Experience Design Navi Mumbai (In office) Director 10-20 years Fulltime

Role Summary The GM, Automotive/ Transportation Experience Design is a senior automotive design leadership role responsible for establishing, governing, and scaling world-class 360-degree hardware product experience across products, software interfaces, service journeys, training, support, warranty, repair, upgrades, and customer communications. The role includes hardware experience design(XD) system maturity, XD team building and governance during the product development process, cross-functional delivery capability, and AI-enabled automotive experience design transformation.

Senior Automotive Experience Design leadership roles are expected to set product experience vision, build experience design teams, align design with product and engineering roadmaps, embed research and usability into delivery workflows, govern design systems, and report customer impact through measurable qualitative and quantitative metrics.

This role is expected to manage and expand an Automotive Experience Design team comprising transportation designers and hardware product engineers that can work closely with project managers to deliver the entire product design. The GM and all members of this team should have experience in designing and launching consumer facing automotive products, and have had extensive experience working with the other functions.

Key Responsibilities

Cross-functional Delivery of World-Class Transportation Experience Design

- Build, hire, coach, and deploy the right talent to deliver consistent product experience across product, engineering, operations, marketing, customer support, service, and training touchpoints.
- Define XD goals and operating model for cross-functional teams, including responsibilities, governance forums, review checkpoints, and decision rights.
- Train existing cross-functional talent on customer-centric thinking, usability, design system adoption, journey thinking, and experience-quality standards.

Envision and Govern 360-Degree Customer Experience

- Define the end-to-end customer experience vision across marketing, merchandising, training, end-use workflows, customer support, warranty, service, repair, and upgrade journeys.
- Establish consistent interaction patterns, visual standards, content conventions, service principles, and customer effort reduction targets across channels.
- Conduct customer journey mapping, workflow analysis, usability testing, voice-of-customer research, task-completion analysis, and friction heatmap reviews.
- Report XD impact and effectiveness to leadership through the right metrics.





XD Processes and Product Development Governance

- Embed XD research as a mandatory part of the product development process and ensure customer evidence informs product and engineering decisions.
- Institutionalize the PRD to XRD to Engineering Requirements workflow, ensuring experience requirements are traceable, testable, and enforced.
- Own XD lifecycle management, including design approval, deviation approval, change approval, experience release readiness, and post-release feedback loops.
- Create governance artifacts such as XD acceptance criteria, experience risk logs, design review records, usability findings, and design-system compliance reports.

Build Scalable XD Capability and Leadership Pipeline

- Deploy XD talent into vertical product teams while maintaining central governance, design standards, and shared design system ownership.
- Build career paths, competency frameworks, succession plans, mentoring routines, retention mechanisms, and performance evaluation inputs for UX/XD talent.
- Create a high-accountability culture that balances customer advocacy, engineering feasibility, product velocity, mission reliability, and business impact.

AI-Powered Customer Experience

- Assess where AI can augment or replace repetitive XD skills, research synthesis, support triage, prototyping, design review, documentation, and journey analytics.
- Design AI-enabled XD processes that retain human-centered principles, safety, explainability, and trust for mission-critical drone platform contexts.
- Recruit, train, and upskill teams for AI-assisted research, design operations, prototyping, content generation, analytics, and human-AI interaction design.
- Implement AI-enabled XD improvements within the product development process and measure whether they match or exceed current process outcomes.

Skills and Competencies

- Deep Automotive/ Transportation XD experience, design systems, and usability expertise across physical, support, service, and training touchpoints.
- Strong understanding of product management, engineering, operations, customer support, mission workflows, and product development governance.
- Ability to translate customer insights into experience requirements, acceptance criteria, design standards,



and measurable product/engineering decisions.
- Agile and Lean methodologies, research operations, design operations, design QA, accessibility, journey mapping, and usability testing.
- Leadership, hiring, coaching, mentoring, succession planning, communication, facilitation, and conflict resolution across product and engineering stakeholders.
- AI literacy for customer experience: human-AI interaction, AI-assisted research/design workflows, ethical and trustworthy AI experience principles, prompt/prototype evaluation, and productivity measurement.

Education and Experience

- Bachelor degree in Automotive Design required; Master degree preferred in Automotive Design, Industrial Design, Psychology, Engineering, Innovation Management or related field.
- 10-15 years of experience in Automotive/ Transportation Design, product-led experience leadership, experience leading design/research teams.
- Demonstrated experience scaling automotive experience design systems, design governance, user research practices, design operations, and cross-functional experience quality in complex technology environments.
- Experience with mission-critical, hardware-software, robotics, UAV, industrial technology, aerospace/defense, or regulated product environments is a plus.
- Portfolio or case studies showing launched automotive design examples with measurable impact on usability, customer effort, adoption, consistency, support reduction, product quality, or customer trust.

Working Interfaces

Internal: R&D;, Engineering, Product Management, Business Development, Marketing, Customer Support, Operations, Training, Service, Quality, and Delivery teams.

External: Key customers and operators, field users, service partners, design/research agencies, training partners, ecosystem experts, and technology vendors.

First 6-12 Month Success Indicators

- Baseline Transportation XD and design maturity assessment completed across products, support, training, service, and customer-facing digital touchpoints.
- Transportation Design system roadmap, governance model, and adoption targets agreed with product and engineering leadership.
- PDP XD governance implemented with mandatory XD research, PRD-XRD-engineering traceability, and review/approval checkpoints.
- Core customer journeys mapped and prioritized by mission criticality, customer effort, support impact, revenue impact, and product risk.
- AI-powered XD use cases piloted with measurable process-quality or cycle-time improvement.

Skills

Design Thinking Experience Design Leadership Management Engineering Business Acumen Product Management Automative

📌 GM - Automotive Experience Design (Navi Mumbai)
🏢 IdeaForge
📍 Navi Mumbai