Designing in memory of Franky 🐾
01 / Work
Rebuilt an AI-first presentation tool from the foundation up: file architecture, a clearer dashboard, collaboration and invite flows, and a refreshed visual language built to scale.
A one-tap subscription checkout for 150M+ users, projected at $15M in incremental revenue by stripping friction out of the highest-intent moment in the funnel.
Turned abstract mutual-fund SIPs into named life goals for Navi's investing app, giving people a reason to start and a reason to stay; daily SIP starts rose 20%.
03 / About
Your friendly neighborhood designer with a side quest in fitness and games. I do product design at Presentations.ai, after stints at Disney+ Hotstar and Navi. Storyteller first, pixels second; I like making complex products feel obvious, and I do it with a smile.
03 / Playground
02 / AI Experiments
Built for the Presentations.ai marketing team: anyone can spin up visual assets for any campaign, in any aspect ratio and any design, and rewrite the copy themselves. No designer in the loop, no bandwidth lost, tweaks shipped on the go.
Social betting on fitness goals. One dashboard pulls every app, every equipment stat and the Apple Watch into one place; a WhatsApp bot posts to the friends group and messages each person their remaining targets for the day, food included.
Point it at any URL and get a clean Markdown file back: headings, copy and structure preserved, clutter stripped. Made for feeding the web into notes and LLMs.
Case study · Redesigning an AI-first tool, from scratch
The world's best AI presentation maker!
The world's most used business tool hasn't changed in decades. So we rebuilt ours from scratch.
Presentations are the language of business, yet the software used to make them hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1990s. PowerPoint and Google Slides digitised paper presentations. They never transformed how we create them.
Presentations.ai exists to close the gap between a raw idea and a finished, professional deck. Not eventually. Not after hours of manual work. Right now. Instantly.
There was no shortage of ideas for where the product could go. The existing architecture made most of them impossible to ship. New markets, core features, industry standards; none of it could happen on top of what existed. So we set out to recreate the foundation: scalable, backend driven, and a significantly better experience to use.
This case study is thin on metrics. The product was too broken for data to lead; we went back to first principles.
The company's event tracking and funnels could not give granular insights yet. So this is about the thinking, the decisions, and the work. Numbers will come as the product matures. If you want to see how I work with data, read the Hotstar case study.
The foundation every enterprise tool is built on was missing from ours. We benchmarked the basics.
File management
| Presentations.ai | Gamma | Notion | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workspaces | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested folders | No | Yes | Yes |
| Drafts | No | Yes | Yes |
| Shared with me | No | Yes | Yes |
| Private folders | No | No | Yes |
Collaboration
| Presentations.ai | Figma | Notion | |
|---|---|---|---|
| File-level sharing | No | Yes | Yes |
| Role-based permissions (view, edit, admin) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Invite via link or email | No | Yes | Yes |
| Folder-level access control | No | Yes | Yes |
| Guest access (external collaborators) | No | Yes | Yes |
No folders, no nesting, no grouping. Every deck sat in the same flat list regardless of project, client, or team. There was no way to organise, sort, or find your work efficiently. The product punished its most active users.
Nobody makes a presentation just for themselves. It gets shared, reviewed, edited, handed off. The product assumed a single user working alone. Real work doesn't look like that.
Every pattern worth knowing, mapped before a single screen was designed.
Yes No Partial Not checked
Most tools separate personal and team spaces with clear boundaries. Private areas, shared areas and team areas exist as distinct containers.
What we tookPersonal content stays personal, workspace content is visible to the team, and shared items get a dedicated view.
| Drive | Dropbox | Notion | Canva | Pitch | Figma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private area | ||||||
| Team area | ||||||
| Shared area | ||||||
| Multiple teamspaces | ||||||
| Team org threshold |
The best tools tightly couple location and permissions; where a file lives determines who can access it.
What we tookMoving a file between personal and workspace changes its visibility. Folder-level permissions cascade down, keeping the mental model simple.
| Drive | Dropbox | Notion | Canva | Pitch | Figma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Folder permission levels | ||||||
| Location-permission coupling | ||||||
| Location sets default permissions |
Most tools support nested folders with inherited permissions.
What we tookA flat folder structure with no nesting, to keep things simple. Presentations inherit the visibility of their parent folder; workspace folders can be public or private.
| Drive | Dropbox | Notion | Canva | Pitch | Figma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nested subfolders | ||||||
| Can restrict children | ||||||
| Can expand for children |
The industry is split between combined and separate systems for links versus direct invites.
What we tookWe kept them separate. Workspace invites for internal collaboration, external links for clients and stakeholders. Private items never surface in workspace search.
| Drive | Dropbox | Notion | Canva | Pitch | Figma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private items appear in search? | ||||||
| Link vs direct invites |
Most tools support guest access at the file and folder level, with domain restrictions.
What we tookGuests are scoped to individual presentations only; they collaborate on specific decks without gaining workspace visibility.
| Drive | Dropbox | Notion | Canva | Pitch | Figma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guest access: files & folders | ||||||
| Domain restrictions | ||||||
| Password-protect links? | ||||||
| Link expiration? |
Everything splits into two spaces: personal and team. Personal space is a simple filtered view of your work; no folders, no hierarchy. Team space is structured; every file sits in a folder, public or private. Permissions follow location. New and uncategorised files rest in drafts until they move to a project.
Everything starts here. Create, find, organise and collaborate from one screen.
Sharing isn't one action; it's three. Workspace level, project level, file level. Each behaves differently depending on plan, role, and whether you're an admin. A free user inviting a teammate sees a different flow than a team admin with open seats. A file in a public project follows different rules than a file in drafts. We mapped every combination across four plan types, multiple permission roles and file locations, then designed flows that absorb the complexity instead of exposing it. For the complete invite logic across plans, roles and edge cases, read the full share-flow documentation.
Permissions inherit downwards
An invite needs a seat. An admin approves. Full access follows.
Public projects open to every member. Private projects need an explicit invite.
Share as a member (needs a seat) or as a guest (no seat, this deck only). Rules adapt to where the file lives.
Link sharing got the same treatment:
The redesign touched every layer of the product. Architecture, dashboard, invite flows, permissions, file management; all rebuilt from the ground up. It shipped on 24 February 2026 with about 80 percent of the redesign live and the rest rolling out. Too early to talk numbers, but the bottleneck that held everything back is gone. New features are already being built on top of what didn't exist a few months ago.
Next up: refresh. Paste or upload your data and let the AI handle the rest, then review what changed on every slide. Keep what works, adjust what doesn't.
Right now my time goes into better slide generation. That means understanding the create flow at a deeper level: how slides are structured, what objects and nodes exist, how content gets generated. The model builds an outline first, then generates slides from it. I curate input datasets and fine tune each stage so the output is better by default. The bigger goal: slides that aren't bound by templates at all. Freeform, generated from scratch, every time.
Thanks for reading.
