Arushi Tandon

Senior Product Designer, design lead

Excel on mobile and iPad · Excel Agent

• Set the design vision and strategy for agentic Excel on mobile and iPad: mobile as the command centre, iPad as the true companion. Excel Agent is live on iPhone and iPad.
• Led end-to-end design across a multi-surface product, from ambiguous early concepts to launch, partnering with product, engineering and research leadership.
• Designed for trust in AI: agent actions are legible before, during and after they happen, through clarifying questions, visible reasoning, change highlights, undo and fire-and-return.
• Turned research into strategy. Designed and ran the studies (7 iPhone sessions, 8 iPad participants across eight professions, a three-day workshop and a survey of 200+ users) and used them to prioritise the jobs to be done.
• Authored the frameworks the team designs by, including trust scales with risk and intent inference over mode-switching.
• Lead and mentor three designers without a reporting line, setting direction and the quality bar.

Originator, design lead and owner

HAWK AI · an AI-native design practice

• Integrated AI into how design works, redesigning the team’s workflow from design tools to designing, auditing and fixing directly in code.
• Prototyped and vibe-coded HAWK AI, an AI experience analyser built on large language models that audits end-to-end workflows from recordings. It secured funding in February 2026 and engineering now scales it.
• Measured impact: replaced a 1.5-month, 8-vendor manual testing cycle, saving 4–5 days per audit across 7,000+ videos, and caught 25+ critical issues in its first run.
• Practised responsible AI by defining how good is measured: an eval system of 13 metrics weighted into accuracy, triagability and hallucination control.
• Built tools for the whole team: the Microanalyzer for frame-level perceived performance, and PRISM for designing directly in code. My designers now fix every craft bug in code across the Excel app, the previewer and Excel Agent.
• Built design culture, moving the team from designers to builders. Promoted to the top Senior band in March 2026.

Senior Product Designer

Excel · Copilot

• Used research to set direction for interactive charts: about ten moderated interviews across the US, the UK and Asia overturned all four starting hypotheses. The headline finding, consumption dictates creation, still shapes charting in Excel.
• Designed data-heavy, interactive visualisation in Copilot chat, from creating a chart with advanced analysis to exploring it in a deep dive pane.
• Designed Data Driven Stories at a Microsoft hackathon: one prompt becomes a plan, an analysis and a report the reader can question. Patent pending, May 2025.

Designer 2 → Senior Product Designer

Microsoft 365 Admin Center · Integrated apps

• Thought in systems: owned nine features end to end in how organisations deploy and govern apps, and aligned the experience across the Microsoft 365 and Teams admin centres.
• Designed complex enterprise workflows for IT admins, validated through a usability study with admins at six global enterprises. Two of my three recommendations shipped.
• Designed governance for AI agents in 2023: tenant defaults, pilot groups and per-agent review before publishing, ahead of the industry.
• Promoted to Senior in September 2023, on the strength of this work.

Senior Staff Consultant, UX Design

Nagarro

UI UX Designer

ARI Network Services

• Standardised the design process and designed web themes.

Publishing, retail and my own company

Dorling Kindersley · FRDC retail innovation · Future Group · Purple Curtain, founder and CEO · freelance