Know your room
Chetna Chadha founded SilverFern after roughly a decade in New Zealand. This single fact should reset how you pitch, because almost nothing about her background rewards the register you would normally use with an Indian agency.
| What her background is | What it means for the next 20 minutes |
|---|---|
| Product Manager, Applications Delivery at nib New Zealand | nib is a health insurer. She has shipped health products and understands clinical and claims complexity. Your N1 Care work is the strongest bridge you have to her, stronger than anything visual. |
| Previously Xero, SnapComms, Accordo | Xero is serious SaaS. She reads enterprise product fluently, so Riskabilitie will land without you having to explain what GRC is. Do not oversimplify. |
| Product and delivery, not design | She will not grade your pixels. She grades whether you ship on time, hold your own in front of a client, and cause her no problems. Lead with ownership and delivery, not craft. |
| New Zealand working culture | Direct, flat, low ceremony. Be plain and confident. Do not over-defer, do not call her ma'am, do not pad answers. Short honest answers beat polished long ones. |
| Named the company after the silver fern | A small, human, true detail. If the moment is right, it is a warm thirty-second opener. Do not force it. |
UAE-born design and technology firm, HQ in Prism Tower, Business Bay, Dubai. Offices in Dubai, San Diego, Pune and Melbourne. They position hard on AI-accelerated delivery, including an app builder that claims a two-week MVP. Their named client roster is serious: Emirates, FlyDubai, Sobha Realty, Omniyat, Modon, Lulu. Case studies include Propeze, a UAE property platform, and VerifyBuy.
Two useful observations. Their site still shows placeholder 0+ team and project counters, which suggests a lean or fast-moving team rather than a large one. And their AI-first delivery pitch is a direct match for how you already work with Claude Code and the Figma MCP. That overlap is your single best differentiator on this call, and almost no other candidate will have it.
Time budget
This is the whole tactical point. At twenty minutes, you cannot present three projects. If you try, you will run out of clock before you ask about scope and money, and those are the two things that actually matter today.
Raise these, carefully
None of these are confrontations. All three are the kind of question a senior person asks and a junior person does not, so asking them well actually raises your value in the room.
The job description says end-to-end product design: user flows, information architecture, wireframes, high fidelity UI, design systems, web and mobile. What you have been told is that you will sit with a real estate client as a graphic designer. Those are two different crafts and two different career tracks.
Six months of real estate marketing collateral does not read as product design on a CV, and you are mid-search for a product design role. This is the single highest-cost misunderstanding available to you today, and it is very possibly just a loose word from a business development conversation rather than the actual plan.
Working through SilverFern for a client means two layers of confidentiality: theirs and the client's. You have already lived this. Most of your CodeBuddy work is locked behind NDA and cannot go in your portfolio, which is a real reason your search is harder than it should be.
Ask for a portfolio or case-study clause in writing, even a limited one, such as permission to publish an anonymised case study after the engagement ends. Ask now, while you have leverage. After signing, you have none.
Contract roles of this length routinely carry a fifteen or thirty day termination-for-convenience clause, which quietly turns a six-month contract into a thirty-day one. Ask what the termination notice is on both sides.
Whatever happens today, this does not end the job search. Your runway is one to two months and a six-month contract with no guaranteed extension does not change that arithmetic. Keep the daily applications running.
Inbound
| Her question | Your angle |
|---|---|
| Tell me about yourself | Ninety seconds, three beats. Five years across healthcare, enterprise SaaS and consumer. Sole or lead designer on most of it. You design and you build, in Framer and React, so handoff is not where your work stops. |
| Why did you leave CodeBuddy? | Plain and unbitter. You wanted to own products end to end rather than rotate across seven client accounts. Do not criticise them. She runs a client-services business, so complaining about client work is a self-inflicted wound here. |
| Why are you open to a contract? | Be honest without sounding desperate. You are looking for work you can go deep on, you already work as a contractor on Upwork, and a six-month engagement with a real client roster is a fair way for both sides to test the fit. |
| How do you work with clients directly? | This is the one she cares most about. Use N1 Care: a US client, remote, 787 logged hours across five months, ten modules from concept to production, and an 80-plus component design system. Direct client relationship, no manager between you. |
| Can you handle multiple projects at once? | Seven client products at CodeBuddy, concurrently, plus a team of three designers you led at Consult Anubhav. State it as fact, not as a boast. |
| What is your experience with design systems? | N1 Care: 80-plus components, 64 icons, 86 documented colours, 45 chart types, 26 documentation files. Then the part most designers cannot say: you helped implement it in code with the Figma MCP, which cut development time by roughly half. |
| Anything about AI | Do not be modest here. This is their whole positioning and it is genuinely your edge. You use Claude Code and the Figma MCP daily and you have shipped roughly twenty-five live products this way. Offer to show one. |
| Are you comfortable with IST 10 to 6:30? | Yes, without qualification. That is already your working window and Dubai is only ninety minutes behind you. |
| When can you start? | Immediately. Last working day was 22 May. |
| What are your expectations? | See the money section. Do not answer this one casually. |
Outbound
You will realistically get through five or six. The ones marked in red are the ones to protect if the clock runs short.
Compensation
₹1,20,000 a month in hand looks like a match for your last package, which is exactly why it was framed that way. It is not a match, because a contract rate and a salary are not the same instrument.
| What the offer really is | Figure |
|---|---|
| Monthly, in hand | ₹1,20,000 |
| Total value of the six-month contract | ₹7,20,000 |
| Annualised equivalent | ₹14,40,000 |
| In dollars, roughly | $1,370 / month |
| Hourly, at a standard 160-hour month | about $8.60 / hour |
| Your own proven contract rate on N1 Care | $20.00 / hour |
That last pair of rows is your strongest and most defensible card. You billed a US client twenty dollars an hour for 787 logged hours, with a signed contract on file. This offer is under half that rate, for a Dubai firm whose named clients are Emirates and FlyDubai. You are not being asked to work at an India rate for an India client. You are being asked to work at an India rate for a Dubai client roster.
No employer provident fund contribution. No gratuity. No paid leave, so every day off is an unpaid day. No health insurance. No notice protection or severance. You supply your own machine, internet and power. Roughly ten percent will be deducted at source, and your filing changes from salary to professional income. Ask a CA before you sign, particularly about presumptive taxation and about whether this contract plus your Upwork income takes your total turnover past the GST registration threshold. I am not the right source for that and you should not rely on me for it.
| Step | Number |
|---|---|
| Open here | ₹1,50,000 / month |
| Realistic landing zone | ₹1,35,000 to ₹1,40,000 |
| Structure to offer if she cannot move the base | ₹1,20,000 now, reviewed at month three |
| Walk-away floor, your call | decide this before 17:30 |
Decide your floor before the call starts. Negotiating without a number you have already committed to is how people accept things in the moment and regret them on Monday.
Three rules while you say it. Say the number and then stop talking, because the silence after a number is where it gets accepted. Never apologise for the ask or soften it with "but I am flexible" before she has responded. And do not accept anything verbally today. Ask for it in writing and say you will confirm within twenty-four hours, which costs you nothing and buys you a night to think.
The five minutes of work
Your instinct to show the mobile app, Riskabilitie and Frabruary is right on content and wrong on volume. All three map cleanly onto the job description, but three projects will eat twelve minutes and you do not have twelve minutes. Load all three, present one.
Enterprise GRC platform, five months, co-led. It is the right lead for three reasons: the case study is already public so there is no confidentiality risk, it is dense enterprise SaaS which is the register Chetna reads best after Xero, and it lets you talk design systems, which the job description lists as a must-have. Tell it as a decision, not a tour. One problem, one thing you chose, what happened.
Nineteen Framer builds in nineteen days, live at frabruary25.framer.website. The job description lists micro-interactions and interactive prototyping as good-to-have, and this answers it faster than any explanation could. It is a live URL, so it loads instantly and there is no confidentiality question. Show it, say the line, move on.
Keep it loaded in a tab and only open it if she asks specifically about mobile. Two cautions. Most CodeBuddy work is under NDA, so check what you are opening. And if you screen-share Figma, share a single clean page rather than the whole file, so client names, comments and internal pages stay out of frame.
Before you join. Close Slack and WhatsApp. Quit anything that shows notifications. One clean browser window with the bookmarks bar hidden. Figma already open on the exact frame, in presentation mode. Test the screen share on yourself once. Have a glass of water and this page open on your second screen. Re-check the Meet link against the invite, because the last agency you interviewed with reissued theirs and changed it.
You have five years, a signed contract with a US client at twenty dollars an hour, and roughly twenty-five shipped products behind you. You are not asking her for a favour. You are deciding whether a six-month contract at half your proven rate is worth your next six months. Sit in the conversation like that is true, because it is.