-to-have" it’s the core. Compared to 2022, product management today is much more AI-driven, helping us reduce repetitive tasks and focus on strategy, creativity, and real problem-solving. Always grateful to be part of this vibrant product community. Here's to building simpler, smarter, more impactful products. #ProductManagement #AI #HelloPM #SummerOfProduct #UserFirst #PM2025

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Today, many users in India were unable to access Supabase. (Impacting authentication and new user onboarding for Clstr.in) Instead of waiting, we acted. • Stabilized existing sessions • Paused new signups to prevent broken UX • Initiated fallback routing strategy • Accelerating infra decoupling roadmap Building a national campus network means preparing for failure ,not reacting to it. Infrastructure is borrowed. Ownership is built. When external dependencies fail, your response defines you. We’re strengthening Clstr’s architecture to ensure long-term resilience. Building isn’t about avoiding failure. It’s about engineering through it. #startup #founder #engineering #resilience #buildinpublic

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Bolt.new — Like Firebase, But for Full App Creation My Honest Experience as a Student Founder As someone building Astrid, a silk saree marketplace focused on authentic craftsmanship and D2C empowerment, I recently explored Bolt.new — and it felt like using Firebase, but for full-stack app development. Here’s how Bolt helped me go from idea to interactive app in record time: Step-by-Step Journey ✅ Instant Project Bootstrapping I described the concept, and Bolt spun up a full React + Node.js + Postgres stack — all inside the browser. No installs. No CLI. Just code and build. ✅ AI Prompting for UI & Logic From “Add a bottom navbar” to “Show artisan stories in card layout,” I iterated using natural language prompts. The AI delivered responsive components and backend routes. ✅ One-Click Hosting & Preview With live previews and Netlify deployment built-in, I had a shareable prototype in minutes — perfect for demos, feedback, and testing early hypotheses. ❤️ What I Loved End-to-end development in-browser Ideal for MVPs, hackathons, and fast iterations AI-driven UI/UX logic generation GitHub & Netlify integration for fast deployment ⚠️ Where It Falls Short Image Relevance: Bolt struggled with contextual visuals (e.g., auto-generating unrelated icons or placeholder images) — manual cleanup was needed Basic App Logic: Advanced workflows, auth flows, or payment integrations still require custom coding Not for Scaling: Perfect for prototypes, but production-grade apps still need refinement outside Bolt Token-based model: Useful for short-term builds, but larger projects quickly require a paid plan 💡 Final Verdict If Firebase is the engine for scaling backend infra, then Bolt.new is the launchpad for building complete apps — fast. For Astrid, Bolt saved me hours of boilerplate work, giving me a beautiful, working prototype I could share with peers, mentors, and potential users. It’s not the whole journey, but it’s a fantastic place to begin. 💬 Have you tried Bolt.new, Cursor, or similar AI app builders? Would love to hear how you’re using these tools in real-world scenarios! #BoltAI #FirebaseAlternative #AppDevelopment #StartupTools #AstridApp #MVP #StudentFounder #NoCodeMeetsCode #LinkedInTech #AIforBuilders #WebDev #ReactJS #FoundersJourney #ProductDesign

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Swig-AI for Swiggy Sleepless nights can be thought provoking, this idea is too a result of the same! A random idea to make food ordering more interactive and easy with AI, and why not? I believe the future of apps isn't just buttons and tabs, but natural conversations that understand what the user wants in the moment. Don’t mind the video and audio quality! Watch it on 1.5x for speeding up 🤓 Tagging design legend in the post let’s see if they like this or not! Saptarshi Prakash Prasanna Venkatesh #ProductDesign #UIUX #Swiggy #AI #ConversationalAI #DesignConcept #Innovation

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🎙️ Our first guest is here Joy Banerjee From Cleartrip to Zomato, Joy has quietly shaped how millions of Indians interact with digital products every day. But here's what most people don't see: the unglamorous decisions behind the polished interfaces. The behavioral experiments that failed. The systems that actually moved metrics when everything else was just noise. In our first episode, we're going there. What we unpack: → Why Indian user behavior breaks most western design rules → Design leadership when you're building for 100M+ users → How AI is changing our craft (and what stays human) → The trade-offs between moving fast and building right This isn't another "lessons learned" conversation. It's the real talk about building products that actually work for Indian users. 🙏 Wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible team Rati Murti Abhishek Soni Ritika Tanwar Shreyauns Upadhye 🎧 Coming soon on YouTube, Spotify & enzolab.in #ProductXPeople #JoyBanerjee #Zomato #DesignForIndia #EnzoLab #BuildInPublic

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🚀 Built another real-world website — and this one solves an actual business problem. I recently created a modern, high-converting website for a hostel business in Patna: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gkw-X7kT This isn’t just a “design project” — it’s built with a clear goal: 👉 Help local businesses get more visibility, trust, and leads. 💡 What I focused on: • Clean & modern UI with smooth animations • Mobile-first responsive design • SEO optimization for keywords like “Hostel in Patna” • WhatsApp + Call integrations for instant leads • Conversion-focused sections (CTA, testimonials, gallery) 📍 Real insight: Many hostels (even well-rated ones near areas like Paras Hospital & Boring Road) still don’t have a proper online presence. That means: ❌ They are invisible on Google ❌ They miss out on potential students & parents 👉 A simple website can completely change that. 💭 My goal right now: Build and improve real-world projects that actually help businesses grow. If you’re a business owner (or know someone) who needs a website like this, feel free to connect 🤝 #webdevelopment #frontend #php #seo #freelance #buildinpublic #patna #startup #projects

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Day 4 Today I explored how accessibility works in food delivery apps by analyzing WCAG principles in Swiggy. I learned how the four principles—Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust—impact real user experience. It made me realize that even small design choices like button size, color contrast, and clear labels can make a big difference for all users. #Day4 #WCAG #Accessibility #UIUX #LearningJourney #Swiggy #DesignThinking #UserExperience

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Kajaria didn’t just launch a product, they launched a conversation. With Gresbond By Kajaria , the brand rolled out 10 comic digital ads that broke away from traditional construction advertising - funny, clever, and product-first. And the innovation continues with their social media contest. #GresbondSeLagayaHotaToAisaNahiHota, inviting people to share their tile failure stories in the most entertaining way. It’s not just advertising — it’s participatory marketing that strengthens both brand and consumer bonds. 👉 Watch the campaign: https://lnkd.in/dYzdiBzz 👉 Follow the journey: https://lnkd.in/daC87ysq

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