Fractional Product, Brand & Design Leadership

I help teams make better product, experience and design decisions — as a fractional leader.

I lead product, brand and design direction: guiding 0–1 work, building or maintaining brand identity, and giving teams senior judgement without another full-time executive. The team makes the work — I help decide what matters, so it continues without depending on me.

Based in Pune, India. Working with teams across the US, UK, Canada.

Bring me in when…

I help decide what gets built, what gets cut, how it should work, and where the team should focus.

01

The product is moving, but nobody really owns the experience.

I help decide what matters, what gets cut, and how the experience fits together.

02

You are building something new.

I help turn a fuzzy idea into a clear product direction the team can actually ship.

03

The team is capable, but needs senior direction.

I help designers, product teams and engineers make stronger decisions without depending on the founder for everything.

04

Design has become reactive.

I help fix the way decisions, reviews and deliveries happen so the team works with more clarity.

05

The brand needs stewarding, not starting over.

I build the identity from zero, rework it when it's drifted, or evolve it as new work ships — keeping taste coherent across a fast-moving pipeline.

06

The end-to-end journey is fragmented and no one owns it.

I map the journey, find where trust or conversion breaks, and ship a service blueprint the team actually adopts.

What changes after I join.

Not more output. Clearer decisions, made earlier, by more of the team.

Before

Everyone has an opinion

Everyone has an opinion

Too many things are being built

Too many things are being built

Design reacts to requests

The founder reviews everything

Work changes late

AI creates more output

After

The team knows how decisions get made

Priorities are clear

Design helps shape the product

The team owns more decisions

Key choices are made earlier

AI helps produce better-directed work

Decisions, and what changed because of them.

Each engagement, in the same three lines: what was unclear or broken, the decision made, and what moved after it.

01

PayGlocal

Fintech

Chief Design Officer → Fractional CDO

3 Years

Situation

Cross-border checkouts were bottlenecked by rapid regulatory shifts and complex international data payloads under strict RBI scrutiny. Lacking industry benchmarks, element-by-element UI builds stretched timeline velocity across months.

Decision

Architected a modular "Server Rack" component framework built on live engineering tokens to seamlessly handle fluid compliance states. Deployed the core checkout loop full-time, then scaled down to Fractional CDO for merchant dashboards.

Outcome

Platform update loops collapsed from months to days, creating an architecture resilient for 4+ years. The optimized checkout flow achieved PayGlocal’s highest historical Payment Success Rate (PSR).

02

SpendOS & Pepmo

Fintech SaaS

Co-founder & Product Architect

2 Years

Situation

Pepmo achieved strong consumer traction—5,000+ organic downloads and a 4.8-star rating—but primary margins sat upstream in enterprise spend management.

Decision

Took consumer data insights up-market into a regulated B2B banking layer, self-funding the enterprise product runway via a parallel high-tier advisory practice.

Outcome

Shipped an enterprise-grade platform in 9 months, running UPI and corporate card flows with absolute founder equity control and zero seed dilution.

03

Global Studio Practice

Various sectors

Designer and Studio owner

22 Years

Situation

Cross-border product teams frequently suffer from siloed, self-focused design workflows that break down during engineering handoffs and stretch timeline velocity.

Decision

Deployed quantitative UX frameworks across 30+ US enterprise web engines while implementing cross-functional mentorship pipelines across ADPList, PayGlocal, and Payppy.

Outcome

Secured a 10+ year US partner retention rate and upskilled a hundred global designers to ship complex product sprints with zero design-to-code friction.

Reveal › Frame › Choose › Act.

The same four moves in every engagement, whether the question is a roadmap, a review process or a single screen.

01

Reveal

See what is really happening.

02

Frame

Turn the mess into a clear problem.

03

Choose

Decide what matters and what does not.

04

Act

Turn the decision into actual deliverables

I have spent more than two decades moving between product, design, technology and business. That means I rarely look at a design problem as only a design problem.

I can work with founders, designers and engineers in the same room and help them reach a decision everyone can actually build.

Most of what I do is make the important choices clearer: what the product is for, what the experience should do, what to build now, and what to leave alone. The team makes the work. I help make the decisions that shape it.

I also build my own products, which keeps me close to the cost of a wrong decision.

Experience

20+ years across product, design, technology and business

Focus

Fractional product, brand and design leadership

Working model

One or two engagements at a time, remote or on-site

Based in

Pune, India — working with teams in the US, UK and Canada

Tell me what you're building

I'll help you get the design right.

Connect on LinkedIn | Instagram

© 2026 Satyen Aghor

Better design decisions through greater clarity.

Tell me what you're building

I'll help you get the design right.

Connect on LinkedIn | Instagram

© 2026 Satyen Aghor

Better design decisions through greater clarity.

Tell me what you're building

I'll help you get the design right.

Connect on LinkedIn | Instagram

© 2026 Satyen Aghor

Better design decisions through greater clarity.