SIDDHARTH S. JHA

Product Designer

LinkedIn · Portfolio · Contact · Stratford, Ontario, Canada

Summary

Product designer with 10+ years of building consumer software from 0 to 1. Mobile-first. Good product taste, writes well. Thinks in systems, studies design patterns and creates new ones, brings artifact thinking to ambiguous problems and works with precision and restraint. Uses AI to work at a pace that used to require a team.

Figma · HTML/CSS · SwiftUI · UX Design · Interaction Design · AI-native UX · Design Systems · UX Writing · Product Discovery · App Store Optimization · Product-Market Fit

SINCE Mar 2023

Product Designer & Builder

Plot Network Inc · Remote

Publishing apps and leading product design for seed to Series A startups. End-to-end ownership from discovery through delivery.

Fractional Design Lead

> Seed to Series A startups
Sole designer for 0-to-1 products. Led product design for software across e-commerce, energy and sustainability infrastructure, fintech and more. Embedded with founding teams to ship new products and redesign core experiences. Industry-agnostic: Y Combinator startups, large $1B+ private equity firms, pre-seed firms, decades-oldsmall businesses.

Apps

Mindful daily productivity app. #4 on App Store Productivity charts. High weekly retention, 5.0 rating. Case study.

Sep 2019—Dec 2022

Startup Founder

Plot Inc · Toronto

Built and shipped three consumer products: mobile hiring software for small businesses, link-in-bio tool for creators, and social recommendation app for places, TV, and books. Ran customer development with creatives and small business owners, designed and coded MVPs, iterated rapidly based on user feedback. Mentored a full-time product designer.

Sep 2017—May 2019

Academic Sabbatical

University of Surrey · Guildford, UK

18-month sabbatical. Courses across engineering, business, and arts.

> Blocdoc
Year-long research project on future of documents. Built Blocdoc, a block-based fluid document editor with transclusion and real-time collaboration. Inspired by Douglas Engelbart's research.

2013-2017

Co-founder & Product Engineer

Mesh8 Inc · Toronto

Raised seed capital. Built and shipped consumer products to web and App Store, innovating in contextual interfaces, social discovery, and conversational commerce before anyone called it AI.

2012-2013

UX Developer

Self-employed · Kitchener

HTML5 and CSS3 experiences for clients. Built a web-based private journal.

2008-2011

Software Developer

> Wyng IncNew York City · 2011
Built early features of marketing software that powered Fortune 500 ad campaigns, including Audi's Superbowl campaign. Created a Facebook app that reached 200k+ MAUs.
> Research In Motion IncWaterloo · 2009
Built consumer social networking apps in BlackBerry's R&D Prototype Group.
> RBCToronto · 2008
Wrote automated testing software for banking products used by millions.

Academics & Certifications

> University of Waterloo

Foundations of Large Language Models, Dec 2024

Professional Certification in transformer architectures and ML techniques. Built RAG systems, applied model optimization methods.
> University of Surrey
Computer science. Global Graduate Award in German.
> University of Waterloo
Software engineering & computer science.
> Stanford University
Computer science (summer term).

What people say

"I want to express my sincere appreciation for your work with Soneil. Your design and product insights have been invaluable, and we wouldn't have made the progress we have without you. I hope we get an opportunity to work together in the future. It was a true pleasure."

Founder & CEO, Soneil Spark (prev. Staff PM at Credit Karma)

"In the several years I've worked with Siddharth on product ideation, I have been constantly inspired by his ability to engage deeply at every point in the product development process - he is spirited and creative while brainstorming; uses deep industry knowledge to conduct user research; brings his programming ability to bear to build out prototypes to validate and refine; and has design and aesthetic ability to present an effective proposal. He's able to speak like a developer to engineering, since he is one, while keeping the goals of the business top of mind. I find him to be a talented partner in finding solutions to entrenched user problems."

Director of Engineering, Chainlink Labs (prev. Director of Engineering, Terraform at HashiCorp)

"Siddharth is an incredibly talented and well-rounded engineer, product and UX designer. He has a keen eye for design and pays close attention to the smallest details to ensure a great user experience. With his founder experience, he's picked up strong strategy skills after wearing multiple hats in the startup from EPD, business, marketing, recruiting, and managing. He cares deeply about his customer and truly wants to build high-quality, impactful products."

Serial founder & CTO (prev. Director of Engineering at Social Capital)

"Siddharth impressed me with his willingness to learn, his diligence and his interest and understanding of software development and company culture. He struck me as someone full of potential and look forward to watching where his career takes him."

Lead, Google Chrome AI (prev. inventor of BlackBerry Messenger)