Principal Product Designer

Overview

As a Principal Product Designer, you will be one of Airtels most senior design leaders. You will shape the broadest and most consequential product opportunities often spanning multiple product portfolios, platforms, channels, operating models, or business units.

You will set the organisations standard for problem framing, customer insight, interaction and visual craft, systems thinking, technical fluency, storytelling, and measurable design impact. You will guide and approve critical work by senior designers and responsible for their career and growth path. Your contribution will be visible both in the products Airtel ships and in how the wider organisation defines, decides, and builds.

What you will own

• Long-range experience direction for major product portfolios or company-level initiatives.
• The quality and coherence of critical experiences across products, channels, and customer relationships.
• Organisation-level design frameworks, principles, behavioural patterns, and systemic improvements.
• Executive alignment on complex customer, product, technology, operational, and business trade-offs.
• Raise the design bar for the most important initiatives and the development of senior design leadership.
• Opportunities for design to create new customer value, differentiation, growth, trust, or operating leverage.

What you will do

Shape company-level product and experience strategy

• Set the gold standard for defining complex customer and business problems with clarity, depth, and strategic relevance.
• Identify opportunities that cut across existing organisational or product boundaries and build compelling cases for action.
• Define or co-create long-range experience visions that connect immediate delivery with Airtels future product and business direction.
• Balance foundational systems, near-term outcomes, regulatory or operational realities, and bold future bets.
• Improve the organisations approach to customer research, experimentation, measurement, and post-launch learning where current evidence is insufficient.

Define the organisations design and systems bar

• Set and evolve standards for interaction design, visual design, information architecture, content, accessibility, prototyping, service experience, and implementation quality.
• Create principles, frameworks, and reusable behavioural patterns that allow teams to solve complex problems consistently without losing customer context.
• Identify systemic issues across journeys, platforms, channels, terminology, information architecture, and operational processes; lead programmes to resolve them.
• Connect and simplify complex systems while making the consequences of exceptions and trade-offs explicit.
• Guide the evolution and governance of Airtels design system when current components or patterns are insufficient for the next generation of products.
• Shape responsible AI-enabled products and design practices, including intent definition, behavioural rules, guardrails, feedback loops, explainability, failure recovery, and human oversight.
• Establish or sponsor organisation-level quality mechanisms that protect the intended experience through build and release.

Lead the organisation through influence

• Influence at every level through exceptional product judgment, evidence, design craft, and business understanding.
• Use prototypes and storytelling to make future opportunities tangible and enable strategic decisions.
• De-escalate difficult situations, align senior leaders, and move initiatives through complex organisational constraints.
• Direct and critique the work of Lead and Senior Product Designers on the highest-impact programmes.
• Identify the few decisions or design changes that materially improve an initiatives customer and business outcome.
• Coach senior designers on strategy, executive influence, systems thinking, prioritisation, technical collaboration, and leadership.
• Build stronger design leaders through clear standards, direct feedback, trust, and visible hands-on contribution.

Increase the leverage of Design

• Identify where Design can unlock growth, reduce service effort, improve trust, increase adoption, or create new business models.
• Improve design operating mechanisms, cross-functional collaboration, feedback culture, hiring quality, and senior talent development.
• Represent Airtel Design externally through writing, speaking, industry collaboration, or thought leadership when it creates value.
• Attract and develop exceptional design talent by setting a standard people want to learn from.

What you will bring

• Typically 10+ years of experience in Product Design, with substantial experience shaping complex products, platforms, or ecosystems at scale.
• A body of work demonstrating company-level problem framing, long-range vision, systems design, exceptional craft, and measurable business and customer impact.
• Deep expertise across product strategy, interaction design, visual design, information architecture, prototyping, and design systems.
• Strong fluency in research, data, technology, operations, and organisational decision-making.
• The ability to reason across customer journeys, backend systems, assisted channels, policy, regulation, and service operations.
• A record of influencing executives and aligning multiple teams or business units around a coherent direction.
• A record of creating reusable frameworks or systems that improve outcomes beyond your own projects.
• Evidence of developing senior designers and raising organisational design quality through influence rather than hierarchy.
• Exceptional storytelling, facilitation, negotiation, conflict-resolution, and written communication skills.

Good to have

• Experience in fintech, telecom, banking, payments, identity, AI, marketplaces, platform ecosystems, or other regulated and high-scale environments.
• Experience shaping products across consumer, enterprise, assisted, retail, and operational channels.
• Industry-recognised work, public writing, speaking, patents, frameworks, or other external contribution.
• Experience defining new design-system, AI interaction, or service-experience conventions.

What success looks like

• Airtel makes better portfolio and investment decisions because of your framing and influence.
• Major product areas converge around a coherent customer and experience direction.
• Systemic complexity is reduced rather than redistributed between teams or channels.
• The organisation ships products that are simpler for customers, scalable for technology, viable for the business, and workable for operations.
• Senior designers become stronger strategic and organisational leaders through your coaching.
• Airtels design standards, frameworks, and product experiences are recognised internally—and increasingly externally—as benchmarks for quality.
• Design creates measurable new value beyond interface delivery.