Snapshot
A team of eight, carrying a logistics platform across an acquisition.
On my first morning at Locus I opened a Google Drive folder and counted twelve files whose names ended in final. One ended in final final final final final final final v7. That was the product, and nobody in the room could say which copy was live.
I joined as Principal Product Designer in February 2019 and owned the design function, the system, hiring, and design QA across eleven product surfaces. Three years later the product ran on a system the team owned rather than a pile of drifting Sketch files. In October 2025, Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee, acquired Locus to run IKEA’s home-delivery backbone globally. The system held. The team held. The headline is the team.
The system
The library was failing literally. By 2020 the single design file took forty seconds to open on a mid-tier laptop because it had outgrown browser memory. I split it into three layers with one contract between them: primitives hold no decisions, components carry their own internal states, page compositions are layout and not logic. Held for a year, that one rule, a primitive cannot contain a decision, changes who decides what. A designer who is not choosing whether a row is one shade of indigo or another is a designer free to sit next to the dispatcher and ask which queue she opens first.
Three decisions I would defend anywhere
The territory editor. Ops teams managed real delivery territories in text editors and Google Earth, overwriting the map every time it changed, so nobody could answer the question that mattered most: what did the map look like the Monday before the outage? The redesign made versioning first-class. Every map carried a version stamp, and promoting a new one moved the old to FROZEN instead of deleting it. In the first user interview, the woman who owned the Bangalore map scrolled the new versioned list, went quiet, and said, “I can finally tell which map is the one the drivers are actually on.” The smallest visible change in the redesign was the one that mattered.
Header standardisation. Eleven modules had eleven different headers, so a new customer-success operator was effectively learning eleven products and taking weeks to do it. I made the case as a support-cost case, not a design one. Three weeks of whole-team audits produced one header component and one rule for when to use it. Training time fell from weeks to days, and because every designer co-authored it, it never drifted back.
ShipFlex. Four months after I left to start my studio, the CEO called: the first customer of a new orchestration product had twelve carriers and a deadline, and the first prospect had already walked away. I came back through Sharpener as a mentor, not a manager, and designed it through a team of five. I redrew far more than I drew. It launched on 21 March 2023 and grew to over 160 carriers across 30+ countries by May 2024. It has its own page.
At Locus, Rohan led design for complex systems and built a Figma library that transformed workflows, making design faster, clearer, and more collaborative.
Shamesh Krishna, Director of Product, Locus.sh
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This is a snapshot of six years and eleven surfaces. I walk through the rest in person. Write to me and let’s talk.