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Akshay Verma
Product Innovation Specialist | Partner at Prophecy
Akshay Verma is a Founding Partner at Prophecy, a product innovation and design consultancy.3 He works as part of a team of exceptionally capable designers who partner with companies to provide product innovation and design services.3
Akshay has a background in user experience (UX) research and design. He has held various positions in the tech industry, including:
- Head of User Experience Research at Duolingo (December 2023 - Present)2
- Sr. UX Research Manager & Staff Researcher at Duolingo (January 2023 - December 2023)2
- UX Research Lead (Sr. Manager) at Gong (December 2021 - January 2023)2
- Senior UX Researcher - Personalization at Spotify (April 2020 - December 2021)2
- User Experience Researcher at LinkedIn (October 2017 - April 2020)2
Akshay holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in European History, Politics, and Societies from Harvard University.1 He has also studied Urban Studies & Planning at the University of Amsterdam and completed a program in Design Thinking & Prototyping called Italia Innovation Program.1
In his current role at Prophecy, Akshay likely leverages his extensive experience in UX research and design to help companies innovate and improve their products. His LinkedIn profile suggests he is actively engaged in discussions about the future of UX, as evidenced by a recent post about "The State of UX in 2025".4
Highlights
A design team’s output can only be as good as the CEO lets it be. Making space for design doesn’t mean leaving designers be. It means to offer frequent and active support, stimulus and collaboration. Without that, you can have a stellar design team, but not stellar products.
IMO, this is why we see lots of companies who hire amazingly capable design consultancies (or heads of design) ending up with sub-par work. If design is not in the DNA and looked at as an outsourced function, it takes a monumental effort to change that.
That change comes at a cost and requires a big leap of faith. It requires a conscious change of habits and instincts to focus on delivering product excellence in the face of a thousand impediments that threaten it.
Treating those hurdles as challenges to be solved, rather than hard constraints, that’s the only way to make anything truly great — not yielding to compromises without putting up a huge fight. It’s too tempting to just say we don’t have the time/resources/expertise and reduce scope until what’s left of the product is a pitiable shadow of its original ambition. And then to conclude after launch that the idea doesn’t work and the project isn’t worth your time.
It takes a ridiculous amount of internalising and practising to do this right. And it’s even harder to rally huge teams to work with this attitude. It’s easy for anybody to say that they “value design.” But how many are willing to pay the price and put in the work?
What a joy to work with over 30 amazing founders from the current cohort of Antler’s India Founders Program! 🙌
In our workshop yesterday, we collected quotes and observations from user research, uncovered insights and made journey maps — all hands-on and in just 3 hours!
I’m so happy to see these founders fully embrace and dive head-first into user research and design discovery. Can’t wait to see what they create with these methods and the design culture they establish at their startups, leading by example! 🚀
Special thanks to Nandini Vishwanath, Cathy Guo, Karan Prasad, Ojasvi Srivastava, Sneha Sankar and Siddharth Ahuja for helping plan and conduct this!
#founders #innovation #design #startups
