Hi, I’m Shivesh Zidan Boodhram

A Senior Product Design Lead based in Johannesburg, South Africa. I currently work at Vodacom Financial Services, where I lead and contribute to digital products across insurance, financial services and multi-channel customer journeys.

My work sits at the intersection of product strategy, customer experience and organisational design. I help teams make sense of complex customer, business and operational challenges, align around a clear direction and turn that direction into digital experiences people can understand and trust.

From designing interfaces to shaping direction

My career began in hands-on UX and visual design. Over time, my role expanded from designing individual screens and journeys to influencing how products are framed, prioritised and delivered.

Today, I work across the full product environment: customer research, service design, journey architecture, product strategy, stakeholder alignment, design systems and delivery. I am often brought into projects where requirements are still unclear, multiple teams have competing priorities or the experience spans several channels and operational systems.

My role is to create structure within that ambiguity.

That may mean reframing the original problem, mapping a complex service ecosystem, aligning business and technology stakeholders, guiding designers through delivery or establishing reusable patterns that make future work more consistent and scalable.

How I Lead

I believe strong design leadership is not about having the loudest opinion or controlling every design decision. It is about creating the conditions for teams to make better decisions together.

I aim to bring clarity to the problem, establish shared principles and help people understand how their decisions affect the wider customer experience.

My leadership approach includes:

  • Connecting customer evidence to product and business decisions

  • Facilitating alignment across design, product, technology, operations and compliance

  • Guiding designers while giving them space to take ownership

  • Raising the standard of design critique, documentation and delivery

  • Creating reusable systems instead of repeatedly solving the same problem

  • Helping stakeholders understand where design can create meaningful value