Research · Strategy · Service design
I use research, strategy, and systems thinking to understand what people need, where they get stuck, and why — then turn those insights into better products, services, and organizational decisions.
Clients and partners
What I do
For 8+ years, that has meant four kinds of work.
01
Uncover what people need, what drives their decisions, what builds trust, and where they hit barriers. I design and lead qualitative and mixed-methods research with everyone a service touches.
02
Look beyond single touchpoints to how products, services, teams, and institutions work together. Map the experience, find where it breaks down, and spot the opportunities with the most potential.
03
Take ideas from discovery to concept, prototype, and test. Redesign the journeys, workflows, intake processes, and tools teams use to deliver a service.
04
Bring evidence into strategic decisions. Help leadership teams set priorities, allocate resources, rethink programs, align stakeholders, and turn a shared vision into a plan.
In the room
The people using a service, the teams delivering it, and the leaders making decisions about it. That includes the people who said no or dropped out.
Selected work
MKE BOSS, funded by JPMorgan Chase
Research, product strategy, and prototyping for a digital intake and lender-referral experience connecting entrepreneurs with community lenders and business education.
Read the case study →
Mamas in Bloom, Perinatal Health Equity Initiative
Research with 100+ mothers, providers, and community partners to identify gaps in care and design the program’s first service blueprint and curriculum.
Read the case study →
For The People
Research across prosecutors, defense attorneys, and formerly incarcerated people to uncover competing needs and friction points across the service journey.
Read the case study →
Cradle Cincinnati
Research and program evaluation that helped leaders set priorities, reassess programs, and build a long-term strategy and evaluation system.
Read the case study →
What people say about working with me
“No matter how messy or complex the inputs are, Janvi has this superpower of turning them into something that is desirable to engage with and easy to follow such that clients or users are actually able to act on the information.”
“Janvi was very communicative and always available to answer questions. She worked as a great lead on this project and steered us in the directions we ought to go.”
“[Janvi] can formalize the chaos that we are. Creates a strategy and executes with a calmness that belies the difficulty of the process.”
“[Janvi] always keeps people at the center of her work, which led our team to levels of impact and outcomes we simply wouldn’t have reached otherwise.”
Contact
I’m looking for user research, insights, and service design roles on product and strategy teams. Based in Brooklyn, NYC.
Financial services · Milwaukee · 2021–2022, pilot launched 2024
Three community lenders in Milwaukee offered loans, coaching, and classes, but business owners couldn’t find the one that fit them, and the lenders had no shared way to pass people along. I led the research and designed MKE BOSS: one front door that matches owners to the right support, and a shared tracker for lender staff.
Business owners of color in Milwaukee went from lender to lender, retelling their story each time. Many didn’t apply at all. They didn’t trust financial institutions, were afraid of loans, and were often turned down without hearing why. Three community lenders wanted to change that, but each worked on its own, with no shared way to send an owner to the partner who could help.
MKE BOSS, a two-sided platform. Owners answer a short intake and get matched to the best-fit loans, coaching, and classes. Lender staff receive the lead, accept it or pass it to a partner, and can see who is holding each owner. The pilot launched in February 2024.
01 · Research with business owners
I talked with 10 business owners of color, in interviews and short video responses, about how they look for financing, who they trust, and what happens when they’re turned down.
“When you apply you feel amazing, when you get denied, your chest just feels stepped on.”
“Never heard back from them. They didn’t tell us what we should do or could do to get funding.”
02 · Research with lender staff
We started with an in-person kickoff with the three lenders to map the system together. I then interviewed 13 lender staff, from leadership to the people who meet owners every day, plus staff at another bank, and mapped each lender’s referral process step by step.
03 · The gap and the opportunity
Owners who needed help and lenders who wanted to give it kept missing each other. Three findings shaped what we built.
Finding 1
Lenders offered plenty. Owners didn’t have time to search, and couldn’t tell which option fit their business.
“I don’t have time to google anything.”
Finding 2
Lenders looked for business know-how that many owners were still building. Funding without education left owners stuck.
“I’m still drowning financially if you are giving us money and not the education of how to use it.”
Finding 3
Owners wanted a warm handoff to a real person, not another link. Lenders wanted to know who was holding each owner.
“Don’t refer me to an org. Refer me to a person at the organization.”
So we designed one front door for both sides, around a rule from our ideation sessions: “It’s never really a No, it’s a not yet.”
04 · Design and testing
I designed every screen for both sides, after role-playing the flows with lender staff in our bi-weekly calls. In May 2022, I ran think-aloud tests on the wireframes with two staff at each of the three lenders, and with three business owners.
05 · Requirements and launch
I turned the research into requirements for the engineering partner: a question flow with conditional logic, ranked recommendations, results sent by email, a dashboard of clients, and a view of incoming and outgoing referrals. Together we decided what had to ship first and what could wait for later versions.
“This is a great step to bridge the gap between someone having an idea or dreams to actually bringing it to life.”
What this project taught me
Giving people money isn’t enough. They also need to learn how to use it.
Often there are people who need help and people who want to help, with nothing connecting them. Most of this work was building that connection, so the help reaches the people it’s meant for.
Healthcare · East Orange, New Jersey · 2026
A free, nurse-led support program for Black mothers had low sign-ups. No one knew whether mothers were turning it down, or getting lost on the way in.
“I thought I owed you money for helping me, so I avoided the call.”
Legal services · Oakland, California · 2023–2024
For The People helps prosecutors take a second look at long prison sentences. Offices hesitated to start, and the program lived in a few people’s heads, so every new office depended on them.
“DC Design pushed us to think differently and be open-minded about different approaches. They did this by really listening to us and those we work with.”
Healthcare · Hamilton County, Ohio · 2022–2024
Cradle Cincinnati works to end infant deaths. It ran many programs at once, and needed a plan grounded in Black mothers’ experiences, plus a fair way to judge which programs fit it.
“Janvi was very communicative and always available to answer questions. She worked as a great lead on this project and steered us in the directions we ought to go.”
Education · National · 2025–2026
NPBEA built an online design thinking playbook for school leaders. Before investing more, its board and funder needed to know whether leaders would use it, and what was in the way.
Out of 100 principals invited:
Most of the drop-off came before anyone made an account, with a second drop after the first phase.
“The method works. The adoption pathway needs investment.”
Community services · East San José, California · 2025–2026
Five nonprofits served the same families in a neighborhood facing displacement, each with its own front door and no shared plan. Families retold their story at every door.
“I really appreciated her facilitation, her approach, and empathy. She came across as dependable and extremely knowledgeable.”
Hi, I’m Janvi
I grew up in Mumbai around my family’s sheet-metal workshop, watching how things get made.
I trained as an industrial designer and found research by watching people play a board game I helped make. When I didn’t know what came next, my dad wrote me a list of what I love: knowing people, exploring places, dancing. That list brought me to New York for an MFA in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts.
Over the past eight years, I’ve worked where research, design, and strategy meet. Five of those years were at DC Design, leading projects from discovery to implementation in healthcare, education, financial services, and legal services.
I’m a systems thinker obsessed with clarity. I’m most interested in the space between understanding a problem and making something better, where research meets decisions and different parts of a system start working together.
How I work
I help organizations move from understanding a problem to deciding what to do differently.
A matching tool I designed and tested for three community lenders in Milwaukee drew 100+ business owner leads in its first six months.
MKE BOSSFor The People now uses the onboarding blueprint I designed to bring on new prosecutors’ offices, across 60+ jurisdictions.
For The PeopleMy research set the priorities of Cradle Cincinnati’s five-year plan, and the evaluation I led helped leadership sunset two programs and refocus resources.
Cradle CincinnatiA pilot I ran showed where school leaders dropped off and why, and gave a national education board and its funder four costed options for what comes next.
NPBEAWhat I make
Journey maps, blueprints, screens, and plans. Tap any piece to see it larger.
What it’s like to go through a service, stage by stage, in people’s own words.
Who does what, front stage and back, so a team can run it.
Tested with the people who’ll use them, and written up for engineers.
What a program should change, how you’ll know, and who leads which part.
Research a team works through, instead of a report they file away. I drew the illustrations.
My journey
Grew up around my family’s sheet-metal workshop.
Studied industrial product design at the MIT Institute of Design, Pune.
Found research by playtesting SHASN, a political strategy board game, 500+ times. It went on to raise $339K on Kickstarter.
Moved to New York for an MFA in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts.
Joined DC Design.
Led research and strategy for clients in healthcare, education, financial services, and legal services.
A team to go deep with: own research from the first question to the decision, and stay long enough to see what changes.
Talks and writing
Design Thinking for Social Impact, BESCY NYC
Nov 2025Stop presenting research. Frame the decision.
Jul 2026How to get research participants to open up
Aug 2026How to turn research insights into something useful
Aug 2026Ask five people how a program works, get five programs
Sep 2026Work
Newest first. Six have full case studies.
Found where a free maternal health program was losing mothers, and designed its first service blueprint. Case study
Designed a day for 116 people from 83 grantee organizations, with a workbook to take home.
The first shared plan for five nonprofits in East San José, linking emergency cash support with longer-term paths to adult learning, income, and ownership. Case study
A three-month pilot of a design thinking platform for school leaders, and four costed options for what comes next. Case study
The onboarding model For The People uses to bring on new prosecutors’ offices. Case study
The research behind a five-year plan, and an evaluation that helped leadership decide what to stop. Case study
Research with 66 students became a reflection workbook for college leaders, with illustrations I drew. I narrowed the scope from every program to four.
A matching tool and referral tracker for three community lenders, launched as a pilot. Case study
Led research with 94 students, parents, and physicians, mapped the path into medicine from middle school to residency, and sorted 37 opportunities by impact and effort. It informed AAMC’s Action Plan 4.
A design thinking course for 100 teenage scholars, ending in a final expo of their projects.
Synthesis and a report from a convening of 40+ organizations working on veteran suicide prevention.
Designed and playtested a political strategy board game: 500+ playtests, $339K from 4,209 backers on Kickstarter, and the IndieCade Europe Social Impact Award.
