Co-founded a product studio that shipped 50+ digital platforms over five years, working with founders, PMs, and stakeholders to define and build.
Founded: 2019 Role: Co-founder, Creative Director, Product Lead Years active: 2019 - 2024
Calypsu was my own company. I co-founded it in 2019 with Harshdeep Anand - a product studio built to take ideas from brief to working software, with a team that handled both design and development under one roof.
Fifty-plus digital platforms over five years. That is what we shipped.
Calypsu worked across sectors - fintech, ed-tech, consumer products, SaaS, services. The brief was always some version of the same thing: someone had an idea for a digital product, and they needed a team to make it real.
What changed was the complexity. Early projects were relatively contained - marketing websites, product landing pages, internal tools. Over time the briefs grew. We were being brought in to define product strategy before a single screen was designed, to build the systems that companies would run their operations on, to create digital products that needed to scale.
Each project meant working through the product definition problem - what should this actually do, in what order, for which users? That discipline of forcing clarity before moving to design, and forcing design clarity before moving to development, became the core of how Calypsu worked.
We made it a rule early on that every engagement started with a roadmap session. No jumping straight to wireframes, no starting development before the scope was locked.
Founders and stakeholders tend to arrive with solutions in mind. Our job was to unpack those solutions back to problems, then rebuild from there. Sometimes that confirmed what the client already thought. More often it changed the scope significantly - usually by trimming features that sounded good but would not actually move the needle.
I built and managed the teams for each project. Designers and developers working in the same room - or the same Figma file and Slack channel - rather than passing work over a wall. That integration meant faster feedback loops and fewer surprises when design met code.
Handovers from design to development were documented properly. Design systems were built from the start, not retrofitted. These were disciplines that clients sometimes pushed back on as overhead - until they saw what happened when they were skipped.
Fifty platforms over five years means some projects were finished and handed over. Some grew into ongoing relationships where Calypsu managed development after launch. The ones that lasted longest were the ones where we had taken the time to build a proper foundation - clean architecture, documented systems, a codebase the client's team could actually maintain.
Five years of running a studio teaches you things you cannot learn any other way.
I learned how to scope work - and how to push back when a scope is wrong. I learned that the most expensive mistakes happen in the definition phase, not the build phase. I learned what it takes to keep a cross-functional team working well under deadline pressure.
Calypsu closed in 2024. The work it produced is still running. The lessons are permanent.
Aanand Madhav is a Senior PM and UX Expert with 9 years of experience shipping products across fintech, ed-tech, ecommerce, and government sectors. He leads UX and development at YAMU Media and runs MediaMen Services.
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