Lead Product Designer

airtel; Gurugram District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Airtel is seeking a Lead Product Designer to guide experience strategy and design quality for a major product area, across multiple journeys, with a cross‑functional team. The role is senior, largely individual-contributor, and remains hands‑on in the most complex parts.

You will own the experience vision, set measurable success criteria, lead design direction, and steward the design system in partnership with product, engineering, data, research, and operations leaders.

Qualifications

• 4–7 years of experience in Product Design with leadership of cross-functional initiatives.
• Portfolio demonstrating strategic problem framing, product-area vision, and strong craft.
• Deep expertise in interaction and visual design, plus research, data, and prototyping capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Set experience and product direction by framing problems, defining guiding principles, and outlining near-term decisions.
• Lead complex, high-risk design problems and turn fragmented journeys into coherent systems.
• Drive coherence across journeys, platforms, channels, and customer states, guiding design reviews and strategy.

Skills

Leadership of complex initiatives

Portfolio showing strategic framing

Interaction and visual design

Prototyping and research

Cross-functional collaboration

Executive communication

Roadmap influence

Job description

As a Lead Product Designer, you will lead experience strategy and design quality for a significant product area, multiple connected journeys, or a cross-functional team. You will take ambiguous and high-impact problems, define the opportunity, establish a compelling direction, align teams around measurable outcomes, and guide several workstreams from concept to scale.

This is a senior individual-contributor role. You may guide multiple designers and direct their work, but your influence comes primarily through judgment, craft, systems thinking, coaching, and the ability to move teams toward clarity. You will remain hands-on in the most complex and consequential parts of the experience.

What you will own

• The experience vision, principles, and quality bar for a significant product area.
• Coherence across multiple journeys, platforms, channels, teams, and customer states.
• Problem framing and success measures for ambiguous or strategically important initiatives.
• Design direction and critique across multiple designers or parallel workstreams.
• Alignment with senior Product, Engineering, Data, Research, Business, Operations, and Customer Experience leaders.
• Design-system stewardship and quality mechanisms for your area.

What you will do

Set experience and product direction

• Frame complex customer and business problems clearly, separating symptoms, requests, constraints, and underlying opportunities.
• Define a motivating but actionable experience vision with Product, Engineering, Research, Data, and business leaders.
• Translate long-term direction into principles, workstreams, sequencing, and near-term decisions.
• Identify missing evidence and initiate the research, analysis, testing, or experimentation required to make progress.
• Define the customer, product, operational, and business measures that should guide the area.
• Influence roadmaps and investment decisions by connecting experience quality to growth, trust, retention, efficiency, or differentiation.

Lead complex design and systems work

• Personally lead the most ambiguous, systemic, or high-risk design problems in the area.
• Turn fragmented journeys and inconsistent product logic into coherent, scalable systems.
• Ensure design accounts for end-to-end behaviour, technical architecture, edge cases, permissions, failure recovery, accessibility, localisation, and operational realities.
• Establish interaction, visual, content, and behavioural patterns that teams can reuse across products and channels.
• Steward the area’s design-system needs in partnership with central Design Systems and Engineering.
• Use prototypes and design narratives to test strategic concepts, align executives, and support product or investment decisions.
• Make thoughtful trade-offs between speed, quality, customer value, technical cost, risk, and scalability.

Lead through influence

• Create clarity across teams when ownership, requirements, or priorities are contested.
• Communicate with confidence and precision at working-team, leadership, and executive levels.
• Surface disagreement early, facilitate evidence-led decisions, and resolve conflict without lowering standards or damaging trust.
• Review and guide the work of other designers, focusing attention on the changes that most improve customer and business outcomes.
• Delegate appropriately while remaining accountable for the coherence and quality of the overall experience.
• Partner directly with Engineering leaders to resolve systemic design and implementation constraints.
• Coach designers on problem framing, customer insight, craft, product strategy, metrics, technical collaboration, storytelling, and stakeholder management.
• Improve critique, design reviews, planning, documentation, quality assurance, and post-launch learning practices.
• Help define hiring standards, interview candidates, onboard designers, and contribute to capability planning.
• Model high standards, speed, resilience, candour, and hands-on contribution.

What you will bring

• Typically 4 - 7 years of experience in Product Design, including leadership of complex, cross-functional initiatives.
• A portfolio showing strategic problem framing, product-area vision, systems design, exceptional craft, and measurable impact.
• Deep expertise in interaction and visual design, supported by strong capability in research, data, content, prototyping, and service thinking.
• Experience coordinating multiple workstreams and influencing roadmaps across teams.
• Strong technical understanding and the ability to reason about platform logic, dependencies, data, APIs, backend-driven states, and implementation trade-offs.
• A record of simplifying complex systems and creating scalable experience patterns.
• Strong executive communication, facilitation, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills.
• Evidence of raising the quality and effectiveness of other designers without relying on formal authority.

Good to have

• Experience leading design for a high-scale consumer ecosystem, super app, fintech, telecom, platform, or multi-service product.
• Experience across customer experiences, operational tools, assisted channels, and service-delivery workflows.
• Experience defining experience metrics and influencing commercial or operational decisions.
• External design writing, speaking, teaching, or community contribution.