UI/UX Designer · Senior · 10+ yrs
Meera Krishnan
Head of Design / Design Director
Professional summary
Design leader with 12 years building products and the teams behind them. Sets design vision and strategy, leads teams of 8–15 designers and researchers, and runs design ops that scales craft without slowing delivery. Ties design to business outcomes — conversion, retention and revenue — and partners with product and engineering to shape roadmaps. Built design systems adopted org-wide, embedded accessibility and research practices, and grew designers into senior and lead roles.
3M+
Users on the platform
+27%
Activation lift from redesign
14
Designers & researchers led
Skills
Leadership
Design ops
Craft
Business
Work experience
Head of Design · Northstar Fintech
Mar 2019 – PresentChennai
- Lead a 14-person design org (product design, research, design systems) for a platform serving 3M+ users across web and mobile.
- Set the design vision and partnered with product on the roadmap; a flagship redesign lifted activation 27% and 90-day retention 12%.
- Built the org-wide design system in Figma adopted by 6 product teams, cutting design-to-ship time ~35% and standardizing accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA.
- Established design ops and a research practice (ResearchOps, a participant panel, weekly usability testing) that doubled research throughput on a flat budget.
- Hired 9 designers and grew 4 into senior/lead roles; instituted the critique and quality bar now used company-wide.
Design Manager / Lead Product Designer · Vayu Mobility
May 2015 – Feb 2019Bengaluru
- Led a team of 6 designing a ride-hailing app scaled to 1.2M riders; a rider-onboarding redesign cut drop-off 23%.
- Introduced design tokens, a component library and a usability-testing cadence, cutting redesign churn and raising delivery predictability.
Senior Product Designer · Earlier roles — Freshworks, Zoho
2013 – 2015India
- Designed B2B SaaS dashboards and wireframed and prototyped end to end across CRM and support products; promoted twice for craft and impact.
Education
M.Des. Interaction Design
2013Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, Mumbai
Certifications
Nielsen Norman Group — UX Master Certification
NN/g · 2020
Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC)
IAAP · 2021
Selected achievements
Drove a flagship redesign that lifted activation 27% and 90-day retention 12% across a 3M-user platform.
Built an org-wide Figma design system adopted by 6 product teams, cutting design-to-ship time ~35%.
Speaker, Design Up 2023 — "Design ops that scales craft without slowing delivery."
Mentor at a women-in-design fellowship; advises 2 early-stage startups on product design and accessibility.
See the work in 3D
Explore Meera's interactive WebGL portfolio — projects, skills and a way to get in touch.