TL; DR
What is Rootly?
Rootly is an AI-native, enterprise-grade on-call and incident management platform loved by 100's of leading companies such as Cisco, NVIDIA, Figma, Squarespace, Canva, and more.
First-ever intern, at my first-ever internship
Stepping in as Rootly’s first and only design intern meant leaping entirely into the unknown. I embraced that ambiguity to leave a lasting mark: shipping 80+ UX improvements, authoring their first-ever brand guidelines, and saving teams 50+ hours per campaign through generative brand tools. I didn't just design interfaces but helped shape a design-first culture, a journey that ultimately earned me a billboard on the Times Square, and the Co-op Student of the Year award!
From papercuts to product confidence
Led an initiative of low-impact, high-impact UX improvements, raising product quality
Some areas I worked on: Escalation Policy repeats and fallback, workflow condition, and custom form fields.
Leverage AI for speed and scalability
10x workflow for brand & marketing
Improving core platform features
Better view of many teams on-call schedules
Delivering the core product interface
Before:
The on-call sidebar overwhelms users with too much buried schedule information.
Screen space is wasted when few people are on call, and overcrowded when there are many.
It’s difficult to find who’s on call across multiple teams.
Switching between daily, weekly, and monthly views creates a fragmented mental model.
Quality-of-life Enhancements
Building an AI-driven visual playbook
The marketing team required a steady stream of visual assets, from social media posts, blog banners, and speaker cards to across multiple touchpoints. Initially, production was entirely manual and bottlenecked through a single designer (me), making the workflow unsustainable and impossible to scale as demand grew.
I designed and implemented an AI-powered asset generation system that transformed our production process from dependency to autonomy. In parallel, I took ownership of various verticals in our first brand guideline, developing what became distinct sub-brand expressions.
──── ୨୧ ────
Key Takeaways
Here, I've learnt more than I could ever asked for.
🔎 Ownership in ambiguity
Startups don't wait for you to catch up. Unlike a “normal” internships, managers lack bandwidth for hand-holding and work isn’t assigned - it’s claimed. Within 2 first months, I delivered full-timer level impact by mastering self-advocacy: identifying gaps, proposing solutions, and proving value through consistent execution whether in brand or product. I learned that asking questions is how you accelerate growth and earn trust in fast-moving environments.
🛠️ Systems thinking over one-off solutions
The real achievement wasn't output volume, it was building a repeatable playbook that outlives individual projects. I applied impact-effort triage to prioritize quick wins, then codified this approach into our design system so future interns could replicate the same measurable impact. In complex platforms like on-call and incident management, stepping back to see systemic connections reveals that many problems share a single root cause.
🔭 Innovation requires breaking patterns
Observing senior designers and PMs taught me how to operate within established systems, but real breakthroughs happen when you detach from existing variables. While mastery of current frameworks proves you can scale with the organization, strategic pattern-breaking introduces new possibilities. The challenge is knowing when to follow the system and when to rewrite it.