What does a Design Head do?
A design head leads the design function across a company — product design, brand, research and design systems — owning hiring, the tooling budget and the quality bar rather than individual screens. Indian firms use this title for what global org charts call Head of Design or Design Director, usually reporting to the CEO, founder or product leader.
A design head usually has around 10–18 yrs of experience and earns typically ₹35L–₹80L/yr in India. The day-to-day blends Design leadership, Design systems, Hiring & mentoring and more — this page gives you a ready-to-use design head job description template you can copy, plus the exact skills and salary employers expect.
Design Head job description template
Copy the 8 responsibilities, 6 requirements and 8 skills below into your job post, then edit the parts that are specific to your company — pay band, location and reporting line.
Select the text above to copy it manually if the button is unavailable.
What are a Design Head's key responsibilities?
A design head is typically responsible for the 8 duties below, which cover the day-to-day work most employers expect the role to own outright. Paste them into your job post as they are, or cut the ones another team already handles — a responsibility list that claims work the hire will not actually do is the fastest way to lose a candidate at offer stage:
- Define the design vision and quality bar the whole company designs against
- Build the team — designer and researcher hiring, levelling and portfolio review
- Own the design system as a funded product with maintainers and a release cadence
- Approve tooling and research budgets and manage agency or freelance vendors
- Run the critique cadence and sign off major flows before engineering builds them
- Allocate designers across squads and negotiate capacity with product and engineering
- Commission usability research and turn findings into roadmap commitments
- Present design strategy and its business impact to the leadership team
What qualifications does a Design Head need?
Employers hiring a design head in India usually ask for the 6 qualifications below, typically alongside 10–18 yrs of experience. Keep only the ones you will genuinely screen on: every extra must-have narrows the pool, and in the Indian market a long mandatory list filters out strong candidates whose background simply reads differently on paper:
- 10+ years in product or brand design with several years managing designers
- Portfolio showing shipped work plus evidence of teams and systems built
- Experience owning a design system and enforcing it across multiple squads
- Working fluency with research methods and how findings drive prioritisation
- Budget and vendor management experience, including agency relationships
- Ability to argue design trade-offs in commercial terms with executives
What skills should a Design Head have?
These are the 8 skills employers name most often on live design head listings in India. Treat the first few as the ones worth screening for directly and the rest as signals a candidate can pick up on the job — asking for all of them at once is what turns a reasonable role into an unfillable one:
Listing the three or four skills you genuinely screen on — rather than all 8 — is what keeps a design head posting from filtering out candidates who could do the job.
What does a Design Head earn in India?
Typical salary (India)
typically ₹35L–₹80L/yr
Experience range
10–18 yrs
These are typical ranges and vary by city, company and skills. For live, role-specific pay data, see the OnJob salary guide.
Design Head job description — FAQs
What is the difference between a design head and a senior designer?
Senior designers are judged on the work they personally ship; the function leader is judged on what the whole team ships and on whether good designers stay. The job becomes hiring, levelling, critique, budget and roadmap negotiation, with hands-on Figma time dropping sharply — a trade many designers find harder than they expected.
Does a design head still design?
Hands-on work usually survives in narrow slices: early concept exploration on a flagship bet, brand-level direction, or a rescue on a stuck project. Most weeks go to critique, hiring loops, roadmap conversations and unblocking the team. Leaders who insist on owning screens themselves tend to become the bottleneck for everyone else.
Is Design Head the same as Head of Design or Design Director?
Head of Design and Design Director describe the same scope in global org charts, while VP Design sits one rung up at larger companies. Indian startups and services firms tend to prefer the shorter phrasing. Judge actual seniority by team size, budget authority and who the position reports into.
What does a design leader earn in India?
Typical pay runs ₹35L–₹50L per year at startups and ₹60L–₹80L at established product companies, with equity common at venture-funded firms. Consumer internet businesses and fintechs generally pay above services organisations and agencies for the same span, and Bengaluru and Gurugram sit at the top of the city range.