Why Shajee Aijazi left Autodesk to start a design consultancy

A Toronto consultancy, three weeks old

The episode opens with Muzamil reframing the show. He says the conversations are shifting toward a specific kind of guest — overseas Pakistanis doing cutting-edge work in roles that Pakistani audiences either don’t understand or can’t yet see themselves in. The thesis is straightforward. Pakistan’s services sector, in his read, is about to boom; the country is already a rising star in freelancing and is performing reasonably in IT, “but not as good as it should have been doing.” The point of the new format is to surface the roles people inside Pakistan don’t yet know to apply for.

His guest is Shajee Aijazi, calling in from Toronto. Shajee corrects the pronunciation of his name — there’s an ain at the end, and the word means “courageous” — and gives the short version of his career. Fifteen years in design overall, ten years specialising in UX, most recently a senior lead UX designer at Autodesk, the fifty-eight-billion-dollar company behind Maya, 3ds Max and AutoCAD. He worked specifically on Maya, on the team building tools for texture artists and material work. Three weeks before this conversation, he left. He has just started his own consultancy, Design Garage, and is taking on private clients.

Muzamil offers context for anyone who has never opened a 3D tool: “They create some of the most cutting edge graphic design rendering software in the world, which Shajee bhai has left, and started his own practice.” The framing of the episode is set from there. The rest of the conversation is a long, deliberate walk through what UX actually is, who can do it, what’s about to be hollowed out by AI, and what a non-technical Pakistani should do if they want in.

What UX actually is, and why Apple gets the credit

Muzamil pushes for a definition. People understand graphic design. UX, he notes, most don’t. Shajee’s answer is anchored in everyday Pakistani frustration. The term goes back to the early nineties, became common in the 2013-15 window, and stands for user experience. Any app, software, digital product or website gives the user an experience. The UX designer’s job is to make that experience fulfil the user’s actual needs and remove the friction in the way.

He uses the example almost every Pakistani has lived through: bank apps. “Pakistan mein khaastor par jo banks ki apps hoti hain, woh bilkul bhi user friendly nahi hoti,” he says — Pakistani bank apps are not user-friendly at all. Translated cleanly: if you want to transfer money, how easy is it to actually complete that task? How many obstacles sit between the user and the outcome? “It is not only how it looks, but also how it works.”

Muzamil layers on a useful piece of history. He asked ChatGPT for the origin of the term and was told the credit goes to Don Norman, a cognitive scientist who coined “user experience” while at Apple in the nineties. Muzamil’s read: if any single company championed UX as a discipline, it was Apple — engineer-first companies optimise for what they can build; Apple optimised for what the user does. That framing carries through the rest of the conversation.

The AI argument, and where they disagree

The first real tension in the episode is over how much AI is going to take. Muzamil’s position is direct. The bottom of the design food chain in Pakistan — the ten- and twenty-dollar logo job on Fiverr, the templated bank-of-the-week social post — is already gone. The customer can generate the asset themselves, sometimes better, for two dollars. He pushes Shajee to name what’s left.

Shajee disagrees, but carefully. “Mein thoda sa disagree karta hoon,” he says — I disagree a little. His argument is from the inside of Autodesk. He was on a team building AI tools for Maya — specifically a plugin for texture artists working with materials like leather on a chair. The plugin would speed the artist up. It would not turn a non-3D-artist into someone who could make Moana. “You will never be able to do it,” he tells Muzamil, who is asking the question hypothetically. “I will never be able to do it.”

He widens the frame. People in tech, he says, hear about AI constantly because tech is close to it. But in Toronto, when a car-wash business, a plumbing business, a law firm or a real-estate firm needs a website, they are not building it themselves. They are going to a web designer. The expectation may now be that the website ships in a week instead of a month — because the designer has AI tools — but the designer is still in the driver’s seat. A thousand-person Pixar team may become a three-hundred-person team. It will not become a zero-person team.

Muzamil takes the point but presses on the seven hundred. Who is in the three hundred? That is the question Pakistani designers — the critical mass of whom are not artists, not first-principles thinkers, but template-fetchers — need to answer. Shajee’s reply lands the strategic spine of the episode. The people who survive are the ones operating at the strategy level: which users are we serving, what is their pain, where do they get stuck, how do we solve it. “If your work is a lot more tactical — you are deciding the button should go here, the button’s colour should be blue instead of purple — all of those decisions are easily outsourced to AI.”

A specific career path, with specific resources

Muzamil reframes the question concretely. Imagine your younger brother is a high-school graduate. He doesn’t want university. He wants UX. Step by step, what does he do?

Shajee’s path runs through online courses with mentors layered on top. The Google UX certificate on Coursera is a reasonable first step. The Interaction Design Foundation has good material. But — and this is the part he insists on — both are starting points. “Yeh aapko, this is the first step. You do have to climb the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth step.” He’s seen the failure mode firsthand. When he hired for his agency, he received around two hundred applications. By his count, perhaps eight to ten were worth looking at. The rest had the same shape: every case study followed the exact pattern taught in the Google certificate. “Which tells me that you have done the Google certificate course and you haven’t gone beyond. You haven’t explored. You haven’t done any self-directed learning.”

Muzamil layers on two resources of his own. The first is roadmap.sh — a site he points out was built by a Pakistani — which gives step-by-step paths for becoming a UX designer in 2025, including the frameworks to learn and the resources to use. The second is ChatGPT, used not as a search engine but as a personal assistant. Don’t just ask “how do I learn UX.” Give it your background, ask for a three-month roadmap, then loop it back to a specific project you’re working on.

The mentor advice is the part of this section worth pulling out. Muzamil names a mistake Pakistanis routinely make: chasing the top of the industry as a mentor, and treating anyone less famous as not worth approaching. His counter is precise. “The best mentors are the ones who are two three years ahead of you. Because they understand your context and they can give you actual next steps.” A breakout success from last year can mentor a complete beginner better than a global name can. The cost is they’re not as glamorous on Instagram. The benefit is they’re useful.

Can a psychologist do this job?

This is the question Muzamil has been building toward for the whole middle of the episode, and the answer is the cleanest moment in the conversation. He frames the audience he has in mind: psychology graduates, behavioural-sciences graduates, smart and intuitive Pakistanis sitting jobless because they assume UX is “a technical field” they’re locked out of.

Shajee’s response is unambiguous. “You hit the nail on the head.” Understanding user psychology, observing how a user behaves, researching how a real person actually moves through your product — these are the things AI is furthest from replacing. He explains why with one specific exercise. “The most that a person learns in UX is this: simply sit behind a user using the software you designed, and just observe. That exercise is so telling.” The user will press buttons you never imagined they’d press. They will move in directions no AI session-recorder can yet interpret with full nuance. “It is still a human looking at another human and understanding the nuances of how they are behaving.”

His advice to anyone non-technical worried they don’t belong: “Make yourself a student of human psychology. Make yourself a student of human behaviour. Develop that understanding. That is going to make you stand out.”

Founder to designer, before founder to coder

Muzamil runs a thought experiment. A founder with a real problem statement — say, the gap he himself has been studying, where roughly two million Pakistani high-school graduates a year have no seat at a higher-education institution and no high-value job to walk into — arrives at Shajee’s door. The founder has a rough idea, no clear solution, and assumes the first call is to a developer. Where should he actually start?

Shajee’s answer is firm and goes against the default Pakistani startup instinct. “I do think UX design always does come first.” His thought process: hash out the problem before chasing a solution. Use design-thinking exercises to define exactly what problem you’re solving, who you’re solving it for, who the stakeholders are, who the competitors are. Then layer in the jobs-to-be-done framing — what job is the user hiring your product to do? Only after that does the question of how to build it become productive.

Muzamil compresses it into a line that lands. “Basically, instead of jumping straight to building an MVP just to see what it looks like, first do the homework on what you’re building. Because building has become easy.” Shajee finishes the thought. “Banana kya hai? Banana kis ke liye hai? Banana kis problem ko solve karne ke liye hai?” — What are we building, who are we building it for, what problem are we solving. With his clients, he says, the exercise lives on a single FigJam board at the start of every engagement. That board is what the rest of the work is checked against. Every flow, every screen, every click he eventually designs has to map back to the original problem and the original job. Otherwise the build looks finished and solves nothing.

Two Pakistans, in the same hiring funnel

When Muzamil asks for an honest read on Pakistani design talent, Shajee gives one. He has just spent two months in Pakistan, meeting design teams at Tenpearls, Systems Limited, RB Soft and Venture Dive. He describes what he saw there as “extremely refreshing.” Self-starters. Designers taking initiative, going out of their way to figure out user needs, actively thinking through how to solve problems on their own. “That was extremely refreshing for me to see, that this kind of UX work is also happening in Pakistan.”

And then, in the same breath, the other side. The two hundred applications to his own consultancy that all looked the same. The portfolios where case studies follow a strict linear pattern — first this, then this, then this — when real product work loops backward constantly. You ship a feature, the user feedback comes in, you go back to the drawing board on the same feature, you ship again. “That was not evident in a lot of the portfolios I saw — which tells me you actually haven’t really worked in the real world.”

Muzamil offers a generous read of why. His own first job was at a large, good company, with a good environment, but the nature of the work was “quietly do this and have it back to me by tonight.” Thinking slowed you down. Speed got you promoted. The incentive structure ran against creative judgement. Shajee’s advice to a young Pakistani designer follows from this directly: seek work at the companies that nurture autonomy — the ones where you are given a problem and the trust to figure out the best way to solve it. Mastery is downstream of autonomy.

Forty-five courses, eighty thousand dollars

The most striking number in the conversation arrives near the end. Shajee mentions that he keeps a Chrome bookmark folder called course login pages. It currently holds over forty-five entries. Every one of them is a paid course he is actively part of. “If I was to calculate the dollar value of the amount of money I have paid to be in these programs, I think it would come to over seventy or eighty thousand dollars.” Last year alone, when he was filing his taxes, he noticed eight to nine thousand dollars on courses in a single tax year.

Muzamil asks the only question worth asking. Was it worth it. Shajee’s answer: he has made ten times the money back on what he learned. He pushes back specifically on a Pakistani perception he hears often — that any Pakistani selling a course is a scam. He calls it “a completely twisted way to look at it.” If someone is two steps ahead of you, they are the best person to learn from. He has paid for courses by other Pakistanis. Some were not cheap. He has made five-times and ten-times returns on the ones that worked. He quotes a personal-finance creator he follows: there is one thing he never thinks before spending money on, and that is books. If a single idea solves one real problem in your life, the four thousand rupees comes back without you noticing.

His own next move sits on top of this. The agency comes first; the coaching side follows. He wants to build a bridge between Pakistani UX talent and North American startups. The math is brutally clean. The most junior US or Canadian designer costs a startup around fifty thousand dollars a year. A mid-level Pakistani designer at two thousand dollars a month is twenty-four thousand — less than half. Three stakeholders win. The startup gets cheaper senior work. The Pakistani designer gets a job that does not exist locally at that pay grade. Shajee gets to be the bridge — and, eventually, the trainer who teaches Pakistani designers how to build a portfolio for a remote role and how to interview for a North American hiring manager. “A lot of dynamics are fairly different. That difference in dynamics is what I want to make Pakistanis understand.”

Books, a billionaire barista, and what he wants for Pakistan

Asked for resources, Shajee names three. Eric Kennedy’s Learn UX Design, Learn UI Design, and Landing Page Academy — slightly expensive for Pakistani buyers, but, in his read, the best beginner content in the space. For a book, he recommends Never Enough by Andrew Wilkinson, the current owner of Dribbble. Wilkinson, he notes, started a design agency from a coffee shop where he worked as a barista — clients would come in, he’d hear them talking about websites, and the idea formed there. He eventually became a billionaire. The lessons in the book are not about design. They are about money, and how much of it is enough, and the answer the title gives. “When I read it, it was a perspective shifter.”

Muzamil closes with the broadest possible question — what does Shajee feel about Pakistan, having just spent two months there. Shajee says it’s a difficult question and that he won’t comment at the macro level because it’s not his area. But on tech specifically, he is direct. A lot of good work is happening. At the same time, a lot of tech talent wants out. The model he points to is India. The major chunk of talent inside the world’s biggest tech companies — Meta, Google — is Indian, whether based in India or outside it. Pakistan, in his read, has the same opening. Either the talent leaving Pakistan ends up inside those companies, or it ends up starting the next ones. “That is something I have hopes for.”

Muzamil ends where he started the episode — by reminding the audience the format is new, asking them to drop their persona in the comments, and signalling that more conversations with overseas Pakistanis doing specific, learnable jobs are coming. The opening thesis closes the loop. The roles exist. The path in is not gated. The work that survives is the work closest to the human on the other side of the screen.