D.E. Shaw & Co. — Product Design Internship, Summer 2026
Unifying D.E. Shaw’s internal work tools.
Three internal tools handled tickets, tasks, and weekly updates. Each did its job. The trouble started when work moved between them.
The brief: make them one connected system. Two months, from research to high-fidelity UI, across five workflows.
Under NDA
The final screens are under NDA, so this page shows the thinking rather than the pixels.
Role
Product Design Intern
Duration
2 months
Team
Internal tools
Mentor
Prithvi Raj
Manager
Tandav Sanka
01
Three is a crowd
Follow a single request through a normal week and you type it three times.
Raised in one tool, split into tasks in a second, summarised in a third. Nothing connected them, so people did.
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Work Management
tickets
Request raised
Status updated
Task Manager
tasks
Broken into tasks
Status updated, again
Log Progress
weekly updates
Summarised by hand
Original entry
Same work, re-entered by hand
An illustrative week.
The problem wasn’t three tools. It was three separate versions of the same work.
Meanwhile, Asana, Linear and Notion had made unified workspaces the norm.
The question
How might we give contributors, project managers and team managers one connected way to plan, track and report work, so that updating something once keeps everyone informed?
Framed during early scoping with the mentor and manager, then refined through stakeholder conversations.
02
A little digging
The interfaces showed how the tools worked. The workarounds showed where they fell short.
Inward · the tools
Tool audit
Mapped the three tools and every handoff between them.
Around · the people
User research
Help-channel threads and quick guerrilla interviews.
Outward · the market
Competitive benchmarking
Jira, Asana and Linear, side by side.
Shared in weekly stakeholder syncs, before any screens existed.
What emerged
From support channels
[Insert the most common question or recurring issue.]
From conversations
[Insert a real, anonymised quote.]
From benchmarking
[Insert the most relevant gap in the existing experience.]
03
Who’s looking at what?
One ticket. Three different questions.
Contributor
“What do I do next?”
Today: work scattered across tools, context buried in threads.
Project manager
“Where does this ticket stand?”
Today: status collected and reconciled by hand.
Team manager
“Who’s blocked? Who’s stretched?”
Today: following up, one person at a time.
3 roles · roughly 30 use cases
Different views of the work. Not different versions of the truth.
04
One source of truth
The ‘aha!’ moment: stop connecting the tools.
Connect the work.
Instead of syncing three records, make the update itself the record. Every view reads from it.
Before
Work Management
record
↓ copied by hand
Task Manager
record
↓ copied again
Log Progress
record
Three tools. Three records. People keeping everything in sync.
After
Ticket
Update = work log
task
task
task
Update
My tasks
My work logs
Reports
One connected data model. Multiple views, tailored to each role.
Chosen from 6+ concepts, tested against
No duplicate entry
A shallow hierarchy
Familiar mental models
One source of truth. Fewer versions of “the latest update.”
05
Making the connections
Five workflows, chosen by how often they happen and how much they hurt.
3
Contributor
Planning and managing tasks
Updating a ticket
Logging time outside a ticket
1
Project manager
Reviewing a ticket and its summary
1
Team manager
Viewing team load and progress
Contributors carry most of the work, so they got most of the design.
Final screens, blurred under NDA.
Made in Figma and Figma Make, with Claude for research synthesis and Cursor for fast iteration. Every round reviewed with stakeholders, mentor and manager.
06
And that’s the bigger picture
A direction the team can carry forward, and one clear next step.
Delivered
— Reviewed design direction and information architecture
— End-to-end designs for five priority workflows
— Documented backlog of open questions for the team
What’s next?
Usability testing with end users.
Reviewed with stakeholders; not yet validated with users.
What stayed with me
i
Look beyond the interface.
Legacy redesign starts with understanding why a feature exists, not just how it looks.
ii
Design for different perspectives.
Working through distinct user roles helps surface edge cases a generic workflow can miss.
iii
Scope is a design tool.
Breaking an open-ended brief into achievable workflows creates room for iteration and feedback.
Under NDA
The screens are confidential.
The final UI, flows and interaction details can’t be shared publicly. I’d love to walk you through them live, along with the decisions behind each one.
Request a walkthrough →