---
title: "Nikhil Sharma - DVP - Head of Product Design in Gurgaon | Tal"
description: "Meet Nikhil Sharma, Head of Product Design, Airtel Payments Bank | Built design org for a 12M+ MAU bank | Trust & Safety · AI-native design ops · Design-to-code pipelines based in Gurgaon. AI stack includes claude code, claude, and codex. Explore public work links including ux-operating-system.verc..."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/nikhil-sharma-16/share-image"
---

# Nikhil Sharma on Tal

## Headline

Head of Product Design, Airtel Payments Bank \| Built design org for a 12M\+ MAU bank \| Trust & Safety · AI\-native design ops · Design\-to\-code pipelines

## About

Nine years ago I was the only designer at Airtel Payments Bank\. Today I lead entire design org behind products that 12M\+ people use every month many of them holding a smartphone and a bank account for the first time in their lives\. That last part shaped everything\. When your users can't read the fine print, trust isn't a brand value on a slide, it's whether the interface tells the truth\. So we studied real fraud cases and built Fraud Alarm: one swipe freezes the account, resets credentials, and gets the bank to call you back\. It won Innovation of the Year and now resolves 39% of frauds on its own\. Safe Pay added a third factor of authentication before any UPI debit leaves your account so customers responded by keeping 32% higher balances\. Fraud fell 62% in two quarters\. The bank now markets trust because design made it real\. The growth work comes from the same place\. We ran 500\+ interviews and 50 field studies across rural and urban India, and kept finding the same thing: people don't lack money, they lack an entry point\. Casual savers weren't buying gold because gold felt like a rich person's product so we made it ₹10 a day, and first\-time adoption grew 28×\. Onboarding grew 7× after we dropped the first deposit from ₹100 to ₹1\. None of this was a growth hack\. It was listening, then removing the thing in the way\. Lately my job has been rebuilding how the org itself works\. I wrote the strategy to make us an AI\-native product organization, and built Vault: a design system plus a Figma\-to\-production\-code pipeline where 12 designers ship real frontend with zero engineering dependency\. QA went from two weeks to two days\. I also restructured the team around Behavior\-Based Design Pods, a framework I created that organizes designers around user behaviors instead of feature backlogs because most design orgs are still shaped like their Jira boards\. On the side I'm building Lane, an AI\-native design ops product, solo, on Next\.js and Supabase\. It keeps me honest about the tools I ask my team to bet on\. What I'm looking at next: a Director/VP mandate where design owns business outcomes — trust\-critical consumer products at bigger scale, or an org that needs the AI transition done properly\. Preferably both\.

## Location

Gurgaon

## AI stack

claude code

claude

codex

cursor

openai

v0

## Work experience

DVP \- Head of Product Design at Airtel Payments Bank, Jun 2024 \- Present · 2 yrs 4 mos, Gurugram, Haryana, India, Thee org and AI transformation era \- scaled design team and function , strategy, Vault design system, design pods, EC reviews\.

AVP Product design \- B2C app & Website at Airtel Payments Bank, Jun 2022 \- May 2024 · 2 yrs, Gurugram, Haryana, India, The growth and trust era \- 28× gold, 62% fraud reduction, Fraud Alarm, platform separation\.

Chief Manager \- Product Design at Airtel Payments Bank, Jun 2020 \- May 2022 · 2 yrs, Gurugram, Haryana, India, The shipping era \- built and shipped 0 o 60 core use cases and products in the foundation days of the bank\.

Senior UX Designer at PayU, 2016 \- 2017 · 1 yr, Gurugram, Haryana, India

UX Designer at GE, 2014 \- 2016 · 2 yrs, Gurugram, Haryana, India

## Education

b arch, architecture, National Institute of Technology Hamirpur

## Public links

- ux\-operating\-system\.vercel\.app: https://ux\-operating\-system\.vercel\.app/

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/nikhil-sharma-16)

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