I've been nerding out about how people use digital products since 2010 — and I'm annoyingly persistent about getting it right. I work at the intersection of product strategy, design thinking, and research. Based in the Netherlands.
I'm Irani Sangham. I've been working in the digital space since 2010 — started at a nature documentary studio in Cape Town, and ended up going deep into the world of ecommerce, fintech, and digital government services. I have a knack for adding clarity and structure to ambiguous problems. I love making complex situations easier for people to navigate — the why and the how of things genuinely excites me.
I'm not someone who just "champions user-centred design" — I think that's a bit of a cliché. What I actually do is get my colleagues to really understand who's on the other side of the thing we're building, and make it obvious why that matters. I've been doing this for over a decade, across in-house teams at Luno and Allan Gray, and for the past 5 years as a consultant at The Baymard Institute — where I work with product and engineering teams across Europe and the US to identify what's getting in the way of their customers and how to fix it.
I'm moving into product strategy and ownership work. I've been operating in that space informally for years — prioritising roadmaps, presenting to clients, building the business case for design decisions, managing teams. I want to do that deliberately. I'm currently based in the Netherlands, working remotely and loving it.
I have a knack for adding clarity to ambiguous situations. These three diagrams show the way I think — how I approach the noise of a problem and find the signal that makes it solvable.
Product discovery starts with noise — research, contradictions, edge cases. The work is finding the attractor point everything else orbits.
Dozens of experiments, pivots, dead ends. Then a moment where the pattern becomes visible — and the product becomes inevitable.
Every product starts as a tangle of competing forces. The job is finding the throughline — and holding it under pressure all the way to something real.
Narrative Intelligence is the capacity to work directly with the deep meaning structure of any system — social, political, technological, or ecological. The platform maps the relational patterns that give information its significance, revealing what artificial and organic intelligences have in common: they both emerge from a meaning space that defines how a system perceives and responds to its environment. My role spans product discovery, development, and project management — building from zero.
Collecting and systematising product patterns, norms, and conventions across global financial products — banking apps, crypto wallets, investment platforms, and savings products. Building a structured research database that captures what works, what fails, and how conventions vary across markets and cultures. Grounded in my decade of UX audit work across fintech at Baymard, Luno, and Allan Gray.
Consulting on a platform for freelancers to find work, join projects, and showcase their skillset, availability, and work history. Defining product strategy and development roadmap — working through discovery, validation, and the structural decisions that determine whether a marketplace reaches critical mass or stalls. The hardest part of building a two-sided network: getting both sides to show up at the same time.
I'm up for product strategy, consulting, and design leadership roles. If you're working on something complex and need someone who can make sense of it — let's talk.
iranisangham@gmail.com