Kaustubh × Salesforce

Salesforce CDP

Senior Product Designer · 2019 – 2021

Salesforce CDP is an enterprise customer data platform built to unify customer records across every touchpoint and power personalization at scale. I joined in its early days and worked across the core product — data ingestion, insights, real-time actions, and identity — often as the only designer on problems with no established playbook.

Getting data into CDP was the first problem every customer faced. Data Streams & Mapping let enterprise teams connect external sources and transform them into a unified schema.

The core challenge was designing for two fundamentally different users: data engineers who needed precision and control, and marketing ops teams who needed speed and clarity. I designed a mapping experience that served both — making the underlying data model legible without requiring users to fully understand it. The patterns I established here became the template for how subsequent ingestion features were designed across the product.

Data mapping and transformation UI

Calculated Insights let CDP customers define and compute metrics — segment scores, behavioral signals, lifetime value — directly on unified profile data, without exporting to a separate analytics tool.

The challenge was making a fundamentally SQL-driven capability feel approachable to non-technical marketers. I led design from concept through launch, building a UI expressive enough for analysts while remaining readable for the marketing teams consuming the outputs.

Calculated insights flow map UI

Six months into the product, leadership wanted a shared north star to align product, engineering, and go-to-market on what CDP should feel like at its best. I ran the sprint — facilitating alignment sessions, conducting competitive research, and producing a vision prototype of the end-to-end CDP journey.

The output gave the team a shared vocabulary and a concrete reference point for tradeoff decisions for months afterward. Less about specific features, more about establishing how we thought about the product together.

Customer data platform home UI

Identity Resolution is one of the hardest problems in customer data: determining that the same person appearing across five systems — with different emails, device IDs, and account numbers — is actually one person.

I was part of the original team that first tackled this in Customer 360 Data Manager, and I stayed with it as it evolved into Salesforce CDP. Over four years I shaped the rules-based and ML-assisted matching systems that let enterprise customers define what "same person" meant for their business — and trust the results enough to act on them. The longevity of my involvement meant I could hold consistency across a system that grew significantly in complexity over time.

Unified identity resolution across systems

Customer 360 Data Manager

User Experience Designer · 2017 – 2019

Before CDP existed, Customer 360 Data Manager was Salesforce's first serious attempt at connecting customer data across its cloud products into a unified profile. I joined as a full-time designer and spent two years doing foundational work — on data stewardship, identity resolution, and the product's public debut.

The public debut of Customer 360 was the Dreamforce keynote — Salesforce's flagship event, with over 170,000 attendees. I worked with the product team to design the demo experience used to introduce Customer 360 to the world.

Designing a keynote demo is a distinct challenge: you're not designing the product, you're designing the story — the sequence of moments that makes a complex platform feel clear and inevitable to a non-technical audience at scale.

Keynote Demo

Customer 360 Data Manager interface

As Customer 360 scaled, a new class of problems emerged around data quality and ownership. I led design for Data Stewardship — tools that let data owners review, reconcile, and act on customer data issues across the platform.

This was deeply operational UX: the users were data stewards doing this work all day. The design had to be fast, auditable, and trust-building. Patterns from this work carried forward directly into CDP.

Data quality and compliance management

Marketing Cloud

User Experience Design Intern · 2016 – 2017

I joined Salesforce as an intern on the Marketing Cloud team. I worked on the Marketing Cloud mobile apps — contributing to design through the full development cycle and shipping features available to customers on iOS and Android at launch. This is where I first learned to work closely with engineering and developed a taste for technically complex product problems.

Android and iOS Marketing Cloud mobile apps

TL;DR

A six-year tenure at Salesforce dedicated to solving the most technically dense problems in the enterprise data ecosystem. My progression from intern to Senior Designer was defined by 0-to-1 platform innovation—balancing high-scale engineering requirements with the strategic design needed to drive global adoption and patented intellectual property.

0 1

Concept to Launch

7

Co-invented Patents

15M+

Keynote Impressions