In my first job at Freshworks, I expected to learn the usual things a young professional learns: how to write polite emails, how to look confident in meetings, how to survive on free cafeteria food.

Instead, I walked into a cult. A design cult.

People around me did not obsess over revenue or feature launches. They obsessed over colors, spacing, typography, word choice and more.

Their oddities rubbed off on me before I realised it.

One morning, I caught myself arguing about the exact shade of Freshdesk green and memorizing the hexcode. That was the moment I knew I was doomed.

My descent began with Bohemian Coding’s Sketch App.

It was handed to me for the wrong reason: to create hyper-customised sales collateral for global enterprise customers. Using Sketch for that job was like using a racing bike to deliver newspapers.

We were a 20-member marketing team equipped with Sketch licenses because it was simply the fastest way to circulate design templates while designers politely pretended they trusted us.

And yet, something unexpected happened. What began as curiosity turned into apprenticeship. Sketch revealed to me a world I didn’t know I cared about. I started using it for what it was actually meant for: product design.

Once that door opened, I walked straight through it. I moved from Sketch to Figma long before it became the religion it is today. Figma felt like discovering that design didn’t have to be solitary or local. It was collaborative, social, alive. You could watch people move frames around like ghosts rearranging furniture.

Around the same time, I started doing online design challenges. Daily UI. A hundred days of making buttons nobody asked for, dashboards that solved nothing, and imaginary sign-up pages for businesses that didn’t exist. It seems pointless on the surface, but the pointlessness was the point. It sharpened my eye. It trained me to care about tiny details that no one would ever compliment.

Then came Zoho.

If Freshworks taught me taste, Zoho taught me the infrastructure behind taste. At Zoho, I finally had the chance to build something for designers instead of merely borrowing their tools. I worked with teams that created internal design systems and platforms, and for the first time, I could see how design was not just about beauty; it was about enabling dozens of people to work without stepping on each other’s toes. It was engineering, psychology, and politics disguised as aesthetics.

Looking back, the journey feels accidental. No single moment felt dramatic. It was simply the slow accumulation of other people’s obsessions, software I had no business using, challenges no one expected me to complete, and opportunities I didn’t know would matter.

But somewhere in that chaos, a truth emerged:

If you spend long enough around people who care deeply about something, their madness becomes your education. And if you follow that madness far enough, it quietly becomes your craft.