Exclusive | Siddhesh Pednekar of BOMBAYDC: UX is not the icing on the cake; it is the foundation

In an exclusive interaction with MediaBrief, Siddhesh Pednekar, Partner and COO of BOMBAYDC, speaks about how Enterprise UX has evolved from screen-level design to system-level thinking, why user effort is emerging as a critical metric in procurement and transformation decisions, and how friction quietly erodes the ROI of digital investments. Pednekar also shares insights on designing AI as a collaborative colleague rather than a feature overload, reimagining compliance as a seamless workflow, and why removing friction–rather than adding technology–is the real driver of sustainable transformation.

Pednekar begins by reflecting on BOMBAYDC’s own journey and how the company’s thinking has shifted as it moved from early-stage engagements to working at enterprise scale across industries. “From our early days at BOMBAYDC, when we were focused on discrete projects, tactical fixes, and one-off redesigns, to now operating at enterprise scale across industries, our approach has evolved dramatically,” he says. “What started as an effort to ‘make things look better and slightly easier to use’ has matured into a holistic discipline rooted in systems, workflows, human behaviour, and long-term organisational impact.”

“This shift marked the moment our work moved from screen design to system design,” Pednekar says. He adds that the team fundamentally changed how it looked at UX. “We stopped viewing UX as a collection of interfaces and began treating it as an ecosystem of multi-role workflows, policy-driven processes, onboarding engines, AI-enabled journeys, and design systems that support hundreds of internal teams.” The insight, he notes, was both simple and transformative: “Pixels don’t create outcomes, systems do. And systems only change when behaviours change.”

The real breakthrough, Pednekar says, came when the questions themselves changed. “The turning point came when we stopped asking, ‘How should this screen look?’ and instead asked, ‘Why does this workflow exist at all?’ That was the moment BOMBAYDC evolved from a design agency into a true enterprise partner.”