Connecting Gandhi fellows, Piramal Foundation

Oct 10, 2025

Designed and shipped the end-to-end Community feature for the Gandhi Fellowship app, enabling fellows to share updates, ask questions, celebrate milestones and engage with peers throughout their fellowship journey. Led the feature from discovery and user flows to interaction design, creating a social experience that strengthened collaboration and knowledge sharing within the existing product ecosystem. (Under NDA currently)

Connecting Gandhi fellows, Piramal Foundation

Oct 10, 2025

Designed and shipped the end-to-end Community feature for the Gandhi Fellowship app, enabling fellows to share updates, ask questions, celebrate milestones and engage with peers throughout their fellowship journey. Led the feature from discovery and user flows to interaction design, creating a social experience that strengthened collaboration and knowledge sharing within the existing product ecosystem. (Under NDA currently)

client

Gandhi Fellowship, Piramal Foundation

client

Gandhi Fellowship, Piramal Foundation

role

Senior Product Designer & Strategist

role

Senior Product Designer & Strategist

service

Product Design • UX Design • Feature Design • Interaction Design

service

Product Design • UX Design • Feature Design • Interaction Design

Parallax image
Parallax image
Introduction
Introduction

To strengthen peer learning within the Gandhi Fellowship ecosystem, I designed and shipped an end-to-end social community feature. The feature enabled fellows to share updates, ask questions, celebrate milestones, create polls, upload documents, and engage through likes and comments using verified Fellow IDs. I led the complete product design process—from information architecture and user flows to high-fidelity interactions—resulting in a significant increase in app engagement and repeat usage.

However, this project is under NDA and only limited details are shared here. Happy to chat about it :)

To strengthen peer learning within the Gandhi Fellowship ecosystem, I designed and shipped an end-to-end social community feature. The feature enabled fellows to share updates, ask questions, celebrate milestones, create polls, upload documents, and engage through likes and comments using verified Fellow IDs. I led the complete product design process—from information architecture and user flows to high-fidelity interactions—resulting in a significant increase in app engagement and repeat usage.

However, this project is under NDA and only limited details are shared here. Happy to chat about it :)

The app was useful. But fellows needed a reason to come back.
The app was useful. But fellows needed a reason to come back.

Reflect+ was built to bring the fellowship's reflection and feedback journey into one system, replacing fragmented workflows across notebooks, chats and spreadsheets with structured reflections, mentor feedback, goals and progress tracking.

But adoption created a different challenge. Much of the experience was inherently task-driven: fellows came to Reflect+ when they needed to complete programme activities and teams still had to repeatedly remind them to use the app.

The opportunity was to make Reflect+ useful beyond assigned tasks by turning it into a place where fellows could also discover, connect and participate in the wider fellowship community.

From a programme tool to a space for the fellowship community
From a programme tool to a space for the fellowship community

I designed Community as a fully functional social layer within the existing Reflect+ ecosystem. Fellows could create posts using text, images, videos, documents and links; create polls; like, comment and share; connect with other fellows; and report inappropriate content.

I also redesigned the user profile around this new social context, separating private programme information visible only to the fellow from a public-facing profile that other fellows could discover through the community.

The goal wasn't to replicate a social network feature-for-feature. It was to identify the interactions that could make a geographically distributed fellowship feel more connected without losing Reflect+'s identity as a programme platform.

The challenge wasn't designing a social feed. It was fitting one into an existing product.
The challenge wasn't designing a social feed. It was fitting one into an existing product.

The interaction patterns themselves were familiar. The harder problem was understanding an existing product deeply enough to introduce an entirely new behaviour without disrupting the workflows fellows already depended on.

Community touched more than the feed. Profiles became both private and public identities; existing users became discoverable people; content needed permissions and reporting; connections needed states; and notifications had to coexist with programme reminders. I had to map these dependencies before designing the feature so Community felt native to Reflect+, rather than a separate product added on top.

Community launched as platform engagement strengthened
Community launched as platform engagement strengthened

Community went live as Reflect+ scaled across the fellowship. These metrics reflect Reflect+ as a whole, not Community in isolation, so I don't attribute the increase directly to my feature. What Community changed was the product proposition: fellows now had a reason to open the platform not only to complete a required task, but to see what others were doing, participate and connect.