Twenty-five years in design. Building the organizations that ship is the work of the last decade.
The launch is the visible part. The organization, the operating model, and the standard behind it are what keep shipping after I leave.
About Sudha Broslawsky
I’m Sudha Broslawsky, a design and product executive based in the Bay Area. I help organizations turn design into a strategic business advantage.
I build and scale high-impact design organizations, align design with company strategy, and drive customer-centered innovation in complex, high-stakes environments.
What I do
I design the organization a business needs before I hire into it: the functions, the levels, the operating model, the hiring standard. Then I build the team against that design and run programs through it. That sequence is why the work keeps compounding after I leave. Across two decades I’ve built design organizations from zero, introduced design systems and research practices where none existed, and connected design investment directly to revenue, conversion, and retention outcomes.
Career at a glance
Most recently VP of Design & Research at NinjaTrader, acquired by Kraken for $1.5 billion during my tenure. Before that, VP of Design & Research at Achieve, where I built a 30-person design organization from the ground up and led design through the largest rebrand in the company’s history. Earlier, leadership roles at Google, Yahoo, Tile, and Meta, spanning enterprise platforms, operating systems, and consumer products at scale.
How I lead
I believe strongly in the human side of design: not only in what we build, but in how teams work and how decisions get made. My leadership style emphasizes clarity, inclusion, and accountability, grounded in my CARE values of Compassion, Alignment, Respect, and Execution.
Where I work best
Enterprise and platform ecosystems. Fintech and regulated financial products. Consumer technology at scale. Complex, data- and workflow-intensive systems where the cost of bad design isn’t a churn metric, it’s a missed trade, a failed onboarding, or a regulator’s letter.
For CEOs and boards, I bring steady, experienced leadership that connects vision to execution. I partner with executive teams to clarify priorities, reduce friction, and ensure design investment translates into measurable business impact.
Currently
I’m targeting a full-time executive design and product role at the CDO, CPDO, SVP, or EVP level. I also take selective advisory engagements with leadership teams through AspireUX, my design leadership advisory practice.
I write The Executive Designer, a newsletter on design leadership, org dynamics, and the executive craft of building design into companies.
Roles and outcomes
- 2025 — 26Founder
PathNow
A full year running an AI-native product end to end, solo: an AI-first career acceleration platform for senior tech professionals. Research, design, positioning, pricing, product. Led and coached two university capstone teams, CS undergraduates at USF and DMBA candidates at CCA, as an extension of the operating model.
- 2024 — 25VP, Design & Research
NinjaTrader
Built design from a tactical function into a strategic discipline with a seat at the executive table, in a high-stakes futures trading environment. Org design was the first deliverable. Made the first design-systems investment in the company's 20-year history and used it to converge UX across every product and channel, marketing included. Shipped Trader Engagement and the enterprise Visual Design Language Evolution. Grew the team from four to nine, made the case for a permanent VP, ran the hiring, and left a structured handoff. Kraken acquired the company for $1.5B during my tenure.
- 2021 — 23VP, Design & Research
Achieve
Built the design organization from 3 to 30 across design, research, and content, spanning three business units and 25+ digital products, and made continuous research standard practice. Set enterprise design strategy: UX convergence, the company's first design system, accessibility, digital transformation. Co-led the FFN to Achieve rebrand, converging three brands into one, with a 4x long-form submission rate on Achieve.com. The company raised $100M during my tenure. The org kept shipping to plan twelve months after I left.
- 2016 — 21Design Leader
Google
Enterprise, platform, and operating-system work across three product areas. Led UX for Google Ads Audiences, contributing to billions in revenue. On Chrome OS, led a ground-up redesign of the media apps, preinstalled on every Chromebook, and built the developer experience for Linux for Chromebooks (AKA Crostini), used by hundreds of thousands of developers. Led the re-envisioning of a performance management suite for 100k+ Googlers. Spoke at Google I/O 2019.
- 2012 — 16Design Leadership
Tile · Meta · Yahoo
Consumer product design at scale. Tile's tracker hardware and app in its early scale years, consumer surfaces at Meta through hypergrowth. Earlier at Yahoo, led the redesign of Search, Homepage, and Personalization across platforms for a property serving 800M+ monthly users. Shipping at consumer scale, across hardware and software, before leading the organizations that ship.
In their words
“Sudha played a pivotal role in building our design function from the ground up, revolutionizing our approach to design and significantly enhancing the quality and consistency of our user experiences.”
“Sudha operates at the intersection of design strategy and real-world execution. She provided wise, human executive leadership at NinjaTrader through a complex build with multiple stakeholders and vendors, keeping the team grounded in what mattered most to customers without losing sight of business priorities and technical realities. She's the kind of design leader the world needs.”
“Our group was tasked with redesigning a tool used internally at Google by 100k+ Googlers. Sudha proved to be very effective in leading the UX efforts, proactive in planning, prioritizing, and engaging the stakeholders.”
“Sudha is a role model for the values-based culture and team she would build, one that is compassionate, poised, strategic, inclusive, and importantly, fun.”
The rest of the picture
I live in the Bay Area with my family. Outside the work, I paint in the Telangana folk-art tradition at sudha.art, cook through long-running recipe projects at Kitchen Sprints, write The Executive Designer, tend a home garden, and read about organizational design and the history of consumer technology.
I’ve spoken at Google I/O, on leadership podcasts, and in workshops and AMAs with the Design MBA program at CCA. In August 2026, Smashing Magazine named me their Person of the Week for Nudges.FYI.
Telangana folk art
Painting is a counterweight to the work I lead every day: slower, more physical, unfolding one brushstroke at a time. It’s where I explore the stories, memories, and traditions that continue to shape me.
Much of my work begins with memories of growing up in Telangana, India. Discovering Thota Vaikuntam’s paintings inspired me to revisit those memories with fresh eyes. Other work simply begins with curiosity. Each piece is a chance to explore a different question through a different visual language.
Open to inbound on full-time leadership roles and selective advisory.
The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything personally.
sudha@aspireux.com ↗