Kaustubh × Airtable

AI Building Experiences

Lead Product Designer · 2025 – Present

Airtable's bet on AI as the primary building interface created one central question: how do you make a powerful system approachable to users who don't know what to ask it? I lead the experiences that answer that — from the debut of Omni to the evolution of guided building frameworks.

Airtable's legacy onboarding was built for a point-and-click world — static templates and guided steps with no room for personalization. For the AI-native launch, we replaced it entirely with a conversational build model where Omni guides users from intent to app. I led the redesign from research through execution, identifying three core friction points: users didn't know what to ask, guidance was overwhelming, and templated flows couldn't match specific user needs. The solution centered on prompt templates, progressive disclosure, and an interaction model that turned abstract ideas into functional apps.

Beyond the flow, I defined the foundational AI interaction patterns — thinking states, suggestion flows, Omni's introduction — partnering directly with the CEO and Head of Design to align on a high-stakes vision under deadline pressure.

Meet Omni, your AI assistant for building in Airtable

Launching Omni's new app creation experience opened a new question: what does it look like when AI truly collaborates instead of just executes? I developed a consultative building framework where Omni clarifies intent, proposes a build plan, and invites iteration before creating anything — evolving the interaction from generation to genuine co-creation.

Describe what you want to build in natural language

Core Product Design

Lead Product Designer · 2023 – 2025

Before leading AI initiatives, I owned the design evolution of core product surfaces — transforming Airtable from an internal database into a platform for external-facing applications. I led the 0→1 design for Forms and Portals, two strategic initiatives that enabled users to securely collect data and share insights with stakeholders outside their organization. My role went beyond design execution: I drove discovery research with enterprise partners, managed beta programs, and led GTM design to bring both products to market.

Airtable customers were routing around the platform — using expensive third-party tools for external collaboration because there was no native way to bring outside stakeholders in. Through discovery research and a vision prototype that aligned stakeholders early, I defined a new guest paradigm with limited permissions tailored for external users. The core design challenge was balancing access and security in a way that felt simple rather than restrictive.

At launch we doubled exec-aligned business targets — driving $5M+ ACV, 6.3K package purchases, and 4K+ daily active users within the first year.

Customizable sign-in experience for external guests

The legacy form builder was holding Airtable back — limited layouts, no conditional logic, and a feature set that couldn't compete. I led a ground-up redesign that rebuilt the entire form creation experience: flexible layout properties, conditional logic, data validation, and more advanced features. The new builder gave customers capabilities they'd requested for years, on a foundation built to keep improving.

The new form builder achieved 10x adoption, with 180K forms created in the first two months and the highest self-serve upgrade conversion rates in Airtable's history.

New Airtable form builder

Growth Design

Lead Product Designer · 2024 – Current

Growth was a new frontier for me — learning to design through rigorous experimentation, challenge industry conventions, and measure everything. I've shipped over 10 experiments with consistent, measurable impact across trials, invites, and sharing flows.

Only 30% of users were completing invites in Airtable's share dialog — a critical conversion bottleneck. Without a PM, I led discovery, wrote the PRD, and redesigned the experience around three principles: opinionated defaults for common actions, progressive disclosure to reduce cognitive load, and inline collaborator visibility.

Across four experimental milestones over a year: 6% overall share rate increase (21% for trials), 14% more invites to new users, 13% higher acceptance rates. The framework is now deployed across Airtable surfaces.

New simplified collaborator sharing experience

The industry convention was reverse trials — full access that downgrades after a period. Airtable's trial-to-paid rate was 20%. I challenged the assumption by designing a paid trial model requiring credit cards upfront, a controversial bet that required significant stakeholder alignment to run. The experiment delivered a 42% increase in upgrade rates with no increase in downgrades, fundamentally shifting how Airtable thinks about trial monetization.

New paid trial UI explaining the trial offering

Other Projects Shipped

Not every project gets a case study. I move toward hard problems regardless of where they sit on the roadmap.

TL;DR

Three years at Airtable spanning core product, growth, and AI — each phase building on the last. I've operated beyond the traditional design role throughout: writing PRDs, running beta programs, and shipping production code alongside the design work. The through-line is outcome ownership — moving toward the hardest problems on the roadmap and seeing them through.