Product Designer

This is a critical role that bridges all three of The Ken’s foundational pillars — journalism, products and subscriptions. The Product Designer will operate across the entire breadth of The Ken’s offerings in order to create AI-first new subscriber products/experiences as well as strengthen existing ones. 

2025 and 2026 are going to see dramatic, non-linear innovations from The Ken. And Design will play a pivotal role in our plans to expand our products into a variety of new spaces like in-person events, community, careers and leadership training. Even as we build out the “new and improved” versions of our current products. And we’re not even getting into how we believe that AI is going to fundamentally embed itself into our products and experiences.

Since our inception in 2016, The Ken has invested disproportionate amounts of time, effort and money into building and improving products. We were the first in India to offer a subscription-only longform journalism. We were the first to launch premium subscriber-only newsletters. We were the first to launch premium, subscriber-only business podcasts. Our website and subscriber apps (for iOS, Android and iPad) have gone through multiple ambitious design evolutions. We pride ourselves on our subscriber-centric design thinking, UX and UI, visual design and typography. Put simply, great design is critical to The Ken.

In our belief – and yes, we are biased – the next two years will be an incredible opportunity for a talented, ambitious and thoughtful designer. During these two years (and beyond, but that’s a matter for later), the product designer will:

 (a) Help conceptualize, prototype, build and launch multiple new subscription products

(b) Collaborate across our newsroom, product and business teams, gaining tremendous perspectives on how to think about building premium and high-quality business journalism products.

(c) Design seamless user experiences that bridge textual, visual, audio, video and in-person offerings

(d) Harness the experience and insights from our incredible subscriber community including tens of thousands of individual, hundreds of organizations and dozens of premier educational institutions, into our products

We are a lean organisation and try to avoid hierarchies as much as possible. Meaning, talented professionals can expect this to translate to a rich and diverse set of experiences, setting them up for either even more ambitious roles at The Ken (within or outside Design or Products) or outside.

We are looking for ambitious and thoughtful designers with 2-4 years of experience in product, UI and UX design.

Given the fluidity of software, design functions and product development approaches, we don’t want to reduce your experience down to specific bullet points. But we will expect you to showcase the products you’ve worked on during your professional career. We will expect you to take us through your specific work in them. We will expect you to tell us about your workflows and collaboration styles.

And we will expect you to have a point of view about the design choices, philosophies and motivations for important products, specifically in the space of journalism, learning and community.

While your past experience may be “spiky” in certain areas, at The Ken we will expect you to be able to independently do the following over the next two years. This means you will be expected to learn and get better at areas you may currently not be strong at.

 (a) Research new product or feature ideas, through both primary and secondary approaches

(b) Conceptualize and prototype them, from pencil sketches to whiteboard flows to software designs

(c) Design user flows and experiences based on independent and ground-up thinking, based on The Ken’s unique contexts and subscriber community

(d) Critically analyse existing products and features, to figure out how we can improve them for subscribers and better outcomes

(e) Design UI interfaces and pixel-specific screens across our range of products, while conforming to and building upon our Design System. We do not like reinventing the wheel unless we absolutely have no choice.

(f) Maintain design harmony over the breadth of products and experiences that The Ken offers, ranging from email newsletters to podcasts to workshops to in-person events

(g) Assist Product and Engineering with faster execution by occasionally helping write or debug front-end code

(h) Collaborate closely and frequently with various colleagues and teams to make sure Design becomes an enabler for faster innovation

(i) Develop a studied point of view about the things you do, and communicate and convince your colleagues about it effectively.

The role is a full-time role and based out of Bengaluru.