Meera Krishnan
Head of Design / Design Director
Chennai, India • +91 90030 61458 • meera.krishnan@proton.me • linkedin.com/in/meera-krishnan-design
Portfolio: www.eliorexa.com/portfolio/ui-ux-designer-senior
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.
Skills
Leadership: Design vision & strategy, Team building (8–15), Hiring & mentoring, Stakeholder alignment, Roadmap influence
Design ops: Design systems at scale, Research operations, Critique & quality bar, Process & rituals, Tooling & governance
Craft: Interaction design, Figma, Prototyping, User research, Usability testing, Accessibility (WCAG)
Business: Conversion & retention, Design-to-revenue, Cross-functional influence, Discovery & vision, Workshops
Core Competencies
design leadership · design strategy · design systems · design ops · user research · usability testing · Figma · interaction design · prototyping · accessibility · mentoring · scale
Work Experience
Head of Design — Northstar Fintech
Mar 2019 – Present
Chennai
- 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 2019
Bengaluru
- 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 – 2015
India
- 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
2013
Industrial 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.