About · Villain's Hat

The work

16+ years shipping products & features.

Having lived and worked across 4 continents, I've designed and shipped products and features across industries in Finance, Consultancy, Energy, Entertainment, Aerospace, etc. I've led teams and I've consistentlyc hit targets & KPIs. I've moved metrics that C-suite, finance & legal teams trusts and engineers respect. I've also walked away from things that didn't meet my bar.

UX Reviewer Consultancy Currently · Belgrade, Serbia

Co-founded with my husband Om Tandon, conduct Product audits for games (Coin Master, 8 Ball Pool, Match-3) and enterprise software and smart Apps (Aqoir), which won Bronze at A/Design Awards 2026.

Smartbox Group Dublin, Ireland

UX Manager for Native & B2B Apps and internal SaaS platforms.
⊹ Consistently drove innovative ideas and features, proving worth and impact with POCs. Identified and built business cases for journeys that were 'hiding in plain sight'. Shipped features generating millions in revenue.
⊹ Won 'Popular vote' in AI Hackathon building a AI micro-service (MCP) that translates natural text to backend search keywords for uber-personalised search results. Won second integrating OpenTable to online restaurant bookings, but couldn't demo live.
⊹ Left, and now building Villain's Hat.

Ryanair Dublin, Ireland

UX Lead for Native App, Product design at scale.
⊹ Won the company's first 24-hour hackathon focused on improving inflight passenger experience, that also saves Ryanair operational costs. The product idea shipped and current mints, and saves, €€€€€.
⊹ Also designed Ireland's first ever AR Bag sizer, which was canned for doing too well.

Cornerstone onDemand Auckland, New Zealand

Design lead for startup aquired by CoD, an HR App.
⊹ Focused on research, UX, compliance, accessibility and retention.
⊹ Set up user research lab that was adapted by the team in the US.

McKinsey & Co. New Delhi, India

UX & Data Visualization Designer.
⊹ Worked with clients across 12 countries in Aviation, Energy, Stock Market and Entertainment sectors.

Cognizant Pune, India

UX/UI Designer
⊹ Worked with Barclays as the primary client. Published a staff+customer facing app to improve trust and sign ups. Initially released in Botswana, then worldwide.

2 hackathons won, 1 came second. Ryanair's first 24-hour hackathon, Smartbox's AI Hackathon, Smartbox's Integrations Hackathon. Of course I always want to win but these were not for the trophies. It was for the practice of shipping a real thing on a tight deadline, ensuring compliance and accessibility.

A specific story

I built a feature that worked too well.

At Ryanair, I designed an 'AR Bag Sizer' feature that helped measure their bags before they flew. It took me 8+ months to get this business case into the backlog, the App product loved it, users loved it, the machine learning accuracy improved by the day. The numbers tracked perfectly with the user feedback and research.

And then it was quietly shelved.

The feature had worked. It worked so well that, in fact, it was stopping people from making expensive bag upgrades at the airport, fewer people in the queues. Margins dropped. The metric that paid my salary got worse the moment the feature helped with what users actually needed.

I always believed in balancing business goals with user needs, but that moment rewired how I think about products.

I learned to notice when a design that's right for the user is wrong for the business, and when it's the other way around. I learned to nail and name the tension instead of pretending it isn't there. I learned that the user the product never wrote for isn't always vulnerable. Sometimes it's the user the product wrote for, served too well.

That tension is what Villain's Hat formalized.

The origin of Villain's Hat

I killed two of my own products, on purpose.

I'm telling you this because it's where the methodology originated from. It;s not the only thing I've done but it's one that I've landed on after numerous trial and errors. The killed products are why I wrote the methodology.

Roastfluencer

This was a really fun one, until it wasn't. Roastfluencer was Gemini-powered roast generator. It was one which emulated standup comedian kind-of roasts, a person just needed t upload a picture. It was technically clean, the roasts worked but the guardrails slipped. I could have shipped it but I put myself in the shoes of others who may use this.

Imagine this: A group of kids in a school corridor using it to gang up on a classmate they've just bullied and taken a photo of. They uploaded it to Roastfluencer, and the roast has them pointng and laughing at that kid. I've been the bullied, I know how much it hurts without AI in the mix. The AI made the cruelty cheaper, faster, and at scale. I decided to kill it before launch.

echonote

A platform for people in critical health situations to leave messages for their loved ones upto 10 years into the future. echonote was originally inspired a few years after I lost my mother. I wish I could hear her voice, her laughter, hear her nag even. This was the kind of product I cared about; the kind that, if it worked, would matter the world to me.

I built seven AI guardrail agents. I named each one, gave them a persona with JDs. I tested them in a multitude of scenarios. Then a passing thought changed it all. What if, just what if, someone is trying to blackmail someone and the messages are scheduled in advance, maybe had pictures attached too? Another example is, imagine this. 'I love you' from someone you love (like my mom) vs 'I love you' from a stalker will have very different reactions. One will bring memories and tears, the other will paralyze and make one shiver in angst. I'd hate to think the effect this would have on someone already broken by grief, getting hit again on the anniversary.

The guardrails caught most scenarios. They couldn't catch enough of them, and so I shut it down.

I wouldn't consider closing my own products naivety. It's a quality bar. I know I could work on the AI agents but would that stop the humans from finding workarounds to do evil?

This is where I draw the line. If I won't ship a product I'd be ashamed of, I won't help you ship one either.

What I'm building now

Same skill, 4 surfaces.

The methodology that came out of 16years in UX & killing those two products is now being applied across everything I do.

Villain's Hat

The methodology: VRSD framework. There's the Free Claude Skill and CustomGPT as a taster, with the full investigations tool launching in the 2nd half of 2026.

Read the methodology →

UX Reviewer Consultancy

Co-founded with my husband, Om Tandon. Product audits for games and enterprise software. Same skill applied through UX research rather than AI lens. One of our recent projects for a smart hydration App won bronze in A'Design Awards 2026

Visit UX Reviewer →

The AI Momentum Podcast

Long-form conversations with founders. Season 1 just ended and Season 2 is all about founders who almost shipped a villain, and what they did to fix it.

Watch Season 1 on YouTube →

AI Momentum Substack

The writing that ties it all together. Patterns I find in client work, online and by talking to founders, written every week.

Read the Substack →

Pavitra Tandon presenting on AI agents and probabilistic UX

Belgrade, 2026. Talking about probabilistic UX for AI agents when they think back.

Where I am

in Belgrade, building Villain's Hat, taking my time to do it right.

Living in Belgrade has it's own challenges with the lanaguage but they're all dog-lover here, so it's great to be here with Om and our cocker spaniel Pari. We're in the process of adopting a child. We've lived across 4 continents - India, New Zealand, Ireland and now Serbia. I am learning Serbian, and the languages I know are English, Hindi, Kannada, a tiny bit of Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese and Japanese.

I've wanted to get into Y Combinator for 20 years and I applied last year with a fashion app focused on transitioning shoppers experiences from volume driven to value driven which in turn changes how fast fashion brands slow down, reducing amount of garments that land in our landfills. They said no. The reason I think was I had the business case, I had a prototype, but no Tech co-founder. Villain's Hat is the version I'm building with AI as my Tech co-founder.

If you want to work together, the fastest paths are: try the free Quick Check, apply to the next workshop cohort, or DM me on LinkedIn (links below).

Shipped features that make companies millions every month; won hackathons. I've also killed two of my own products.